Do Your Email Recipients Recognize You?

Introduction

When you send an email for your Brand, you want your recipients to read it. In order for this to occur, your email needs to be delivered, and the recipients should recognize is as valuable and deserving of their attention. While the content within the email itself is important, there is an additional aspect to consider. If the email lacks clear branding and fails to establish its origin as the entity from which the recipient willingly subscribed to receive emails, there is a risk that the recipients may overlook your message or, even worse, mark it as spam.

Therefore, we emphasize the importance of aligning your sent emails with your Company by following the best practises outlined below.

Before you start sending emails...

Ensure that you are only sending emails to individuals who have subscribed to receive emails directly from you and not addresses acquired some other way. As an example, purchased or rented lists, addresses collected via third party, partners, or emails that were collected from another brand of yours.

Clearly aligning your emails with your Brand

Let's say you want to email people who subscribed to receive emails from mybrand.com, make sure the following is always true:

1. The "From" address of the email should be @mybrand.com. That address is the address from which you send the emails and it should be the one verified in your Emails & Automations -> Settings.

2. The "From" name should clearly be associated with @mybrand.com. The field represents the Name that is displayed as the sender of the email and the recipient sees in their inbox.

3. It is crucial that the email is distinctly branded as a communication from @mybrand.com. A recommended approach is to prominently incorporate your brand's logo within the email. Relying solely on the small Company Name print in the footer may not be enough for the recipients to confidently recognize the email as originating from your brand.

4. Add a reminder in the email of why the recipient is getting the message. For example, you could include a phrase such as - " You signed up to our newsletter subscription here (provide the URL to the page with the form)".

Example 1: Email promotions coming from partners

An example of this is when a visitors subscribes to a newsletter on an Agency website that offers multiple services, with the expectation that the site will send them mail about those services, deals, etc... However, the mail they actually receive is branded from the specific service instead of the Agency website they signed up with. This leads the User to believe they are being sent an email from a Company that they did not sign up with, which is marketing a specific service.

Even if there is a sentence in the footer or somewhere else that this email is being received because the User is registered with the Agency, it is not enough. The recipient is expecting a clearly identifiable email from the Agency brand, not the partner. This can result in them hitting the Spam button.

The solution here is simple. Send the email from the Agency directly and include the services information by clearly identifying the branding of the Agency and then list the promotions of the partners down the email's content. Then it will be very clear to the recipient that the message of the service provider is coming from the Agency the User signed up with.

Example 2: Email from Product Brand

Let's say you have a Shop that offers a variety of products from different brands, such as Shoes, clothes, phone cases or anything of that subject. If a customer signs up to receive email about product offers and deals, they would expect to receive an email clearly branded as being from your own Store. However, if they receive an email with the sender being the Product brand and the contents are exclusively showing that Product's items only, it should be ok, right, since the User has agreed to receive products offers and deals? Wrong. The recipient is expecting to see an email from your Store, not the Company producing the product.

The solution is the same as before, where the email is only being sent from the Store. Have the Store's from address and name, and start the email with something similar to " We think you will love this deal from Product X" In this scenario, things are aligned and the recipient is receiving an email directly from a familiar organization they signed up for and are not tempted to report it as Spam.

This is about best practices, not the law

In both of the cases above, there may well be language at the original site indicating that by signing up with the site, recipients are giving permission for partners, affiliates, or third parties to email them. By including this sort of language, this kind of sending may well be legal, and the recipient may have technically given permission for it.

However, this kind of sending is still problematic and may cause us to revoke your ability to send mail. Unless a user explicitly and directly signed up with the brand that, on casual inspection, appears to be sending them mail, there is a high likelihood that the message will be identified as spam either explicitly by the user or by automated algorithms that track engagement. To protect our ability to deliver high quality mail for all senders, SES requires that senders on our platform make it obvious to the recipient that messages are from an organization the recipient signed up with. If this is not obvious, then we consider the message to be unsolicited.

Recap

The key emphasis here is on maintaining alignment. When a user enrols with a specific brand, it is imperative that only that organization, without involvement from partners, other brands, affiliates, or third parties, sends emails to the user. To prevent any confusion, the email content must unmistakably establish its relation to the brand the recipient initially signed up with. Any attempt to obscure this relation may confuse users, making the email appear unsolicited, even if the user had indeed subscribed to receive such emails. SES strictly prohibits emails lacking a transparent link to the original brand the recipient signed up with.

If you make sure the subscribers, "From" addresses and names, and the branding of your email are aligned, then this should keep your sending reputation intact.

Please see this related article:

- Tips and Best Practices for Email Marketing: How to keep your emails out of Spam and Promotional Folders