Tuesday Tip: You need Google Postmaster Tools


Are you having trouble delivering mail to Gmail subscribers? Then you need Google Postmaster Tools. It is the single source of truth when it comes to understanding what Google sees as your sending reputation, and vitally important for monitoring as you nurse your email campaigns back to health in response to a deliverability or reputation issue.

Heck, it can even come in handy to troubleshoot deliverability issues for other mailbox providers, too. They don't all work exactly the same way, but, for example, since Microsoft's SNDS feedback isn't really domain based (nor synced directly with Microsoft's spam filtering systems), you're not going to have a lot of options when it comes to determining your domain reputation when trying to repair, say, a Microsoft deliverability issue. (This won't always be helpful, but sometimes it's worth trying!)

Let's say you've signed up for GPT and you've identified that your domain reputation is poor. Now what? What does that actually mean, and how do you fix that?

I was talking to Senior Email Deliverability Specialist Peter Ansbacher the other day, and he kindly shared an example of a recent Gmail reputation repair and how GPT's feedback helped throughout that process.

Peter writes: "I had a newish sender with us who ran into reputation issues with Gmail. They had a big send after a long break in sending and continued to send and had issues. Their IP addresses were in red (indicating low or bad IP reputation) and their domain reputation went all the way to low. After their next sends, domain reputation dropped to "bad" and so I took a step back to reassess – to look at the signals GPT was telling me and the customer.

"That's when I decided to talk to the customer about how to repair the issue. That discussion entailed:
  • I showed customer GPT screenshots to highlight how serious the issue was
  • Had the customer fix an issue with their domain's DMARC record. (Always check for, and address, outstanding technical issues.)
  • Told the customer we needed to restart warmup with Gmail and target very engaged users. (The customer had limited and inconsistent sending with us and low open rates due to reputation, but was able to segment out anyone that opened in the past 30 days.)
  • Created some email sends with different campaigns and started slowly sending to engaged users.
  • One thing that I believe really helped, was contacting Gmail via their sender support form. When contacting Google, we were clear about the customer's issues and kept Google updated on steps we were taking to improve things with the customer. We ended up reaching out to them multiple times.
  • After a week of very targeted sending and slowly increasing volume, we saw IP reputation go to yellow and domain reputation go to low and then medium.
  • Created a new campaign for engaged users and began carefully adding in other contacts that had no engagement data.
  • After another couple of more days of this type of larger email with engaged + non-engaged subscribers, domain reputation went to high in GPT – a significant improvement!
  • We continue to monitor with customer and their domain and IP reputation appears to be staying high as the customer gets to a more consistent sending schedule."
Thanks for sharing this, Peter! I think this is a great example that very much highlights how GPT helps senders (and their deliverability experts) identify and address deliverability issues.

Looking to learn more? Check out the Tuesday Tip section here on Spam Resource. And thanks for reading!
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