Increase transactional email deliverability

Question

My question is strictly related to transactional emails and common best practices like using different email providers for transactional and marketing emails, relevant Subject, From and Reply-To addresses, etc. is assumed.

Would using multiple transactional email providers with a different affinity to the destination domain or even full email address increase my deliverability?

e.g. using let's say mandrill to send to gmail and postmark for everything else or even mandrill for [email protected] and postmark for [email protected]

Is it worth splitting transactional emails in first class ones (reset password, verify email, etc) and second class ones (merely informative) and using different email providers for each?

e.g. using mandrill for password reset and postmark for the welcome (registration successful) email

What else is advisable?

Answer 1

Yes, you got the thread rightly.

For transactional emails, it is always recommended to go with a highly reputed service provider who doesn't deal with spam or promotional emails. This is the first most step. If the vendor supports both then there is a high probability that they will end up messing the reputation of your domain/IP addresses.

As you have selected a good provider, so you can be now rest assured your emails are following the best delivery practices and are compliance with guidelines.

Now, the second step is to have a separate account for the marketing emails. This can be with the current vendor (only if the vendor providers different envelope and IP addresses for this account) or with a new service provider.

Now, the third step is to have a separate domain/sub-domain (preferably sub-domain, so that you should not look spammy to the world) for marketing emails.e.g. if you are using example.com for your transactional account, then use mailer-example.com for your marketing account.

Another important note, having a separate account doesn't mean you now save to send any type of promo/marketing, send relevant customer engaging emails else by doing all these hacks also, you will end up losing the reputation of your sender domain and delivery IP addresses.

Answer 2

So all of the major transactional email providers offer similar deliverability abilities, they (obviously) take that stuff very seriously.

I don't think splitting between them is worth it, but there are some things you can do to increase your delivery rates and inbox placement regardless of ESP:

1. By default you share a delivery IP with other ESP customers, if you pay more you can get a dedicated IP which will improve things over the long term (assuming your data is good)
2. Reduce bounces -- using an email verification service when you collect an email to make sure it is a real, active email address will reduce bounce rates and improve the deliverability of your emails. I work for Kickbox, which offers exactly this.
3. Reducing spam complaints -- make sure users know the emails are coming from your web app and you make it clear how to turn the emails off.

Hope that helps.