Email campaigns are a powerful tool for reaching and informing candidates. However, there are important guidelines and best practices you should follow to ensure the effectiveness of your campaigns and to protect your domain reputation.
The Risk of Email Campaigns
In general, the more automated emails you send, the higher the likelihood that the recipient’s IT infrastructure will classify them as such and potentially mark them as spam.
A Note for Startups
If you have just founded your company, you naturally want to generate business as quickly as possible. Keep in mind: your domain is still completely unknown. If you suddenly start sending large volumes of emails, your reputation can drop much faster than you might expect.
Why? Because nobody knows you yet, and suddenly a large number of emails appear from your domain. Most systems will classify this behavior as spam.
Start Small and Warm Up Your Domain
Before launching large campaigns, you should start with smaller volumes over several weeks instead of sending emails every day right away.
Warming up your domain is a proven method to build a healthy sender reputation. We recommend running only smaller campaigns at first and waiting 3–4 weeks before sending campaigns in the high hundreds.
Reputation: Easy to Lose, Hard to Regain
Your email reputation is a measure of how trustworthy your email activity is. A poor reputation can cause your emails to be marked as spam or blocked by mailbox providers.
It is much easier to lose a good reputation than to rebuild it. That’s why it is critical to follow best practices and monitor the metrics listed below. This is also why starting slowly and carefully is so important before scaling up your campaigns.
Example
Your email reputation is similar to a credit score in finance.
If you have never sent emails, you don’t have a bad reputation, but you also don’t have a good one.
Imagine walking into a bank with no credit history and asking for a large loan. You wouldn’t get it because the bank doesn’t trust your creditworthiness yet. The same principle applies to your email domain reputation.
Send Only to Valid Email Addresses
You should always ensure that you do not send emails to invalid addresses, as this also negatively affects your domain reputation.
There are online services that can verify email addresses. This is especially useful during migrations, where invalid addresses can be filtered out. If you need more information about this, feel free to contact us.
Legal Requirements: Data Protection & GDPR
Our email campaign provider is subject to EU GDPR regulations. This includes limits on sending volumes and the number of complaints that can be received.
Thresholds
To prevent your account from being suspended for security reasons, the following thresholds must not be exceeded:
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Bounces: ≤ 5% (based on rejected messages)
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Unsubscribes: ≤ 1.4% or 1% if unsubscribes > clicks
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Spam complaints: ≤ 0.08% (based on spam reports)
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Blocks: < 20% (based on blocked messages)
You can always reactivate your account, but you will have to complete a questionnaire that is reviewed by the provider.
Keep in mind: the suspension is meant to protect you. Without it, your reputation would continue to decline and eventually all your emails would land in spam, which is the worst-case scenario for any recruiter.
Double Opt-In
Make sure that all recipients have completed a double opt-in process. This means they have given consent twice: once during sign-up and once again via email confirmation.
This significantly reduces the risk of exceeding the above thresholds, because recipients know who you are and what kind of emails to expect from you.
Think about it: receiving an email from someone you don’t recognize at all is a strong trigger for spam complaints. That’s why it is good practice to regularly reconfirm consent.
Long Story Short
If you start slowly, don’t push volume limits, and your recipients expect emails from you, you generally don’t need to worry about any of the risks described above.