Category Archives: Monitoring

Bulking Up: Doing the Heavy Lifting before Sending Email

Quite often email marketers concentrate on the fundamentals of marketing messages:

  1. Audience – Targeting the right group of people for the message
  2. Brand awareness – Using a message that aligns with the perception of the brand
  3. Value Proposition – Leveraging use cases and problem-solving concepts that highlight the value of the product, service or feature.

These techniques work but ignore another fundamental problem of email: how the email is constructed, sent, delivered and received.

The issue of email hygiene is highly important to major Inbox Providers like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, because they are battling to keep spam and unwanted email out of their customers’ inboxes. Email marketers now also need to ensure that their email campaigns meet increasingly more stringent technical requirements to ensure delivery.

The Heavy Lifting for Bulk Email

We recently discussed the differences between Bulk and Transactional email. If you are sending any Bulk Email, you need to do some heavy lifting before the email goes out:

  • Use your Marketing Fundamentals to craft your message
  • Ensure you are sending to legitimate opt-in email addresses – The Days of Unsolicited Email are Over
  • Ensure your email is DMARC, SPF and DKIM Compliant
  • Ensure your email conforms to Google and Yahoo! Bulk Sender requirements (Low Spam Rate, DMARC

After the email is sent, you also need to monitor your campaigns for issues:

  • Is your DMARC compliance rate within tolerable ranges?
  • Did you have a large number of spam complaints?
  • Were there other issues with the email list or your emailing domain?

How does MxToolbox Help?

You can do your own heavy lifting with free MxToolbox tools like:

Or, you can let MxToolbox simplify your work…

Use Inbox Placement to test your messages before sending. Inbox Placement will:

  • Analyze your headers for DMARC, SPF and DKIM compliance
  • Check your email for 1-Click Unsubscribe, a requirement of Google and Yahoo! bulk sender rules
  • Parse your message for common issues like spammy content, broken links and link shorteners
  • Visually display your email, graphically highlighting where your issues are.

MxToolbox Delivery Center provides the email configuration monitoring that you need to:

  • Monitor DMARC compliance rates
  • Constantly check your Gmail Spam rate
  • Analyze other potential reasons to miss the inbox
  • Notify you of issues while they’re occurring to enable quick resolution and damage control

Email is no longer fire-and-forget. It’s time to sharpen your email skills, develop your email technology muscles or the on-going email arms race will leave you behind.

The End of a Blacklist – BSB

On Friday the 17th of April, the blacklists BSB and BSB Domain shutdown.  When a blacklist goes offline, it typically returns a positive blacklisting event for every IP address or Domain inquiry.  This is standard but can be a bit alarming for users.

What that means for you?

All of our Monitoring and Delivery Center customers suddenly had a notification of blacklisting on BSB or BSB Domain.  This is normal.  MxToolbox has removed BSB and BSB Domain from the list of blacklists we check.  All notifications that we previously sent of blacklisting by BSB and BSB Domain can be ignored safely.  If BSB and BSB Domain return to action, then we will evaluate adding them back into the list of blacklists we search.

The Importance of Email Delivery Management

Blacklisting is not the only reason why your email may be denied or tossed into a Spam or Junk folder.  Blacklist monitoring is the beginning of good email delivery management.  In addition to monitoring your email for blacklisting, you need to:

  • Monitor your DMARC, SPF and DKIM configurations for compliance with industry standards
  • Regularly monitor the blacklist reputations of all your senders; not just your own IP addresses, but every CRM, Marketing Automation, Order Management, Support Ticketing and other sending system.
  • Actively monitor and manage the DMARC compliance rates for your legitimate senders, eliminating non-compliant senders if needed.
  • Monitor DMARC compliance rates for Fraud and Phishing attacks using your brands

MxToolbox Delivery Center provides you with the capability to manage your Email Deliverability, reducing the chance that your email will be dumped to spam or junk.  Check out Delivery Centertoday, or Contact Sales for a Walkthrough of Delivery Center Managed Services.

 

New MxToolBox Monitoring Feature: Pausing Monitors

Sometimes, there comes a point when a server needs to be taken down for temporary maintenance. Whether you are monitoring that server for performance or availability, you more than likely don’t want to get inundated with down alerts or, worse,  go through the process of removing the monitor in order to stop the alerts – only to re-add it again later.

With that in mind, MxToolBox recently released a new feature for pausing your monitor. Whenever you need to take server offline, you can simply pause/disable your MxToolBox monitor until you are ready to bring the server back online.

To access this feature:

  • Select the monitor you wish to pause
  • Select the “Edit” tab
  • Choose “Disable Monitor”.

When you are ready to unpause your monitor:

  • Select the “Disabled” button in the status bar of your monitoring dashboard
  • Select your monitor
  • Click “Edit”
  • Select “Enable Monitor”

Bam! your monitor is now active again and ready to start tracking.