Email Sending Best Practices
Overview
This list is by no means all-encompassing, as we know email marketing is a huge topic. However, if you have limited knowledge on sending best practices, this should serve as a great base of knowledge!
Verifying your Domain with Bullhorn Automation
It's important that any email domains you plan to send emails from via Bullhorn Automation are verified. Clients often provide their primary domain when they are first set up with Bullhorn Automation, then attempt to send from different domains later and forget about this step. If you want to verify a new domain, contact Bullhorn Automation Support who can provide you with the information you need.
Authenticating your email leads to a greater degree of trust. Inbox providers use authentication to verify a sender’s identity, so authenticated email has a much better chance of successfully landing in the inbox than unauthenticated email.
Whitelist your Sending IP Address
Inboxes are getting smarter, and sometimes they can tell that the domain you're sending Bullhorn Automation emails from is coming from a different IP address than they recognize. Having your IT team white label your Bullhorn Automation sending IP address can help with that. If you're unsure what that is, reach out to Bullhorn Automation Support.
Do not Purchase or Scrape Email Lists
Blanket emailing a bunch of recipients who don't know who you are and aren't expecting emails from you very rarely has a positive impact, whether from a sales/delivery or reputation perspective. Recipients of your emails should have followed an opt -in process of some kind (see next section) and be happy to receive your content.
Have a Strong Opt-In Process
Creating a clear opt-in process establishes sending expectations, defines the sender-recipient relationship from the start, and helps prevent spam traps (email addresses used by ISPs and corporations to monitor spam email).
Opt-in email refers to non-transactional emails such as newsletters or job alerts. Without obtaining the recipient's permission first, your email has a high risk of being unwanted, and is likely to be marked as spam by the recipient or their mailbox provider.
It's also important to continue to request that opt-in. Just because someone opted in to your emails five years ago, it doesn't necessarily mean they still want to receive them.
Maintain your Sending Lists
A smaller, more engaged email list is much better than a huge, unengaged email list. Taking time to regularly monitor your email engagement across all recipients is key to email marketing. To ensure the highest engaged list possible, remove inactive recipients (those who don’t open your emails).
Remember, some people just don’t want to receive emails from you, and that's OK - it's not personal! The quality of your list is so much more important than the quantity. Properly maintaining your email list also helps you avoid getting caught in spam traps.
Tidy up your Email List by Regularly Doing the Following:
- Remove bounced emails and "role" email addresses (role email addresses are addresses that aren't associated to a single, specific person, such as emails that begin with things like admin@, info@ or support@)
- Remove recipients who are unengaged and do not open or click your messages. There is an array of search criteria in Bullhorn Automation that can help with this. For more information see Building Lists based on Bullhorn Automation Activity.
Provide a Clear and Easy Way to Unsubscribe
It can feel daunting having the Bullhorn Automation Unsubscribe link on all of your emails, but it's there for a reason! The easier and clearer the Unsubscribe process is for your recipients, the better. Having an Unsubscribe link in your emails actually helps delivery. For more information see Opt In / Opt Out and Unsubscribe FAQ .
Optimize your Content for your Recipients
Clear and Consistent Branding
Ensuring your emails have clear and consistent branding helps the recipient and their mailbox recognize you as a sender.
Limit Scrolling
We hear this all the time in recruitment: apparently the average person’s attention span is around eight seconds (think about the speed in which you scan your resumes!). For this reason, your emails should get to the point as quickly as possible. The longer that recipients have to scroll to get to your content, the more likely they are to give up on your emails
Be Device Responsive
If your emails aren’t device responsive, recipients are likely to delete or mark your messages as spam. Bullhorn Automation's Email Builder is optimized to perform across all major mailbox providers, and lets you choose a different layout entirely for the purpose of mobile devices. You can also preview your message as it will appear on different devices, so that your email will look perfect regardless of the device it is read on.
Be Relevant
Even if you follow every deliverability rule and best practice, your content must still be relevant to recipients. If they find your content irrelevant, they won’t engage with it. Segmenting your mailing lists by their interests is a great way to ensure content is relevant. You could use Bullhorn Automation Survey Engagements to gather this information, and can even store those preferences in a custom field in your ATS.
Optimize your Content for the Robots
Don’t use Free Link Shorteners in your Messages
This includes tools like Bitly. Because spammers commonly use link shorteners, they are a warning sign to ISPs. They also dilute your brand prevalence, so avoid them when you can.
Bullhorn Automation automatically shortens links in a compliant way for the purpose of tracking within the platform. As standard, this is "clicks.careerbits.com" but we can change that to reflect your brand based on the 4th CNAME value in your Settings > Website Integration area. Reach out to Bullhorn Automation Support to find out more about this.
Optimize all Images
The more information you can give ISPs about the content of your message, the better. This provides context, and helps ISPs recognize and categorize your email properly.
Take advantage of all the tools in the Email Builder, including adding alt text on every image you use, making sure your images are to scale, and having responsive designs. Both your recipients and their machines appreciate responsive design when looking at an email they've received.
Host your Images Properly
You can host your images in the Bullhorn Automation File Manager.
Practice Good Text to Image Ratio
As a general rule of thumb, ensuring you're providing two to four sentences per image helps give context to the ISP and your recipients.
Think About the Size of your Email
If your email is too large, it could be clipped, or may not end up in the recipients inbox at all. Be sure to preview your message in a test email (or two!) and adjust the copy as needed.
Balancing content that serves both humans and machines strengthens your email program on both sides.
Remember, there’s no guarantee that following these rules will ensure inbox delivery, however, it will help to strengthen your sending reputation, and maintain happy and healthy mailing lists.