Guidance for sending bulk emails
Outbound Sequencing

TekStack’s outbound sequencing module enables users to send high volumes of emails to contacts through their Outlook account.  While the tool can be used in this way, you need to ensure not to exceed the guidelines presented by email providers like Google.  This article will provide some TekStack’s recommendations in order to maintain deliverability and prevent a situation where your email sending domain becomes blocked by one or more email providers.

What is a Bulk Sender?

500 emails sent a day, or 10,000 per month would classify one email account as a bulk sender. 

Bulk Sender Guidelines

There are existing anti-spam laws including GDPR and CAN-SPAM act that establish responsible marketing guidelines for email.  However, these have rarely been enforced for businesses marketing to other businesses.  Google's recently implemented Bulk Sender Guidelines has more bite with consequences that could include blocking email sending to accounts hosted by Google. While you may not market to personal Gmail accounts, Google’s Business Suite is a popular email provider.

TekStack recommendations

To ensure high rates of deliverability and prevent an extreme situation where your email domain is blocked from sending to email hosting providers that implement anti-spam policies, TekStack provides the following recommendations.

Proper Email List Acquisition

The best practice for email list building is double opt-in.  This is a combination of the user volunteering their email address on a website form, and then also from a "double opt-in" email sent to the user confirming their subscription.  In lieu of double opt-in, an "opt-in" based subscription process where the email is volunteered by the user.  In lieu of an opt-in process, "opt-out" would allow a recipient to unsubscribe from future emails.  This is used when you have a database of email addresses from un-known origins, or if you curate email addresses through list providing services, or through manual research.

Email Validation

We recommend frequent email validation using services like Verifilia or Neverbounce.  These are services that will validate an email address as deliverable, undeliverable, or risky.  You should validate your email addresses as often as your contacts turn over in new roles.  We recommend validating new email addresses before importing them, and then validating them annually.

MX Lookup

So far, Google’s bulk email guidelines are the most stringent.  If you want to reduce your risk, you can identify which companies (or more accurately, domain names) are hosted on Google using services like MXToolBox or InfoByIP.  You can mark these accounts and incorporate the information into your contact or account view filters.
 

Setup domain on Google PostMaster Tools
 

Google PostMaster Tools is a free utility from Google that tracks data on large volumes of emails sent and information about your sending domain. You can view different dashboards to understand details like Gmail delivery errors, spam reports, etc.

Authenticate your domain with DKIM, DMARC, SPF Setup
 

These are three authentication methods that ensure your email domain isn’t being used by unauthorized parties for sending emails on behalf of your domain.  Google pays particular attention to the DMARC policy that is specified. This was likely done as part of your Microsoft 365 setup.  When sending emails from TekStack’ Outbound Sequence tool, we are using an API to connect to the exchange account of the user, so we inherit existing policies your administer set up when they turned on Microsoft 365. However, as a separate note, when using Click Dimensions, you’ll need to setup additional DNS records for the subdomain you are using for Click Dimensions emails as well.

Email volumes

TekStack recommends no more than 150 sequence participants added per day per user.  The nature of outbound sequencing is that sequences start piling on top of one another as the weeks go on.  For example, if you add 150 contacts to a sequence this Monday, the 150 contacts from last Monday may also have an email going out on the same day as the new set, so then you have 300 emails being sent in one day.  It doesn’t take long before a user could exceed our guidelines.

TekStack has two guardrail configuration options that can be set.  Go to:  TekStack | Configure| Configuration | Limits.  You can set the maximum number of instances running per user and daily sequence participant creation limit.

Email Frequency

Limit the number of times one contact receives an email within a period of a month, and a year.  If a contact is included in a sequence that has 5 email steps, don’t include them in another sequence for at least six months.   Discourage users from creating sequences that have wait times of less than two days between emails.  There are no configuration options to prevent this so treat this as a best practice recommendation.

Make unsubscribing easy

An email recipient should have an option to unsubscribe from future outbound communications.  There are two ways to do this.  In every email step, add a sentence like “If you don’t want to hear from me, just let me know by replying”.  Or, Setup the Opt Out Template.  In Configuration, you can configure an Opt Out Template that can be automatically included on every email (automated and manual).  On each Sequence, on the settings tab, you can enable “Include opt-out”.

Setting up an alternative email sending domain

If you have a number of bulk senders in your organization, the best way to reduce the risk of your primary email domain being blocked by an email hosting provider like Google is to setup a second email sending domain in Exchange.  For example, if tekstack.com is your primary email domain used by regular users, use tekstack.cloud as the primary email domain for bulk senders.
 

In Exchange, you can add up to 5,000 domains per tenant and set the default email address for your bulk senders, ask your Exchange administrator to set this up.  This Learn article can provide additional details.
If your bulk senders want the option to send from the primary account, you can either setup a second user account used solely for bulk sending, or ask the user to switch the email account used for sending by exposing the From line on an email and having them manually switch.