| Criteria |
Factors to be monitored |
| Compliance |
- Are all the compliance requirements met?
- If not - Pause everything and fix this first.
|
| Email set up |
- Is the email setup still intact?
- If not - pause everything from the domain/IP set that has issues and fix that before resuming.
|
| Sent volume |
- Is the volume in line with the ramp-up plan (if applicable)?
- If not, pause -> backtrack -> make sure all metrics are intact -> then resume.
- Was there a volume spike?
- Volume spike would be sent volume more than 150% of the highest volume sent in the last 30 days.
- If yes, why did that happen? What has been done to ensure, it doesn't recur?
- Send only to email openers with reduced frequency and reach out to each postmaster explaining the cause of the issue and steps taken to recover/prevent it from happening again.
|
| Sending frequency |
- Are you sending enough times per week/fortnight to keep the IPs warm?
- If not, try other lifecycle use cases, and reach out to the postmaster to explain why you have sporadic sends.
- What is the RPM being used?
- If there are deferrals/delayed delivery/infrequent sends, lower the RPM.
|
| Delivery rate |
- What is the average delivery rate?
- If it's below 98%, review the reasons behind it.
- If there are high hard bounces, secure audience collection points, implement double opt it, send welcome campaigns, and look whether hard bounces are automatically suppressed as expected or not.
- If there are high soft bounces, reach the error description, and fix it accordingly.
|
| Deferrals |
- Are there deferrals [event: Event Deferred]?
- If yes, pause for a day and clear the queue, resume with lower volumes and low RPM, and reach out to postmaster support.
|
| Open and click rate |
- Are the Unique open rates across all ISPs on par with the benchmark?
- If not, revise your sending strategy.
|
| Spam complaints (Gmail) |
- Is the spam rate higher than the threshold?
|
| Spam complaints (from the stats) |
- Is the spam rate higher than the threshold?
|
| Domain and IP reputation (Gmail) |
- Is the domain reputation LOW/BAD?
- If yes, pause everything, investigate the root cause behind the drop, fix the underlying problem, reach out to Google Postmaster support, resume slowly, and ramp up.
|
| SNDS status (Microsoft) |
- Is the filtered status RED?
- If yes, pause everything, investigate the root cause behind the drop, fix the underlying problem, reach out to Microsoft Postmaster support, resume slowly, and ramp up.
|
| Inbox Placement |
- Is the overall placement lower than 95%?
- Is this low only for a specific domain?
- Review all other metrics (performance, reputation, complaints) and fix accordingly.
|
| Blocklists |
- Are the IPs and domains in blocklists/blacklists?
- Blocks identified by reviewing soft Bounce reason.
- If yes, apply for removal.
|
| Next Steps |
- Review the trends going back 6 months, find the gaps, and optimize.
- Follow best practices.
|