How do ESPs manage internal vs client deliverability responsibilities?

Key findings

• Shared responsibility: Many ESPs find that deliverability management is a joint effort between the dedicated deliverability team and internal IT or marketing departments.
• Advisory role: Deliverability teams frequently act in a consulting capacity for internal corporate sends, offering guidance and sanity checks rather than directly managing operations.
• Domain separation: It is crucial to use separate domains for internal corporate communications to avoid impacting the ESP's primary production network and client email deliverability. This approach helps prevent any potential issues from internal sends from spilling over into client services.
• Proactive approach: ESPs prefer to provide proactive guidance to internal teams, helping them implement best practices from the outset to avoid deliverability problems and the need for reactive cleanup. This strategy aligns with the broader principles of email deliverability responsibility.
• Credibility maintenance: Internal teams adhering to the same high deliverability standards as clients reinforces the ESP's credibility and commitment to best practices.

Key considerations

• Define clear roles: Establish explicit guidelines on whether the deliverability team is directly responsible for internal emails or primarily provides consultation and monitoring.
• Resource allocation: Consider how much of the deliverability team's resources should be dedicated to internal support versus client services, often influenced by organizational goals.
• Policy enforcement: Implement internal policies that prevent corporate email sending from negatively affecting the ESP's core service infrastructure and its clients, particularly regarding overall deliverability health.
• Training and upskilling: Invest in educating internal marketing and sales teams on email best practices to empower them to manage their own sending reputation effectively.
• Monitoring internal domains: Even if not directly managing sends, the deliverability team should monitor internal domains for blocklistings or other reputation issues, as highlighted by industry discussions on shared responsibility.

Key opinions

• Indirect involvement: Marketers indicate that their deliverability teams provide heavy guidance and sanity checks for internal sends but are not typically hands-on in fixing issues for internal campaigns.
• Proactive support: It is generally preferred to consult with internal marketing and communications teams proactively to ensure proper sending practices, rather than dealing with problems after they occur.
• Domain segregation: Marketers stress the importance of internal teams using separate domains for their corporate communications to prevent any negative impact on the ESP's production domains used by clients. This is crucial as IP reputation management can be complex.
• Credibility and consistency: Maintaining consistent high deliverability standards across both client and internal campaigns is seen as essential for demonstrating quality and credibility.
• Organizational alignment: The extent of internal support provided by deliverability teams often depends on how the organization measures their success, highlighting the need for balanced goals that acknowledge non-revenue generating contributions.

Key considerations

• Establish a consultation framework: Create a clear process for internal teams to request deliverability consultation, ensuring consistent advice and best practices.
• Educate internal stakeholders: Provide educational resources and training sessions to internal marketing and sales teams to help them understand email sending best practices and their impact on deliverability, using insights from ESP capabilities essential for deliverability.
• Monitor internal domain health: Even if not directly managing internal sends, maintain oversight of corporate domains for any emerging deliverability issues.
• Align goals: Ensure that the deliverability team's performance metrics account for the time and effort invested in supporting internal teams, not just client-facing outcomes, as noted by discussions around ESP impact on newsletter deliverability.
• Prevent negative spillover: Actively work to prevent any internal email issues from adversely affecting the core client sending infrastructure or shared IP reputation, which can lead to deliverability drops.

Key opinions

• Shared oversight: Experts believe that while ESPs manage the deliverability of client campaigns, they should also have a role in advising or overseeing internal corporate email practices.
• Strategic guidance: The deliverability team's expertise should be available to internal marketing and sales departments for strategic guidance and best practices implementation.
• Policy enforcement: ESPs should establish and enforce policies for internal email sending that protect the company's overall sending infrastructure and reputation, similar to how they manage authentication protocols like DMARC.
• Consistency is key: A unified approach to deliverability across all email streams, internal and external, strengthens the ESP's reputation and credibility.
• Proactive problem solving: It is more effective for deliverability experts to prevent issues through upfront consultation than to reactively troubleshoot after problems arise.

Key considerations

• Define scope of involvement: Clearly delineate whether the deliverability team's role for internal sends is advisory, monitoring, or directly operational.
• Implement internal review processes: Establish a system for internal email campaigns to be reviewed by deliverability experts before deployment to catch potential issues.
• Resource allocation: Ensure adequate resources are allocated to support internal deliverability needs without compromising client services. This balance is often highlighted in discussions on how ESPs affect deliverability.
• Training and documentation: Develop internal training materials and documentation for best practices that internal teams can follow to maintain good sending hygiene.
• Centralized monitoring: Maintain centralized monitoring of all email streams, including internal corporate sends, to quickly identify and address any deliverability issues or blocklistings, leveraging tools like blocklist checkers.

Key findings

• Platform responsibility: ESPs are responsible for providing the necessary infrastructure, tools, and technical configurations to enable high deliverability.
• Sender accountability: Documentation consistently places the ultimate responsibility for email content, list quality, and sending practices on the sender, as these directly impact reputation.
• Authentication compliance: Sender adherence to authentication standards like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is critical for email acceptance by recipient servers and is a shared responsibility between ESP and sender setup. A simple guide to DMARC, SPF, and DKIM emphasizes their importance.
• Engagement metrics: ESPs monitor how recipients interact with emails, and documentation stresses that senders must strive for high engagement rates to maintain a positive sender reputation.
• Automated handling: ESPs often provide automated handling for bounces and complaints, but senders are expected to act on this data to improve list health and sending behavior. Knowing what ESPs share about bounce data is key.

Key considerations

• Review ESP terms: Carefully read ESP terms of service and acceptable use policies to understand their specific deliverability requirements and shared responsibilities.
• Implement best practices: Ensure that all internal and external email sending adheres to widely accepted email marketing best practices, as outlined in ESP guidelines.
• Proper authentication setup: Verify that all sending domains have correctly configured SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to align with the ESP's sending infrastructure and improve authenticity, which is essential for ESPs impacting deliverability on dedicated IPs.
• Monitor and adapt: Regularly monitor deliverability reports and feedback provided by the ESP, and adapt sending strategies based on observed performance to maintain a healthy reputation.
• Maintain list hygiene: Proactively clean email lists to remove invalid or unengaged addresses, reducing bounce rates and spam complaints, a key aspect discussed in the value of using an email service provider.