Increase Deliverability By Separating Your Mail Streams

Customers - Target and Arrows Hit the Word

As the winter holiday season approaches, we begin to see an increase in both transactional and marketing related email traffic.  In order to achieve the highest rates of inbox placement for both types of mail streams, it may make sense for your organization to split these mail streams onto separate SocketLabs On-Demand smtp servers.  Every SocketLabs On-Demand account can have as many separate servers as you would like.  Each server will have it’s own reports and statistics, making it easy to keep track of how individual mail streams are performing.  Here are some benefits you can expect to see by splitting your mail stream:

Deliverability

Customers have different levels of expectation when it comes to transactional messages versus marketing related email.  They expect to see near instant inbox placement from these transactional email messages, especially order confirmations and receipts.  Occasionally when the major providers encounter a new stream of marketing email messages, they may defer or limit the rate these messages are accepted by their mail servers, in order to gauge customer reaction.  If marketing messages are being deferred, and transactional messages are mixed in with these marketing messages, the higher priority transactional messages may end up experiencing these same deferrals.  By separating the mail streams, you can ensure that any transactional messages continue to experience the fastest delivery possible while the marketing messages continue to be delivered separately.  When separating your mail streams it is also a good idea to choose a different From Address for each, such as “[email protected]” for transactional messages and “[email protected]” for marketing messages.  In an upcoming blog article we will go into further detail about how to choose the best From Address for your messages.

Customer Engagement

Most customers tend to engage more with transactional messages than marketing ones.  They are more likely to open a transactional message that they are expecting, as well as more likely to click on any links inside.  Promotional and marketing related messages may not experience quite the same levels of customer engagement.  Again, by separating these mail streams the major inbox providers will take notice of the higher engagement rates for transactional messages, which will result in the highest rate of inbox placement possible.

Gmail Tabbed Inbox Placement

Many of our customers have recently asked about what factors can determine tab placement in Gmail’s new Tabbed Inbox.  Many things contribute to which tab a message will be placed in, including message content, subject line, and even the presence of an unsubscribe method. Although the Tabbed Inbox is very accurate, mixing mail streams may confuse this new Gmail feature, potentially resulting in improper tab placement for some messages.  Separating mail streams onto different On-Demand servers is an easy way to prevent this from occurring.

Support

If you are ready to make the move to split your transactional and marketing mail streams onto separate SocketLabs On-Demand servers but are unsure of how to approach doing so, our Customer Support team is here to help.  Contact us by email at [email protected], or create a ticket in our support system and our team will be happy to assist you.