Author: M3AAWG Senders Committee
Email deliverability is a top priority for any company using email to connect to their customers. This importance becomes even more pronounced when the emails being sent pertain to the security and safety of customers. Mandated emails – often regarding product recalls, security breaches, or significant organizational policy changes – present unique deliverability challenges to any company sending email at scale.
High-risk messages perform poorly in terms of engagement (bounce-backs, complaints, etc), although they’re crucial in helping individuals mitigate damage, offer assistance or provide non-commercial information about an account. The challenge with delivering mandated emails is ensuring the appropriate recipient receives the notification and trusts its validity. Poorly executed mandated email campaigns can diminish an organization’s domain reputation and ultimately be ineffective at delivering high-risk notifications.
Leading Email Service Providers (ESPs) and Mailbox Providers (MBPs) at M3AAWG explored the unique characteristics of mandated emails, including how they differ from traditional email marketing messaging, as well as the responsibilities of sender organizations in ensuring deliverability. Ultimately, sender organizations have an obligation to their customers and a reputational incentive to effectively deliver their mandated email campaigns while their customer often has a legal obligation to send a mandated email to everyone that ever signed up for their service.
Today, the M3AAWG Senders Committee published “M3AAWG Best Practices for Sending Mandated Emails to Large Audiences,” to help sender organizations understand the steps that should be taken to ensure deliverability, security, and trust in their mandated email campaigns. The document outlines recommended best practices for sender organizations, ESPs, and MBPs to maximize the deliverability of high-risk messages. This includes implementing proper sending infrastructure, configuring sending domains with Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC), as well as ensuring sending servers support Transport Layer Security (TLS).
Click here to review the document and its guidance in full.