Summary
Sending a mass COVID-19 email to an extensive, unengaged list poses significant risks to email deliverability. While the urgency of a public health message might seem to justify a broad reach, bypassing standard deliverability practices can severely damage your sender reputation and negatively impact future email campaigns. This summary outlines key findings and considerations when facing such a challenge, emphasizing the importance of strategic list management, gradual sending, and a clear understanding of recipient expectations.
Key findings
- Reputation risk: A sudden, massive increase in sending volume to an inactive audience will almost certainly harm your sender reputation, potentially leading to widespread blocklisting (blacklisting) and reduced inbox placement for all future emails. This is especially true if you typically send only 50,000 to 80,000 emails per week and are now considering sending 7 million.
- Engagement issues: Unengaged subscribers are highly likely to mark unsolicited emails as spam, leading to high complaint rates. They may also result in increased bounces due to invalid or dormant addresses, further signaling negative behavior to internet service providers (ISPs).
- List hygiene: Large, unengaged lists often contain spam traps and invalid addresses, which can severely impact your sender score. It is crucial to have a clean, validated list before sending, particularly for sensitive communications. Validating your list can take time and resources, which may help buy time for strategic discussions.
- Strategic importance: Evaluate whether the message is truly critical for all 7 million contacts. If they are not actively engaged, it's unlikely they rely on your organization for general public health updates, which are widely available through other channels. The goal should be to provide genuine value, not just send for the sake of sending.
- Leadership communication: Clear communication with leadership about the risks to deliverability is essential. Presenting the potential long-term damage to future email-based communications, such as fundraising or critical updates, can help them understand the gravity of the situation. Documenting your advice and their decision is also prudent.
Key considerations
- Audience segmentation: Prioritize sending to your most engaged segments first. Gradually expand to less engaged segments, monitoring metrics closely. This allows you to adapt your strategy if deliverability issues arise. Read more on how to manage deliverability when re-engaging inactive email subscribers by reviewing our comprehensive guide.
- Throttling: If a full send is unavoidable, implement extreme throttling. Send as slowly as possible, over several days, to minimize the sudden surge in volume. This still carries risk, but mitigates some of the immediate damage. For more on this topic, consult our article on how to send to a large, unengaged email list with no existing reputation.
- Content relevance: Ensure the COVID-19 content is highly relevant and actionable for every recipient. Generic, unnecessary messages are more likely to be marked as spam. As noted by Mailgun, segmenting your list based on engagement and avoiding sending to unengaged contacts is critical for protecting deliverability.
- Post-send strategy: Be prepared for significant dips in deliverability and engagement for subsequent campaigns. Have a plan to actively rebuild your sender reputation and clean your list after such a send.
What email marketers say
Email marketers often face the difficult balance between business objectives and deliverability best practices. When tasked with sending critical, broad communications like COVID-19 updates to unengaged lists, their primary concern shifts to mitigating the inevitable impact on sender reputation and future campaign success. The consensus leans heavily towards caution and strategic segmentation.
Key opinions
- Deliverability impact: Most marketers agree that sending to a vast, unengaged list will severely damage deliverability for current and future campaigns, risking IP and domain reputation. This includes the potential for being added to various blocklists.
- Audience relevance: A key question raised is whether the information is truly critical and relevant to all recipients, especially those who haven't engaged recently. Generic COVID-19 updates are unlikely to be perceived as valuable by a disengaged audience.
- Engagement versus perception: While some crisis-related emails may see initial high opens (due to urgency or curiosity), this doesn't equate to positive recipient perception. Over-sending or sending irrelevant content can still lead to complaints and disengagement, even if an initial open is recorded.
- Shared IP risk: Marketers on shared IP addresses are particularly vulnerable, as their sending behavior can negatively impact other senders on the same IP. This makes strategic segmentation and throttling even more critical.
Key considerations
- Gradual targeting: Marketers recommend starting with the most engaged segments (e.g., active in the last 90 days) and progressively sending to less active ones, while monitoring metrics for signs of trouble. This aligns with advice on how to improve email inbox placement with sending priority and audience segmentation.
- List cleaning: The massive, unengaged list likely contains invalid addresses and spam traps. It's advisable to validate the entire list against a trusted vendor to clean it, which can also provide a buffer for internal discussions. For broader context, refer to the essential tools and practices for email deliverability.
- Damage control: If a full send is unavoidable, be prepared for a significant decline in deliverability. Marketers suggest documenting communication with leadership, protecting yourself, and having a plan to rebuild your sender reputation post-send.
- Contextual sending: Consider the sender's typical sending pattern and if communication has been paused. For some senders, a brief, highly relevant message might be an option to keep the domain/IP active, but only if there's genuinely urgent or different information to announce. Higher Logic also advises maintaining a consistent sending pattern and sending slowly.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks warns that a sudden, massive increase in sending volume, like from 50,000 to 7 million emails, is likely to catastrophically crush your deliverability, IP address reputation, and overall sender reputation. This extreme deviation from your typical sending patterns is a major red flag for ISPs. Such an unexpected surge often triggers spam filters, leading to high bounce rates and an influx of spam complaints from recipients who are not accustomed to receiving your emails or who simply don't find the content relevant. The long-term repercussions can include consistent filtering to spam folders and even getting your domain or IP address added to a blocklist (blacklist), making it difficult to reach even your engaged audience in the future.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks recommends segmenting your audience and gradually decreasing engagement levels when sending to a large list. Starting with the most engaged segments (e.g., active within 0-90 days) and then progressively targeting less engaged groups is a safer approach. This method allows you to monitor deliverability metrics like complaints and bounce rates in real-time. If negative trends appear, you can stop or adjust your sending schedule before irreversible damage occurs to your sender reputation. Ultimately, there will be a point where mailing to very old, unengaged contacts is no longer beneficial due to the high risk of spam complaints and bounces.
What the experts say
Deliverability experts universally caution against sending large volumes of email to unengaged lists, especially during sensitive times like a pandemic. Their advice prioritizes maintaining sender reputation above all else, warning of severe and long-lasting consequences for email programs that fail to do so.
Key opinions
- Avoid if possible: The overwhelming expert consensus is that sending a mass COVID-19 email to a largely unengaged list is a bad idea and should be avoided unless absolutely critical and for specific, highly engaged segments.
- Catastrophic impact: Experts warn that such a send will almost certainly tank deliverability, regardless of specific tactics, due to the sheer volume increase and the inactive nature of the list. This could include significant increases in bounce rates, spam complaints, and blocklisting.
- Unnecessary communication: The message itself is often deemed unnecessary for an unengaged audience, as critical public health information is widely available elsewhere. Organizations should assess what unique value they bring before sending.
- Broader implications: Beyond immediate deliverability, experts question why an organization maintains a 7 million-strong unengaged list, highlighting a deeper problem with list acquisition or management practices. A deliverability issue is often a symptom of underlying list health problems.
Key considerations
- Leadership education: Experts advise involving leadership in understanding the severe deliverability consequences. This might include having them review resources or communicating the risks in writing to ensure accountability. Learn how to persuade management to remove unengaged email list subscribers for better deliverability, which is a related challenge.
- Risk documentation: Documenting your professional advice against such a send, and the leadership's decision to proceed, is recommended as a protective measure for the email specialist.
- Minimal engagement strategy: If a full send is absolutely unavoidable, consider sending only to the most engaged segments. Even then, be prepared for significant negative impacts. It's crucial to understand how to rebuild Gmail sender reputation with limited engaged subscribers, as this might be necessary afterward.
- Recipient perspective: Always consider the recipient's perspective: 'What's in it for me?' If the email doesn't offer clear, direct value, it risks being unwelcome. Laura Atkins from Word to the Wise offers advice on coronavirus emails, emphasizing careful consideration.
Expert view
Email expert from Email Geeks emphatically states that initiating such a mass email send to a significantly unengaged list is a fundamentally flawed strategy. The immediate and long-term repercussions for your deliverability are too severe to ignore. Regardless of any light advice or minor adjustments, this kind of send is highly likely to result in a catastrophic impact on your email program. It's a situation where basic deliverability principles are being overridden by an urgent, but misguided, business demand, making a positive outcome highly improbable.
Expert view
Email expert from Email Geeks strongly advises against sending an email if it's not absolutely critical or if your organization isn't the primary source of this information for the recipients. They emphasize that the core question leadership needs to answer is what value they believe they are providing to the millions of people who haven't heard from them recently. If the recipients are relying on your organization for general COVID-19 updates, it implies a level of disengagement that makes the email unnecessary. Such a send would serve no real purpose for these individuals and could instead alienate them, leading to complaints rather than engagement.
What the documentation says
Technical documentation and research typically reinforce the importance of established email deliverability protocols, even during times of crisis. They highlight the mechanics of how ISPs and filtering systems react to sending anomalies, especially sudden surges in volume to potentially unengaged lists. The core message is that foundational deliverability principles remain constant, regardless of the message's content.
Key findings
- Sending pattern consistency: ISPs monitor sending patterns. Any drastic deviation, such as a sudden 8650% increase in volume, is a strong indicator of unusual activity, likely leading to increased filtering or blocklisting. Consistent sending patterns are crucial for maintaining trust with mailbox providers.
- Distributed sending: Documentation often recommends distributing send volume slowly over time, rather than in a single burst, to avoid overwhelming ISP systems and triggering their abuse detection mechanisms. This applies especially to unengaged audiences.
- List validation: Protecting deliverability involves validating your email list before sending to ensure accuracy and remove invalid or risky addresses, especially when dealing with lists that have not been actively engaged. This reduces bounces and spam trap hits.
- Engagement segmentation: Segmentation based on engagement (e.g., recent opens or clicks) is a fundamental practice. Sending to highly engaged segments first provides positive signals to ISPs and gradually builds reputation for subsequent sends to less active users.
Key considerations
- ISP capacity: Some ISPs and filtering services have reported experiencing difficulties due to the massive influx of COVID-19 related emails, suggesting that even legitimate, but high-volume, sends during such periods can face increased scrutiny. This makes careful volume management more critical.
- Reputation is key: Documentation consistently emphasizes that sender reputation, built on consistent positive engagement, is the primary factor for inbox placement. Any action that threatens this reputation, like a mass send to an unengaged list, is highly discouraged. For an in-depth understanding, see our guide on a practical guide to understanding your email domain reputation.
- Feedback loops: ISPs provide feedback loops for senders to monitor spam complaints. A sudden spike in complaints from an unengaged list would immediately signal negative recipient sentiment, leading to further filtering. It's vital to incorporate these loops into your monitoring. Our article on what are the best practices for email deliverability and avoiding spam filters delves deeper into this.
- Authentication standards: Ensure your email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is perfectly configured. While not a silver bullet, proper authentication is a baseline requirement to even be considered by ISPs, especially for large sends. Google and Yahoo email guidelines also stress the importance of regularly updating subscriber lists and maintaining transparent communication.
Technical article
Email deliverability documentation from Higher Logic advises maintaining a consistent sending pattern to preserve deliverability. They emphasize that any significant deviation from your usual volume and frequency can negatively impact your sender reputation with internet service providers (ISPs). For urgent but large communications, it's best to send as slowly as possible, utilizing distributed sending options where available. This approach mitigates the risk of overwhelming ISP systems and appearing as an anomalous sender. They also specifically recommend avoiding sending on the hour, as this can often be a characteristic of less sophisticated or bulk sending practices that trigger filters.
Technical article
Email deliverability documentation from Mailgun emphasizes the critical importance of validating your email list before sending any COVID-19 related emails to protect your deliverability. An unvalidated list, especially a large one, is prone to containing invalid addresses, spam traps, and disengaged contacts, all of which contribute to negative sender metrics. Furthermore, they recommend segmenting your list based on engagement levels. The core advice is to avoid sending emails to unengaged segments altogether, as these recipients are more likely to generate spam complaints and contribute to poor sender reputation, regardless of the message's content or perceived urgency. This strategic segmentation helps focus your valuable deliverability resources on the audience most likely to respond positively.
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