Everyday I always used to delete around 100-150 emails and need to clean my work inbox. These include set of emails from eCommerce sites, some offline stores, restaurant deals, group discussions or forums that I had subscribed to at some point of time (name which I don’t remember when!).

I was doing the same last day when my colleague came up and said “Ah! deleting and block the graymail, eh?”

Graymail?

That was a new term for me. She said the term and left me with dozens of important questions about Graymail. I started my analysis from the night. My research started. Still I figured out this is a term that we marketers don’t use frequently, instead it is something we face everyday.

It is much easy for people to deliver bulk emails from legitimate source. It help to add value to different recipients name. 

What is a Graymail?

Graymail is an email that you opted in to receive, but you don’t really want it in your inbox. For instance, last week I went shopping to a retail store and saw people buying different brands.

When I reached the billing counter system, the person asked for my phone number and email ID to use it for declaring the final amount. And still that’s how I was opted in to their email list. Now, I love their collection but having a regular email updates is not what I really like to use.

These types of emails are typically categorized as Graymails and help to deliver filtered bulk emails through legitimate sources for the need of much higher email deliverability system will filtered good neutral or poor. The most important fact to understand here is:

The engagement level of this graymail is very less, as most people don’t need these emails. In the end, it may impact share a higher conversion rate. It is easy to try.

Overall Graymails are usually those emails that you had opted in but after a certain pulse you get weary of them. Hence, you stop engaging with these emails.

Graymails are periodic newsletters, advertisements source, and announcements which are share to impact targeted for subscriber’s specific interests and it increases the another email delivery rate.

You have to verify the IP addresses before delivering email messages to different email addresses for avoiding spam complaints. If possible you’ll get the chance to improve and build the email delivery rate and hard bounces block. Then you have to keep deliver email program to email addresses.

You have to keep in mind to protect your recipients from spam trap, so you can already verify the IP and domain reputation in real time depends on reputation scores. 

Internet Service Providers / system detect these emails as graymails based on the lack of engagement and avoid the interference of great third party. For example, if you’ve opened the first two emails from a retailer to check the scores and website traffic.

Then you can never engaged with the next 50 or so emails. Internet Service Providers will definitely mark these emails as Graymails by checking the history and valid site reputations.

Internet Service Providers track your engagement with the emails you receive. It verify the industry reputations and history of email list. Think it gets smarter with its categorization based on the actions of all recipients across emails sent from a particular reputation email in real time.

That is possible specifically, think why these emails are never tagged as SPAM. You’ll get started with some great email program to avoid third party. Don’t deliver these messages to unknown users for implementing best practices in your network.

You can deliver web blog from your network to keep reputation check. These work will get started and create to known huge difference in hard bounces factor. 

“A Graymail is different from a malicious email IP address. It helps to improve reputation scores by email sending to unknown users.”

The content of a graymail factor at times replicate malicious where a recipient marks such an mail as hostile issue out of annoyance and put mail to spam folder. Those recipients avoid receiving great email program from any business industry without proper authentication .

However, this type of poor mail issue delivered fails to meet the legal definitions of spams. It comes under the factors of average malicious complaints practices addresses. Ip reputation is still important. 

Graymail is not same as Graylisting.

What is Graylisting?

At times, ISPs may not deliver an entire email batch at once if they find the sender’s IP suspicious or not trustworthy for email program. This can happen when you’ll get a new dedicated IP address and send out an email campaign of say 15,000 emails.

The ISPs tool may accept some emails while others can be graylisted. They send the remaining email program regularly when they are sure that it is safe and good combination to deliver messages to inactive recipients from your IP address.

This will minimize probably the bounces and help providers to ignore third party factors for best practices mail campaign so IP reputation equally important.. 

So, where do these graymails get delivered, if not the malicious or junk folders?

You already know about Gmail’s Priority Inbox, right? Well, this is Gmail’s product to handle graymails. In this case, such emails get delivered to the promotional tab where they may not get seen in the open group.

Many companies have created products to specifically handle graymails by maintaining the security of email addresses/ website. Hotmail itself coined the term Graymail and created a product to tackle such emails to measure the mail metrics.

Infact, Hotmail ran a series of YouTube videos with the tagline “Conquer your Gramails”, and they are just so probably relatable. For example, check one of the videos addresses “Messenger Boys“.

However, whether you like it or not, no businesses / company will want their emails to become graymails. Rather, the whole purpose of sending emails is to trigger more engagement and build a healthy email reputation as well.

That’s right, when most of emails are marked as Graymails, that does affect/ hurt/ suffer your email sending reputation; maybe not to the extent of what bad spamming does by spammers, but still its not a very good thing to maintain talk right now. Make sure, never buy list from many third party mailbox providers.

Best practices to Save your emails from becoming Gray

There are many new best practices that can set maintain to share & help you for protect your emails from becoming graymails. At EasySendy, we’ve are doing the following many best practices to keep experts mailbox providers mind , we protect our emails from going gray!

#1. User Engagement is the key to inbox placement

In today’s email delivery world, there’s a significant shift from several IP reputation metrics to engagement metrics.

The latest email strategy & best practices by many experts who states that the customer engagement level plays a vital role in the inbox placement to avoid spam traps issues from spammer mailbox providers.

Yet Graymails have lost the interaction, but  let these are not return path report phishing or even unwanted. Infact, the ISPs are now smart to track the actions of the recipients and their interaction levels able to understand about best engagement metrics good neutral or less poor IP address spam traps/ sites like talos intelligence business complaints.

Are you often worried about your real customer engagement and want to get your graymail back/ return to the inbox?

There is a simple answer to this- Monitor and Make sure that the content is relevant and able in engaging enough so that they get the most number of recipients product apart from many return path phishing spam traps issues from spammers. So user can trust &  better click on the mail and open it.

#2. Segmentation is necessary

Make sure you are offering your most engaged users exclusive offers and work to enhance the engagement level. Yet The more often the customers click on the offer web links and the faster they added, more are the chances of your emails reaching their inboxes directly.

You can ensure that you are nurturing your engaged contacts trust mostly by using behavior-based segmentation of EasySendy Pro.

Along with this, you can also add subscriber scores to indicate which leads are most engaged in your funnel. Create drip sequences filters with various actions, conditions, and decision triggers to ensure relevant nurturing emails. 

Those who are dormant gets automatically segmented into a different list in your database. You can either choose to retarget these contacts. However, make sure you verify this list first to avoid invalid traps from spammers server. 

#5. Re-engagement Campaigns do wonders

Re-engagement is the key advantage to marketing solution, as it boosts better email performances and trust. You can pump up your email open rates, reduce your bounce rates, and increase email/ posts site engagements/reputations to facilitate customer activation.

Here are some tips filters for a re-engagement campaign. So the unsubscriber may return path and stay back to your web site..

• Post attractive and better offers such as “Reply to this and win goodies.”
• “Reply to this message for 50% discount and free shipping results.”
• Enhance the customer engagement level by offering them the discounts and replies such as “Reply to this email and get customer service anytime.”
• Post simple feedback such as “We’d be happy to hear from you.”

The bottom line advantage is to get your audiences engaged with your email campaigns list.  

Protect your emails: Essential To-Do’s 

If you want to route your messages into inbox tabs and folders, then here are your immediate list essentials:

#1. Let the prospective audiences know what they’re signing up for

Graymails include newsletters, sales announcements, coupons, etc. In your pop-up forms, you can add check boxes to give your audiences options results to choose what kind of emails they’d prefer from you.

You can look & include boxes lists where they can specify if they want to receive emails on a daily basis or weekly or monthly basis.

Give your audiences/ people the power to choose what they want from your results. You can going to add this option / tips to choose segments in the lead capture forms.

Mention that you will be sending emails or sms or push notifications from time to time to your contact. 

This tips helps in ensuring that your audiences consciously agree to collect certain type of emails from you that had sent. Your email campaigns are thus, consent-based.

Along with this, offer a double opt-in server which means the audiences have to confirm from their subscription by clicking on a confirmation link lists that is immediately sent to their inboxes upon significant subscribing.

Or else they will block unknown contact inboxes which will affect system server industry reputations.

For example, the confirmation email from EasySendy Pro team upon registering for a trial. After confirming by clicking on the significant link server, the user is automatically added to the email segment for further nurturing. 

 

Ultimately the final goal is to send high-quality emails which have value to your list.

Another method is to offer options to “opt-down” when a subscriber clicks on unsubscribe button. With this option, team can help your audiences choose what categories of emails they want to get rather than fully unsubscribing from your email lists.

This helps in better segmentation and more effective nurturing. Also, it creates a healthy brand impression where you build your users feel important.

For instance, when you click on unsubscribe button on Aritic PinPoint, you are automatically redirects to the Preference Page where you can set your preferences.

You can choose to communicate via email or SMS, and select the most appropriate segment to receive customized emails. This method automatically reduces your unsubscription rates.

#2. Follow-up immediately after signup or subscription

Build your recipient list by sending an email at the time of their sign up. The best time to build engagement with the subscribers is the registered time as you can get to know their expectations, their frequencies and the reason behind their approach too.

You can build an excellent brand reputation by sending a welcome email. It helps you enhance engagement and increase customer interaction. Make sure you test your email send frequency so that to keep a track to engagement level.

For instance, when they sign up, you can immediately send a welcome email with options to engage more. Like in EasySendy, we always want to educate and make our users aware, at the same time get detail insights into what they are looking for.

So, we craft a welcome email including an option to book a demo for the product or go through our tutorials, helping them in onboarding smoothly. Here is a sample email we send when users sign up for EasySendy Pro.

#3. Filter Out Email Lists

Make sure that an unsubscribe option is prominent in all of your emails. If your subscribers no longer wish to receive your emails, you must unsubscribe them in advance.

In email marketing terms, we call it Suppression List management (which you can quickly check within EasySendy). Suppression list management feature helps you to permanently exclude those email IDs to which you don’t want to send emails in future.

Someone/something (e.g., the system, the software, etc.) can include dormant emails or email IDs that no longer exist, or can automatically add emails (without user consent).. This feature helps you stay complied with the CAN-SPAM act of email marketing, as well as keeping your company email list updated and healthy with email marketing tool scale solution.

Use watch guard metric  team to consistent monitor spammy networks flood and give report and visit performance

#4. Only relevant email contents, please

Know more about your company scale subscribers on your list so that you can optimize the relevancy for your email content for each subscriber. Create valuable content. In other words, make sure that every mail you send contains valuable content.

Talking about content, I’d also suggest you work around your email subject lines.

You see, email subject lines are the first thing your subscribers will see. This subject line is instrumental in deciding the fate of your emails – will they open? Will they mark as spam? Does it read spam? Will they delete immediately? 

Phew! So many things are dependent on your subject line. As a precautionary measure, I always suggest to test your subjectlines.

PS: Avoid SPAM FOLDERS at any cost.

In case any recipient reports your message as spams or route your messages to their spam folders, it is a red flag for you. Generally, the filtration of signals start happening at a higher rate if your email generates more than one spam complaint about every 1000 emails. Hence, make sure that the content is relevant so that it doesn’t end up in the spam folder.

Over to you now.
Tell me what methods you are using to prevent your emails from falling in the spam traps? For better delivery options, you can take a look at EasySendy – an email marketing automation platform/ tool.

It is cloudways host service and offers multiple email delivery servers that can improve your email inbox placement rates.

Additionally the email automation features make it easier to send targeted and relevant emails which increases email open rates (which is directly related to maintaining a good email sending reputation). Give it a try for free and let me know your views.

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