webbie917

Policy like this is meant to protect sender reputation, not just provider IP pool. High hard bounce rate lowers your inboxing in the long term. If your bounce rate is consistently above 5% consider verifying all new emails before sending them an email > https://www.bigmailer.io/blog/email-verification-service-pro...

Natural email decay rate is 2-3% per month so the goal is to stay close to this range, but the lower the better.

You often pay for "good company" when you choose a more expensive provider. So the cheaper the provider the lower quality of their shared IP pool due to the type of customers they tend to have on the platform. The free tier lowers the customer quality even more. IF you are sending mission critical email then dedicated IP makes a lot of sense, but probably not at a huge price multiple mentioned for Sendgrid.

Amazon SES shared IP pool isn't better than Sendgrid or Mailgun but their dedicated IPs are only $25/month. If your volume is low that might be the only cost since they offer 62k/month completely free and after that it's $0.1 per 1000 emails.

Unfortunately not a lot of providers offer dedicated IP option on lower level plans.

My guess is that how most email service providers handle this - they don't actually delete the email and just have a flag on it - bounced, complain, unsub. This way the list owner can run an export and see all the status code.

The hard bounce status might be stored outside of your lists. I am not sure customers can easily change a hard bounce status themselves. Do you mean you just deleted those records with intent to re-add to reset the status? On our BigMailer platform this wouldn't work as hard bounce status would get preserved.

+1 what Jonathan said. Typically, when email service providers are down the response code indicates a temporary issue with a soft bounce code, so you can still try to send to that address in the future.

The action for rectifying isn't too difficult, but the implications are still pretty big...

This would affect all email types including emails like receipts, shipment confirmations, password resets, account verification.

Plenty of critical communications get caught in this storm...

Thanks for sharing Jonathan, unprecedented situation. And that's just gmail.com addresses we can see data on, while there are all those business domains that use Google Apps for their email that probably experienced a similar issue...

I don't love the pricing examples (cost prohibitive for many), but I like an idea of IP pool clusters where you pay to be on a certain tier level.

^^^ I agree with this. There is a very good chance that anyone who bothers to reach out to support and explain their case can get grandfathered.

^ Couldn't agree more, especially "Abuse ruins it for everyone."

It really has become a norm and is very frustrating for customers, while there is simply a better way to do this - kill free plan for NEW customers, but grandfather existing customers. Or at least introduce some break-even (low profit margin) plan/tier to move existing customers to, no need to force them off the platform completely.

Yes, spammers are a big issue for all ESPs (my own biz in this space is no exception), but no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

BigMailer.io isn't self-hosted, but for a list size of <5000 it's completely free, and supports bulk + auto/drip + transactional (via API) campaigns. We also have drag-and-drop template editor, Zapier integration, and live chat support 7 days a week.

ConvertKits is expensive - all plans fall under BigMailer's free plan :-o

+1 for this approach. This was the #1 design decision we made with BigMailer.io back in 2015. It's not trivial to change the model once you go with unique lists approach.

Performance is extra helpful for making real-time segment size calculations. We use elastic search and it's costly.

Many ESPs these days license 3rd party editors that cost them recurring fees on a per user basis. Unlike hosted solutions, like BigMailer.io or SendGrid (both license drag and drop Bee editor), Sendy charges a very low one-time (!) fee of $59 to download the software once.

Sendy's pricing model simply doesn't allow such 3rd party product licensing and I imagine maintaining a heavy front-end application like a drag-and-drop template builder across the variety of clients is too costly (dev and support time) as well.

The issue here is "relating to their products and services". Per GDPR, the consent can not be "bundled". When you signup for an account you consent to communications about your account only and things like product updates or tips for using product should be under their own explicit consent.

Most email marketing service providers don't even support multi-interest opt-out page, or charge a lot for configuring your unsubscribe page this way (like a multiple of list size for each option gasp), so this makes it impossible for email recipients to choose what emails types to opt-out of so marketers in turn don't bother to collect unbundled consent.

Comparison of some market leading ESPs (see multi interest opt out row): https://www.bigmailer.io/bulk-email-marketing-services/

Now, what additional personal data are collected by tracking pixels?

In theory, an IP can be captured, which is considered PII, but most mailbox providers use proxies so this isn't reliable.

It's not my definition, that's how the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (applicable to US only) defines spam and most marketers are familiar with since it's been around for 15 years. Of course the laws are different in Europe and Canada.

One of the factors I didn't mention in previous comment is presence of physical mail address.

Not sure what "unfortunately for me" is in reference to - BigMailer isn't a platform for cold emails (there are plenty others that specialize in cold email campaigns) and Amazon SES doesn't give a free pass on the practice either.

Agree on "most of the time". There are of course exceptions, like the famous BaseCamp story.

I wrote about a similar but shorter list for early stage bootstrappers - https://www.bigmailer.io/blog/10-early-stage-tools-every-boo...

Couldn't agree more ^^^

I see way too many market leaders on the list - just because they have a free plan doesn't mean they are good "for companies on a budget". The free tiers are designed to hook you in, but switching once you hit the limits can be very expensive (resource wise) and shouldn't be part of cost-saving strategy.

Take MailChimp for example - it's a very expensive email marketing solution.

BigMailer.io is a great alternative to EmailOctopus because it supports transactional emails (EmailOctopus doesn't) in addition to bulk and auto/drip, and it offers a more generous free tier - up to 5,000 contacts.

Thanks for the answers.

Try to implement bounce processing soon - an average list decays at 2% per month (3% for B2B lists) so in a few months, the bounce rate can be high enough for mail box providers to start blocking your emails due to attempts to send to large number of invalid email addresses. Especially sensitive issue with your list size and sending volume.

There might be a couple more useful nuggets in this article on email deliverability best practices https://www.bigmailer.io/blog/improve-email-deliverability-b...

Yes, agreed. Lotsa factors in play when it comes to deliverability, like a puzzle. What a well established brand (with high quality emails) can get away with isn't something that businesses with less resources should try to copy though IMO.

Just saw an email from Starbucks in the spam folder - all because of a few words that no doubt triggered the spam filter.

Pretty cool. Does the tool process bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes, e.g. auto removes from future mailings?

Have you considered using a hosted platform that uses Amazon SES rather then hosting Sendy or other tools yourself? I own BigMailer and our clients with established SES accounts (high daily rate limits > high limit per sec) see 1m emails go out in a little over 1 hour.

I always wonder why people choose to host email software in house and it seems like the requirement for direct integration with in-house system(s) is one of the biggest considerations when choosing in-house vs. off-the-shelf solution.

Sounds like you have a good and established sender reputation, which is a big factor. When people start fresh (new sender identity) they tend to run into deliverability issues.

Also, the quality and size of the starting list matters too because a large list (like the OPs) or unengaged list can have a high bounce and low engagement rate, which factors into future deliverability.

I agree with all your suggestions, but want to expand on a couple points: 1) The shared IP pool at cheaper providers like Sendgrid, SES, and MailGun will have lower reputation versus a platform with a guarded (via cost, but also on-boarding mechanisms) platforms like MailChimp, simply due to customer pool and quality of emails sent. I have been hearing from my (BigMailer.io) customers about having deliverability issues with platforms like SendInBlue and MailGun frequently in the last year or so. 2) If the bulk sending practices are healthy and engagement is good, then it's better to use the same sender/domain for both bulk and transactional email.

I would recommend to NOT send different email types from different providers, like use SendGrid or SES for transactional emails and then some other platform for marketing emails, especially using the same sender domain. That's because email header signature and tracking links will be different and email box providers like Gmail can find it suspicious and send emails to Spam. And then there is the issue of processing and syncing bounces/unsubscribes/complaints data.

Keeping all email campaign types in a single platform allows for centralized processing of bounces/unsubscribes/complaints date and protects future campaign engagement + sender reputation.

Actually, cold emails (without permission) aren't spam. What makes an email spam is: 1) misleading subject line 2) misleading message 3) lack of simple (not requiring login or extra steps) unsubscribe link, and a couple other factors.

People forget subscribing and hit "Spam", which has an impact on the sender reputation and affects future deliverability for that sender.

It's time you wrote a book (aka package your popular blog posts into an ebook) Patrick and made people pay $$ for your advice :-)

Whew... I can think of a long list of reasons to sell a business. Many sell simply because of life events - wanting to spend more time with family, travel, buy a new house, deal with personal health. Running a small business is a 24/7/365 job and you can't just take a month off because you have got a honeymoon or a newborn in the plans.

Accounting (consult your own accountant please0: when you make salary/profit from your small biz you get taxed at ordinary tax rate (up to 40% in the US) where is when you sell biz as assets you may be taxed at capital gain tax rate (0%-20%) which is a financial advantage - like you get paid 3-4 years ahead. Again, consult a professional on this.

You could have other ideas or projects you want to work on, but unable to because your business is your 100% priority and has been for too long.

You might not want to deal with hiring a team because that's the stage your business is at - too big for you to handle on your own or you don't want to work 60-hour weeks anymore.

I could just go on and on, but a combo of 2-3 of these will certainly make the thought of selling quite appealing to many.

Make sure you know what your metrics are so you can answer initial questions and separate business records/accounts from personal way ahead of sale.

I sold a business not too long ago.