How news organizations can use Google Postmaster Tools to improve newsletter performance

Overview:

To keep up with email deliverability issues and ensure an organization’s sender reputation is strong, publishers should learn how to check deliverability performance, interpret reports and fix issues proactively, using available resources including Google Postmaster Tools.

Email has become one of the most important channels for news publishers to share updates with readers, so making sure messages are consistently delivered is critical. Google Postmaster Tools is a free platform that bulk email senders can use to monitor deliverability insights including domain and IP reputation, spam rate and delivery errors. Postmaster Tools tell publishers only how they’re seen and performing in Gmail inboxes, but because this represents such a large portion of email overall, these insights can help gauge general deliverability.

See more: 11 tips for improving email deliverability | BlueLena

Domain and IP reputation

Postmaster Tools will tell a publisher how Gmail views its domain and IP reputations with rankings of “high,” “medium,” “low” or “bad.” Domain reputation ranks the reputation of the sending domain, while IP reputation is tied to the IP addresses used to send messages, which may be shared with other senders using the same email service provider. Domain and IP reputation can go down if a publisher is getting a high rate of spam complaints or is sending lots of emails to contacts who aren’t engaging.

If a news organization’s reputation is ranked by Postmaster Tools as low or bad, there are tactics to improve the health of a publisher’s email lists, limiting spam complaints and improving deliverability rates and therefore reputation. BlueLena can help publishers set up engagement tagging and scoring automations to better understand which contacts are engaged and which are unengaged, and then propose list cleaning automations to cut ties with contacts who are not interested in the emails being sent.

Spam rate

As part of new authentication protocols rolled out by major email platforms including Google and Yahoo in early 2024, Google announced it may not deliver messages in Gmail from senders who receive excessive spam complaints. Google cited a spam rate threshold of 0.3%, or 3 per 1,000 emails marked as spam, but senders have seen deliverability issues firsthand when spam rates creep above 0.1%, or 1 per 1,000 emails sent. The changes mean publishers should pay closer attention to spam complaints, which indicate that a contact sees a message as unwanted or unsolicited.

In Postmaster Tools, spam rates are tracked on a daily basis and can be viewed in a line graph over time to identify spikes. If spam rates are high on a particular date or trending upward, publishers should review emails sent at that time to look for reasons, and ask the following:

Was an email sent to contacts who aren’t used to receiving these types of messages?
Have contacts explicitly opted-in to receive the emails they are being sent?
Are any of the messages strictly a third-party advertisement or sponsored content, or otherwise appear to have come from someone other than the news organization?
Have we been sending more messages than is typical to this list or group of contacts?
Is there a clear and conspicuous way to unsubscribe from the list?

*User-reported spam report in Google Postmaster Tools account*

Publishers should put themselves in the shoes of the contact who signed up for emails and consider what might have prompted an uptick in spam complaints, and then make changes to their strategy to avoid future complaints.

Delivery errors

The delivery errors report in Google Postmaster Tools can identify instances where an email wasn’t delivered to a contact for a specific reason, such as:

Rate limit exceeded — If a publisher suddenly started sending emails at a much higher rate than normal and a temporary delivery limit was put in place, then exceeded
Email content is possibly spammy — Gmail suspects spam based on the contents of the message, such as a message that’s only one large image with no text, or a message with links that may be low-quality, such as links using URL shorteners or links to websites with poor reputations

If it’s not clear by looking at an email what about it might have triggered delivery errors or spam complaints, try testing the email with a service like mail-tester.com which can review aspects of an email that might trigger issues, such as broken links, the number of redirected links, possible issues with HTML, formatting and more.

Authentication

News organizations can check that DKIM, DMARC and SPF domain authentications are properly set up through a service like ActiveCampaign’s verification tool. Once properly set up, Postmaster Tools can verify that the authentications are working as expected. Choose a date range to see the volume of traffic that has passed each type of authentication.

When properly set up, DKIM success rates should show at 100%. For large volume senders, it is expected that a small percentage of emails sent may fail DMARC because they are routed through email forwarders, causing the authentication checks to fail.

*Domain authentication report in Google Postmaster Tools account*

If an email platform such as ActiveCampaign manages SPF authentication for a publisher, it’s expected that there will be a 0% SPF success rate on Postmaster Tools. This is because the SPF record being checked by Postmaster Tools (ActiveCampaign’s mail server domain) is different than the domain being checked in the report (the publisher’s domain) — so, don’t worry about a low pass rate here.