Are you also experiencing a drop in open rates and engagement?

As an e-mail marketeer or company involved in e-mail marketing, you may experience (even) more problems with deliverability with Microsoft-owned e-mail clients such as Hotmail, Live and Outlook these days. This can cause concern for anyone and with good reason, since Microsoft makes up approx. 5% of the world’s e-mail accounts, and up to 15-20% when it comes to e-commerce brands.

When your email campaigns experience a drop in open rates and overall engagement, important metrics such as website activity or sales conversions can be severely impacted.

What is Email Deliverability

Email Deliverability is complex and can be difficult to understand, but is critical to the success of your email marketing. E-mail Deliverability determines whether an e-mail lands in the recipient’s inbox and should not be confused with E-mail Delivery, which only tells whether an e-mail has been received or not. Factors that affect Email Deliverability include:

Email Sender Reputation
Email Authentication
Email Content
Engagement Levels
Email Volume Spikes
Bounce Rate

To improve Email Deliverability, it is important to maintain good email hygiene, only send out to recipients who have actively given permission, personalize emails, segment lists and avoid spam triggers.

Microsoft and other email clients implement measures to protect their users’ inboxes from malicious or unwanted e-mails using spam filters that prevent such e-mails from reaching the recipient’s inbox. However, legitimate brands and businesses have recently seen a noticeable increase in their emails landing in the spam filters at Microsoft, despite not changing their mailings, either when it comes to what or how much they send . Unfortunately, there is no clear answer as to why this happens, other than Microsoft changing its spam algorithm.

Microsoft is placing increasing emphasis on positive user engagement to determine whether an email lands in the recipient’s inbox. Positive user engagement can, for example, be open rates, clicks, whitelisting, and marking an email as important, whereas negative user engagement includes returning emails, marking emails as spam, and extended periods of unopened emails. Therefore, every marketer who deals with e-mail marketing must make sure to optimize the positive user engagement.

What is whitelisting

E-mail whitelisting is a list of approved senders defined by you or your recipients, the purpose of which is to prevent your e-mail client from blocking or marking e-mails as spam. You can therefore ask your recipients to add your e-mails to their whitelist or address book to ensure that your e-mails land in the inbox.

There are therefore some things you can do to avoid landing in the spam filter:

Make your recipients aware of the problem and ask them to whitelist your emails
Avoid exclamation marks, capital letters and trigger words such as OFFER, BUY, SALE, etc. in your subject lines and emails
Send out to smaller segments over a given period
Set up engaged segments using Hotmail, Live or Outlook
Test plain text emails to unengaged segments for a period of time to see if it’s enough to get through the spam filter

What is plain text e-mails?

Plain text e-mails are simple e-mails that only consist of plain text without noise (images, different fonts, etc.) Plain text e-mails have the advantage that they are more likely to land in the recipient’s inbox and thus avoid spam filters.

Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all solution to the deliverability problems at Microsoft, but with an early and targeted effort, you can easily prevent and limit the drop in opening rates and engagement. If you need help with your e-mail marketing strategy, you are always welcome to contact us.

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