Ask a Deliverability Expert: Will Switching ESPs Improve Deliverability For My Newsletter?

These stories are presented thanks to Who Sponsors Stuff, which gives you and your team the tools to quickly find and reach out to relevant sponsors for your newsletter. They track 350+ newsletters, have direct contact information for 6,000+ sponsors, and keep you on the cutting edge of who’s spending money in the email advertising space. Find out how their Sales Pro product can supercharge your ad sales operation today.

I feel like my open rate isn’t as high as it should be, and I think my email service provider (ESP) is to blame. Will switching ESPs improve deliverability for my newsletter?

The short answer: Yes — and no.

On one hand, moving from one ESP to another could make things better. A new ESP might:

• Offer automations, like a welcome series
• Set you up with a dedicated IP address
• Make it easier to authenticate your emails with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

And all of those things might lead to positive changes in engagement, which would make it more likely that you’d land in the inbox.

Another reason why things might change for the better: Every inbox provider and spam filter keeps track of your sender reputation over time. When you make changes to your ESP, you’ll usually also be changing the IP address you send from, which will make the inboxes take a second look at your email strategy and review the changes you’ve made. Positive changes might lead to positive long-term deliverability outcomes. 

But switching ESPs is not a guarantee of success. If you don’t stop the problematic tactics that you used before, making this change won’t be enough to keep inboxes happy. After an initial bump, you’ll likely see things return to where you were before you made the move.

Deliverability isn’t just about which ESPs you use. It’s also about you — what emails you send, who you send to, how often you send, and how you grow your audience.

If you do decide to make a switch, it’s critical to understand which party — you, or your ESP — has which responsibilities during the migration. The better you understand which best practices need to be implemented, the better the chance that you’ll leave those deliverability problems behind at your old ESP and give your audience every chance to receive your emails and engage with you moving forward.

Understanding the role of the ESP

Sending and receiving an email requires more than just a sender and recipient. There are lots of pieces involved: 

• Email service providers, or ESPs, which help you send your emails. These include companies like Aweber, Mailchimp, or SendGrid.
• IP, or Internet Protocol, addresses, which are the digital addresses from which your emails are sent. These are sometimes shared among multiple users of an ESP (also known as an IP pool), though larger senders often pay for a dedicated IP, so only their emails come from that address.
• Inbox service providers, or ISPs, like Gmail or Outlook, which maintain the inboxes for users, and also have spam filters to make sure that bad senders stay out of the inbox.
• Blocklists, which are maintained by independent organizations like Spamhaus, and help the ISPs decide which emails should be allowed into the inbox.

Let’s focus here on the ESP side of things. What are they responsible for, and what should we expect from them? 

Maintaining a list of features is their most obvious responsibility. Features might include the ability to upload a list of email addresses, design attractive email templates, and authenticate a sender’s domain, all of which they make available to their users. Make sure you’re picking an ESP with features that serve your marketing or business goals, reduce your workload, and help you get the most out of your email strategy.

An ESP’s job also includes ensuring the safety of all the data they collect. All of your email lists, statistics, content, and forms should be kept safe and away from nefarious parties.

ESPs are more than just CRMs on steroids. As a technology, email has evolved a lot over time. There are new types of bounces emerging, new ISPs and regulations coming out, and there are constant changes in the way that spam filters work. In addition, there are also new limits or checks being set with blocklists or sending patterns. ESPs take care of all of these components and so much more for senders. This ensures that you can concentrate on the actual emails being sent to your audience.

It is also imperative for ESPs to maintain their infrastructure and reputation. Every day, they monitor how their IPs perform, update their technology to stay up-to-date with inbox changes, and help customers become better senders — or suspend senders who will negatively affect the ESP’s reputation. ESPs continue to create more effective ways to recognize problematic sending behaviors as early as possible. This may not be so obvious to the average user. However, trust me when I say that ESPs are looking for clever ways to block malicious senders from using their tools. By doing this, they can reduce the chance that their IPs end up on blocklists or end up with an infrastructure that has a bad reputation among ISPs. 

Yes, the ESPs maintain strict control over the IP addresses you can send from, but you — not the ESP — are ultimately responsible for your reputation and deliverability. An ISP knows which IP addresses belong to a specific sender and which are used by email service providers. This means that if one customer in one shared IP pool isn’t a trustworthy sender, the inboxes know the difference and will penalize the sender. This is why ESPs have rules in their Terms of Service that users must adhere to. In addition to not accepting senders from certain industries, ESPs have the authority to suspend or close your account. In the long run, all users benefit from these stricter rules. It’s not worth keeping one customer with their problematic habits if it affects all the others, isn’t it? 

It’s not about your ESP — it’s about you

In the short run, senders can use an ESP’s reputation to their advantage to improve their inboxing rates. But this isn’t enough to keep things running smoothly forever. If your business is legitimate but recipients are annoyed by your email marketing practices, then inboxes will penalize you for your email habits. To put it another way: Your readers will decide if you’re a spammer. You are responsible for growing your list, creating your content, selecting your sending patterns, and making sure that all compliance regulations are followed. 

An ESP is a machine that allows you to send your emails. It’s up to you to use it responsibly.

Inboxes expect you to know and understand your audience — particularly what they want to receive and read from you. It is your responsibility to craft the perfect message that will target a specific reader with something irresistible or useful. And as a sender, it is your responsibility to remove any unengaged users from your list. For instance, perhaps a reader loved receiving your emails in the past, but now they’re not engaging with them any longer. That means it’s time to win them back — or let them go.

A third-party ESP does not run your business, does not grow your list, and is unlikely to know what your ideal email strategy should be, other than ensuring you are following a list of best practices. You will be seen by spam filters in accordance with the way subscribers engage with your emails, not the IP pools you use.

Switching ESPs is a short-term fix. In the long run, you still need to update your strategies — from the way you grow your lists to the emails you send — to remain in the inbox.

Maintaining a healthy relationship with your subscribers will ensure high deliverability and a valuable list of contacts. Here’s how your ESP defines that: The ideal list of subscribers is one that engages with your emails, converts, and, of course, doesn’t report your emails as spam.

It is your responsibility to respect the person behind the email address, especially when they opt-out. Your ESP will assist by processing unsubscribes or bounced email addresses. And it’s your responsibility to make sure readers understand what they are unsubscribing from. Are they being removed from just this newsletter, or from all marketing communications? This is especially important when you use more than one tool to send emails. It is your responsibility to ensure that unsubscribes (and other contact issues such as bounces) on one platform are replicated across your other tools. Senders often overlook this aspect when working with multiple ESPs. To reduce spam, creating a centralized way to unsubscribe or manage preferences is always useful.

Due to the fact that so many decisions fall on the sender’s shoulders, it is important to understand what ESPs can do and how they can assist. Migrating from one tool to another should be a decision you make to help you send better emails to readers — not just a quick fix to get your emails into the inbox. 

Inboxes care about your reputation and your email practices, not what tool you use. So if you’re considering switching to a new tool that will help you implement new tactics and maintain best practices, I’d encourage you to move forward with an ESP migration. Choose an appropriate tool, set it up correctly, and slowly migrate with your fixes in place while monitoring your reputation on a daily basis.

If you’re making a switch in hopes that it might magically fix your deliverability problems, think again. The issue probably isn’t your ESP — it’s your strategy.

Have a question that you’d like Yanna-Torry to answer in a future edition of Ask a Deliverability Expert? Submit it here.

Thanks to our sponsors
The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our fall sponsors: ∙ Litmus, an all-in-one email marketing solution to help you create campaigns that convert ∙ Who Sponsors Stuff, a tool to help you find relevant sponsors for your newsletter