Email Deliverability in Salesforce

Hello and welcome to the X Force Data Summit.

Today's session is on email delivery best practices. I've got Siva Devaki here. He's the co founder of MassMailer. MassMailer is a tool that integrates with Salesforce to help with mail delivery.

Steve is going to tell us a few things that I think we all might be interested in learning about how to get email delivered. I know that we've all, at least I have as a developer, I've written applications where I send mail and it ends up in the spam folder and, we wanna avoid that. So without further ado, here's Siva, and he's gonna give us some tips and tricks on how to avoid our emails ending up in a spam folder.

Alright. Thank you so much, Leonard. Thanks for the introduction, and thank you so much for watching this, video here. Today, we're gonna talk about, the email deliverability best practices, as Leonard mentioned.

And, we all send emails, at the same time, we do not know what we are doing right or wrong. And, in a very simple manner, I'm gonna touch base on a few best practices on how to really get most out of your email strategies. Okay? So I'm not gonna really bore you much with the presentation, but I think it is gonna be a good session today. Alright.

So at a high level, this is what we're gonna talk about today, about the email strategy when it comes to sending out email, especially the deliverability strategy. Yep.

So we're gonna look at what is deliverability means and then reputation, compliance, and inboxings. So just to go a little bit more details on, each one of these points, when you talk about deliverability, all it means is that, does your email go to the inbox when you're sending out to someone? Right? That's the most important thing because, ultimately, your goal is to let other people, read open, read, and then go through your email.

If it does not then go to the inbox, what's the point? Right? So you need to make sure all of the emails are getting delivered to the inbox. That's the first and foremost thing.

And then everything that I'm gonna talk about is gonna be interrelated to the deliverability. And the second point, that's the reputation. Right? As we all know, the Internet is like a tall interconnected servers. Right? And you have a web domain, email address. You have an IP address for the server.

So what do you do with your email server? You need to have a reputation for your own domain and also the IP address that you're using to send out these emails.

So you got to watch your reputation, that is the domain reputation and the IP reputation, make sure that those are not blacklisted. Right?

And then a third and, very important thing, especially a lot of countries, especially the Europe has come up with a lot of compliance rules, recently. That's called GDPR. So wherever country you belong to, it doesn't matter as long as you are following the rules of every single country that you're doing business with, whether you're sending emails, making sure that you understand the rules and regulations in that particular country, and then follow them. So that's all what the compliance means. Again, it sounds very tough to implement, but it's not really when you start looking into the simple things that any any country is imposing on you, like, being a business owner or the email sender.

And the fourth thing is the inboxing. Again, you know, it's very critical that our emails in are not getting into the spam folder, but there are other techniques. These are white white hat techniques, I would say. One of them is called inboxing, meaning you wanna make sure that emails are getting into inbox, but how do you do that? Right? One is, of course, following all the top top three that I mentioned.

Along with that, if you are also trying to constantly warm up your domain and IP address, eventually, we'll see the improvement. Again, we're gonna get into a little bit of details about the inboxing as well.

But now digging into the deliverability itself, four most important things out here. One is the content. When you're sending out email, we write beautiful emails, with a lot of content, but sometimes we do not know if the content and the words that you're choosing are spammy or not. So it's very important that you're actually looking at the spamminess of your content. And how do you do that? We'll we'll take a look at it. There's certain tool tools that you can utilize the same thing.

And then the list is very important. So it's not that you're purchasing a list from outside for running your business. Even if you're accruing the list from anywhere, it could be trade shows or maybe you met some people or, you know, people are filling up forms in your website. You know, whatever means you're capturing certain list of contacts. You gotta make sure that the list is very clean, meaning it's not just the format of the email.

You know, nowadays, a lot of spam bots, you know, people keep filling up your forms, but you do not know whether these email addresses are actually good or bad. So you're going to clean your list all the time, meaning periodically. Any list or email that that you capture, you got to immediately clean that.

Cleaning the list, meaning, again, validating the email for the format.

Is this email address a real inbox or maybe a catch all kind of an email?

Or maybe the email address is a short lived email, which is gonna be there only for a couple of days for some purpose.

Or maybe the inbox itself, is captured in such a way that the survey is trying to just monitor, certain inboxes. So you got to really make sure that it's not, you know, a swallow like, the survey is not swallowing the email addresses. Or maybe spam drops. You know, sometimes, certain companies or organizations are trying to just, feed in certain email addresses as a spam trap, and you gotta make sure that you don't have all of this. So it's very important that you clean your list.

And the third thing is the domain reputation is related to authenticating your domain. I am not really getting into too many technical details here. When you're sending out from your company, let's say, a b c dot com, you got to authenticate that, a b c dot com domain. That's what it means, the domain authentication, for which there are certain policy frameworks that are defined by organizations and a bigger company, such as Yahoo and Autodesk and, you know, Microsoft of the world and AOL and all of that. They come up with authentication mechanism decades ago. I just tried to follow those framework rules and authenticate your domain as well as brand new links. That's very important.

And the fourth point is, usage of dedicated IP address. There are, you know, two types of, IP addresses that you can leverage. One is a shared IP, and the second is a dedicated IP.

Shared IP meaning, not just one client or a business using it. It's a multiple companies or businesses using the shared IP address. You would see this, most of the times when you're using, you know, MailChimp to the world or Constant Contact kind of solutions wherein which you end up just using a shared IP address, they will rotate your IP address, and it's always shared by multiple businesses. But we personally recommend that, you know, our company recommends that you use a dedicated IP address.

But a combination of dedicated IP and a shared IP address is also good, so that you actually build your own reputation of your domain and also the IP address, and make sure it's clean. You know, make sure it's not blacklisted. Right? So these are the four, most important points when it comes to the deliverability.

Yeah. And talking about the reputation, again, it's very important that you actually make sure the domain and IP address is clean. At the same time, it's, not blacklisted. Even if it, gets blacklisted for, some reason by the organization, you can always request them to remove it by providing, a very valid reason why you want it to be removed.

And then the very most important point, you got to have unsubscribe link in your emails, meaning you got to honor the off thoughts. If somebody wants to get out of your email, that's perfectly fine. Just remove them from the email unless they're your customers. You know? Customers may sometimes do not know what you're sending. You can always explain to them. But otherwise, anybody outside of your customers who wants to opt out, just let them just opt out from your email to make it easy.

The compliance, we talked about this a little bit about, the compliance rules that, every country would, impose. Not getting to a specific country at a high level, the compliant rules are almost the same.

You gotta make sure that you got the opt in list. So meaning anyone that you're sending out email, opted into your emails. Sometimes it may not be possible because you're prospecting, which is absolutely okay, provided you are not sounding spammy, and you're not really sending out spammy emails and not really sending out too many emails. There's no harm in sending email to somebody that you do not know.

Right? That's not a problem. You're just communicating. But it should not be in such a way that you're, you know, sending out millions of emails to your purchase list.

That's a big no. But you can always prospect using, email list. There are ways to do it. So but make sure that you're actually having an opt in list.

That's ideal.

But for prospecting purposes, if you have to have non opt in list, that's okay, but as long as you follow certain policy.

And then having a provision for unsubscribing to people is very important, and it got to be you know, ideally, it should just be one click. But if it is, like, two clicks, that's okay too, but make sure that you have an opt out, and it's easy for customers to opt out from their emails.

When you're sending out email, make sure that you got a clear signature, meaning, your name, company name, your address, the phone number, any kind of a disclaimer. If you wanna have it, you should have that in the signature line. It's really important.

And then the fourth point, when you're sending out from your domain, say a b c dot com, it should appear as if it is coming from a b c dot com. So no spoofing is allowed. So you got to authenticate your domain hundred percent accurate.

And talking about the inboxing, so I'm gonna touch on this a little bit. So you're sending out email, to a list of contacts, so let's say ten thousand. Right?

Not everybody is opening those emails. Some may open it, some may not open it, some may click it, some may not click it. But how do you really improve the inboxing rate and also the open date and the click rate? Right?

There is a white hat technique that you can use that's called inboxing, meaning you can always send or have a vendor send these emails on your behalf behind the scenes, which are authenticated emails to a seeded list through which you can actually improve the open data in Clerkraig because the seeded list that you're sending, the vendor can manually look at where the emails are landing and make sure they put it back to the inbox and then practically engage with those emails that are being sent behind the scenes, which means if you send out their calls and emails, your vendor is also sending out another calls and emails, but the active engagement is there to the emails that are sent by the vendor, overall, you're actually mimicking that you have a a higher inbox rate. So the Internet is looking at it, and it sees that there's an active engagement in the emails. It'll also improve your email, send rate, open rate, and click rate eventually.

So that's that's what is called as inboxing, and we I mean, being a master of company, we do offer those services. So, basically, all we are doing is we constantly warming up your domain and the IP address with a positive activity. So that's what is called inboxing. K?

So not really talking about product in detail. I think it's still it's better if I explain what MassMail is all about. It's a native Salesforce app that you can leverage to send mass emails. Whether you wanna send out single email or, you know, multiple emails, email alerts to any standard or a custom object, you can leverage MassMailer. And, we have certain tools, through which you can actually improve the email deliverability, which I think we're gonna take a look at.

So today's demo, I would briefly touch on the mass mailer features in one stroke, and I'll we can take a look at the domain and IP reputation, how to monitor that, how to monitor your content's premise, and how to look at the infrastructure. Check the overall deliverability score, and if possible, we'll take a look at email compliance as well. K?

Alright. And so it's done. Let's go take a look at okay. So if you're familiar with Salesforce, so this is how Salesforce would look.

And when you install configure mass mailer, and you would see all the tabs, One of the prominent tools that we're gonna take a look at is email monitor. So what we are doing is we are actually just doing a quick deliverability test. It's very simple. All you need to do is you just have to fill up this form and then hit this button called test email deliverability as if you're actually sending out a real email.

So you fill in your form the name and the email address and, what industry you actually belong to, and what is your approximate list size, and where are you sending these emails? It could be a a country, and or it could be a region. And then select a specific the template that you want to test it, and then select the language.

And that's it.

Once you're done with that, you just click on this button called test email deliverability, and that's gonna send the information about your email to the back end engine. And it's gonna take some time, perhaps maybe anywhere between five to seven minutes to actually load the result of, you know, the the it's gonna look at you the deliverability score. So I have a sample report here that I pulled up. So once the processing processing happens, you would receive an email with a link. So you click on a link, and it's gonna open a report something like this. Where you can see the snapshot here, it shows the overall deliverability score here.

It says, you know, it's good and a recommended action is send. It shows around eighty two point three two, is deliverable to the inbox, and, rest of it, seventeen point six eight percentage may go to the spam filters. And it also gives you an idea on, what is wrong, with your email. So it highlights if there's any problems.

So here, you can see two sections. There are more on the top, though. There's two of them are content loss and infrastructure loss. Let's take a look at the content.

So it's highlighting certain words here. You can see there in red color. If I click on any of them, it's actually saying, hey. It's a disgrace for the void, and it's also highlighting few of them that are not recommended. And it is giving you a list of recommended words, so which means that you can take out this and then use any of the other words which will actually improve the deliverability score. Right?

Similarly, there are such a certain sections of the email that may not be, you know, appropriate. You can always take a look at those problematic phrases and take a look at it and edit them, so which is gonna improve the overall deliverability score.

And similarly, coding in layout, if at all you're using a pure HTML, if there's any problem with the layout, it's actually gonna highlight those sections.

And link quality, if at all there's any problem with any of the links that you're using, you know, if you're referring to any of further domains and those are blacklisted, it's actually gonna highlight and say, hey. These are these are the links that are actually blacklisted. Do not use them. Right?

So that's the link quality. And if you go to the top, it's actually, gonna have few more sections here. One is the infrastructure, where we are gonna look at your IP address and the domain. If at all it's blacklisted, it's actually gonna it's actually gonna come up here with a blacklist.

Since this IP is good, it's not seeing any blacklist information here.

And if you scroll down a little bit, it's actually looking at your email infrastructure, not getting into too much technical SPF, DKM, DMARC. It's a sender policy framework and then domain keys identification. So and then these are all the framework that are associated with your email infrastructure. You gotta make sure that they're all in green. If at all anything is red, which means that you have to take a look at those values and then update them.

So that's why it is showing here in the infrastructure.

So once you're done with that, you can go to the compliance. So this is actually getting into a little bit more on the email itself and looking at the content. If you have any referral referring domain, then it's looking at it and see if then cookies that are problematic. And if those are problematic, it's actually gonna highlight them. So that's what you see here. So you see some, standard YouTube and Twitter, and there are certain cookies, but seems like it's okay. No problematic cookies in this.

And finally, previews. So what it's showing here, when you're sending out email, you do not know who is using what email client. People are not using various devices. It could be a desktop.

It could be a a web client. It could be an iPhone or I like, meaning a mobile device people are using to open email. So you do not know whether the email that you're sending is in the right format. So you wanna make sure that you look at the client previews on various devices such as iPhone, or it could be, any of, other, you know, Gmail kind of a web client, and make sure that it is in a in a good format.

And what we render here is all the real time rendering.

Anything that is not listed not listed, meaning it's is still not showing. You can always click on this and request for that specific desktop client, and it's gonna render it real time. And it shows you, For example, this is Outlook desktop client, and you can see it's listing two thousand seven. How does it really look?

Outlook is, you know, tough one to crack. You gotta make sure that your emails are rendering properly on various devices. So it's listing out all the popular ones, so it's quite handy when you're out when you're sending out emails, making sure the format is good. Because if the format is not good, most likely people are gonna just hit spam or trash it.

So you wanna improve that, deliver, the open rate and click rate, and also make sure nobody is complaining on your email as a as spammy email. So, and if you look at this, the help section which is actually gonna guide you on the email deliverability aspects. It looks at rather, it touches upon various sections that we already talked about, especially the content. If you click on it, it shows various topics about the content.

You can learn how to write, you know, copywriting techniques and, you know, all caps. An example, you should avoid all caps.

And if you want to understand the infrastructure, it has various sections on the information about DCAM, DMARC, and SPFs, and what is best and what is not good. All of that, it actually lists out, so it's important that you look at this information and understand the event deliverability best practices. So that's kind of a very good way to learn about email deliverability.

Now we talked about authentication, meaning the domain and a link and IP address authentication. Just want to kind of show you how we do that behind the scenes. You know, it's also our site information. You can see that a specific domain is authenticated with its own, like, DNS values behind the scenes.

Give we give all the c names so you can actually take a look at how those are defined. And, similarly, the link branding, we give you the link the DNS values for the link, which is what you're actually gonna go enter your DNS server. And similarly, if you have given you an IP address, a dedicated IP address, again, we give you the DNS lookup information that you're gonna set up on your DNS server and make sure that you authenticate your IP address as well. So that's about the overall authentication that you have to do behind the scenes.

And now, looking at the tool itself, the MassMailer tools, it's quite easy to send out emails via MassMailer in Salesforce. I'll give a a quick overview of how to do it. It's a step through process. You get on to the outreach result.

This is one way to send out email. You fill up this form. First step, you're actually just trying to give a name to your campaign. And then second step, you're actually selecting, who you wanna send email to.

For example, you're sending out email to contacts. You basically define that list view, and then select those contacts. And go to the next step. We're actually gonna select the email template wherein which you can actually, give your, the, what do you call, the signatures.

So for example, you already defined the template that gets loaded into the editor, and then, you can actually edit this runtime, by adding a a signature line. So this is missing a signature. Let's say you wanna add a signature line.

It's quite easy. All you just have to do is just drag and drop. And if you want to have maybe, you know, something like something like this, and this could be the the text block, and this could be an image block, and this could be another text block. So you can just type in and say your name, address. Again, this can come in a dynamic manner, meaning you can retrieve this information using the module, even though I'm not really getting into, those details, but, you can pretty much, just give the signature line right there.

As I said, you can always use your dynamic fields as well to retrieve it on time. That's quite possible to do it. So you can always change the width. And let's say you want to add a picture.

I hope I have a picture that's uploaded. Let's take a look at it.

If not, you can always mention I mean, it could be, you know, your logo. It doesn't need to be a personal picture. So as long as you have something that is more authentic. And if you want to give your company information, for example, like the website, you know, maybe the company name itself. Right? You can give that tier, and then, you can also mention, your phone number.

For example, you wanna give a phone number here. That's fine.

Nine one. And then you can center this. You can change the color to something else. You can change the actual, red. You know, all of that you could do. So that becomes, you know, a little signature line right there even though you can format it better.

You know, once you're done with that, you can save it, and you don't need to do it for every single template we have feature in which you can actually just save your signature line It's called base template, which can be reused. You can attach files. If you don't want, you can skip this. And then sender option, you can select any sender, on behalf of someone or maybe common sender, like a global sender you wanna use, maybe a a record owner, or maybe a completely custom or just send it as a logged in user. There are various options available. You have an option to do CC. You have an option to do BCC.

And then finally, you can send now, or you can actually schedule later by giving a date and time. You can send transactional or nontransactional, meaning sales, marketing, business development. Those are called nontransactional.

You can honor the opt outs. I do not want to honor opt outs. We have those features.

You can suppress any list view if needed. You can have email preferences defined as well.

You can suppress the email event logins. These are all advanced features. You can always do that.

And then finally, you can review all your work, meaning the campaign that you have defined so far. You can do a quick, test email, by comma separated values by selecting the mod field. You can do a quick preview.

And if everything looks good, you can actually just submit this by clicking on the finish button, and that's how you basically run a campaign.

So it's a very straightforward tool, not really complex as such. Any business user can quickly learn this and then just run their campaigns natively in Salesforce.

So that's about MathMailer. So I think we pretty much covered let's take a look.

We looked at the outreach result. We looked at how to look at the reputation, deliverability score, and we looked at the compliance. We also looked at the signature thing. We pretty much recovered except the verification, you know, which is something I can call in the maybe next demo due to lack of time.

So, otherwise, if you wanna get started with MassMailer, it's quite easy. Just go to our website, MassMailer dot I o, and then you would see a a trial link there.

We can help you with the configuration as well. We can help you with the live demo if needed.

Alright. I think I pretty much got everything done.

I hope that was useful information.

Thank you, Leonard, once again for the opportunity.

Yeah. And I have a couple of questions that maybe our audience might have or maybe our audience might not have, but I have.

A button there where there was SMS, MMS and voice were some options. Is that something your tool does? Okay. And so you can send text messages using the same basic setup using templates and so forth?

Right. So that feature is something which is, coming very soon. So currently, MassMailer is just an email tool, but very soon we're gonna have the SMS, voice features, WhatsApp features as well. It'll be a complete outbound solution.

Nice. Nice. And it looked like let me just make sure I caught the demo correctly. It looked like maybe your standard use case might be an administrator or a marketing person might log in and choose to send emails to a large group of customers and sign them with the record owner's name. So that is that a pretty common use case that you see from your customers?

Where where some Yeah.

Lot of people

Yeah. A lot of people use the record owner feature. That way, don't really have to bother the entire team. And, you know, you're sending on behalf of someone, and especially if you have a large team, it makes sense that, you know, somebody is actually sending out the emails on your behalf. That's quite a common use case scenario, but then we have various use cases. It's not just the marketing and sales to win always.

You know, how universities is actually using that. Right? I mean, there are hundreds of users who are actually interacting with the students for various purposes. It could be related to the course, admissions, the tracking of their performance, whatnot, so student advisers.

Similarly, advisers using it, recruiters using it, nonprofits, especially when they're capturing their donations or maybe communicating with the donors, they use it, the newsletters. The use cases could be anything, as long as your business really needs to send emails for a certain purpose. For example, our collection agency, right, as a classic scenario, you need to send emails to, collect the money. So, know, it's not just the sales and marketing.

Yeah. Nice.

So if you're excuse me. When you were talking about warming up the domain, I didn't quite understand.

Is that do you have a like, you have a bunch of Gmail and Yahoo addresses that you send to on behalf of your customers as as them? So Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, all know about about the domain.

Is that the idea? Yeah. Yeah. That's one approach.

It's to get it's to get your domain a record of delivered emails in those big providers Okay.

Correct. Got it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So that's called inboxing.

That's one way of warming up your domain and IP address. And the other approach is sending out emails to the same server, but, you know, less frequency and less number of emails that's called auto warm up.

It doesn't send it to the feeder list. It send it sends it to your own list, but it sends, you know, with less frequency, less volume, for two months. It's called auto warm up. So we got both features available.

Which do you find more successful?

So we are piloting the inboxing feature, with few customers. We have been successful. That's called inboxing, which is, you know, sending out emails to the feeder list. So we're actually gonna use a combination of both. What we have seen is sometimes, you know, you have to warm up your own, to your own list of emails. So while we are doing the auto warm up, we also would do the constant warm up to the feeder list. A combination of both would actually help.

Okay. I bet you I'm guessing that part of the benefit of engaging a company like yours is that you know the business. Right? I mean, delivering an email has become very complicated.

Absolutely. I I agree. I mean, the nowadays, if you look at, whether it's a small company or a big company, everybody's having spam filters in head domain.

Yes. So it's tough to really get through those spam filters and get to the inbox. And more and more security complaints that countries are imposing on us, you got to really make sure that you know what you're doing. And, you know, it's always better to work with a vendor like us, you know, who knows in and out of email.

Great. Well, great. Well, I I really appreciate this. I think it looks like a great tool, and I and thank you so much for your time. I learned a lot.

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