Tag: Sendgrid

Avoid emails being marked as SPAM

Learn how to avoid your emails being marked as SPAM. Follow the below practices to increase your email deliverability and protect your reputation.

Practices that avoid your emails being marked as spam

You surely want to ensure your email deliverability and protect your reputation. However, depending on the receiver’s settings, your legitimate messages can get marked as junk quite easily. It’s not a server or hosting issue, it’s just a common problem in the digital age.

Here are some common things you can do to help avoid spam filter flagging your emails:

  • When preparing your email template in aNinja, make sure it doesn’t have in the subject line or email body any of the following:
    • Crazy formatting
    • ALL CAPS
    • A lot of exclamation points !!!
    • Phishing phrases and trigger words like Fantastic deal, For free, Act now, don’t hesitate.
    • Also, avoid image-only messages.
  • Let the recipients know who you are and where you’re located: add a signature to your emails.
  • Inform your recipients how they can opt-out of receiving any future emails: add an unsubscribe link to your emails.
  • Honor opt-out requests: send an automated reply through aNinja triggers.
  • Use SendGrid to send a large number of email sequences through aNinja without limitations and without worrying about spam filters marking your messages as spam.
  • Test your email for SPAM Score
  • Ensure that you’re Compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act
  • Ask your clients to whitelist your domain.
  • Lastly, ensure your email authentication is enabled:
What are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
  • SPF: Sender Policy Framework records allow domain owners to publish a list of IP addresses or subnets that are authorized to send emails on their behalf. Mainly, the goal is to reduce the amount of spam and fraud by making it much harder for malicious senders to disguise their identities.
  • DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) standard is an email authentication technology that verifies a message was sent from a legitimate user of an email address. Basically, it’s a way to additionally sign your emails in a way that will allow the recipient’s server to check if the sender was really you or not.
  • Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is an email authentication method that allows you to protect your email domain from spoofing.

Make sure to comply with all the above practices to avoid the spam filters flagging your emails.

Enabling SendGrid for your Transactional Emails

Enabling SendGrid for your Transactional Emails allows you to send a large number of email sequences through aNinja without limitations and without worrying about spam filters marking your messages as spam.

Learn how to avoid your emails being marked as spam.

Email Services

By default, all emails go through the users’ email service (e.g. Gmail, Outlook…) using Nylas APIs. This is not recommended for bulk emails because the user is limited to the maximum number of emails allowed by his email service.

So, to be able to send bulk emails without limitations, we highly recommend using SendGrid.

Enabling SendGrid

1- Sign in to SendGrid

Or Signup to SendGrid if you don’t already have an account

  • Make sure you sign-up for the Essentials plan in Sengrid for this to work.
2- Create a SendGrid API key

Make sure to save your SendGrid API key immediately, as it shows one time, and if you lost it, you can’t retrieve it.

3- Authenticate your domain in SendGrid
  • This means that you are showing your email provider that SendGrid has your permission to send emails on your behalf.
  • After that, your recipients will no longer see the “via sendgrid.net” message on your emails. Which shows that the emails are coming from you. So, it is less likely that your recipients mark your emails as spam.
  • This increases your reputation with the Email Service Providers. And it’s less likely that they filter your emails and not allow them to be delivered to your recipients. Which increases your deliverability.
  • Lastly, SendGrid automatically attaches an unsubscribe link to the emails sent through it.

Please follow this link to authenticate your domain => https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/account-and-settings/how-to-set-up-domain-authentication

4- Enable the Event Webhook in SendGrid

You’ve reached a step where you need to enable the event webhook in SendGrid.

5- Enable SendGrid on aNinja web app

  • And enable the rule: “Enable SendGrid for single and bulk email sequences”

  • Lastly, enter the SendGrid API key (don’t forget to click on the refresh button next to the input)Enabling SendGrid for your Transactional Emails
  • Once you’ve enabled SendGrid on your aNinja web app, all single and bulk email sequences will start being sent through the SendGrid service.

Our support team is happy to assist you with any questions you may have. Just leave us an email at support@aninja.com

Email-sending limit

Every email server has an Email-sending limit and it predefines how many messages it allows you to send each day.

aNinja was designed to make sending and receiving Emails easy, using your Email server.

Through aNinja, you can send a bulk email sequence to all your leads, or a group of leads that you pull out using a Smartlist.

Bulk Email sequences stopped sending out

When you’ve reached the daily Email-sending limit allowed by your Email server, it stops sending Emails from your account.

The daily sending limits of the different Email service providers

Godaddy Workspace

500 SMTP relays per day

GSuite

10,000 sent Email messages per 24-hour period. However, this can be lower if your Google Workspace account is still in a trial-like period.

Gmail

2,000 sent Email messages per day

Office 365 / Outlook

Daily recipients: 5,000

Maximum recipients per message: 500

What to do to send a large bulk of Emails

The best recommendation would be to connect aNinja with a Transactional Email service provider (such as Sendgrid). You’ll then be able to send 10K to 1M+ eventually Emails without affecting your Email provider.

Moreover, Sendgrid adds Unsubscribe links to the Emails you send through it. It also tracks spam scores and notifies you.

SendGrid is usually used to send out bulk email sequences and it works well with aNinja.

Connecting Sendgrid with aNinja

To connect Sendgrid with aNinja:

  • Create a Sendgrid account (so you get an API key that we place in aNinja). You can start with a free tier or their basic tier.
  • Authenticate your outgoing domain DNS (we can assist with this).

Please let us know if you’d like to Integrate with Sendgrid. Leave us an email at support@aninja.com. We’re more than happy to assist you!

Troubles in sending Bulk Email Sequences

If you overpass the daily limit of your email provider, you will face troubles in sending bulk email sequences

Ech email provider imposes a daily email sending limit.

Having troubles sending your email sequences

You might need to check the following:

Still unable to re-launch your email sequences

For a large number of daily emails, we highly recommend you process your run through our transactional email processor SendGrid. You can enable it directly from your aNinja account > Settings > Global Settings.

Or send us an email at support@aninja.com. We’re happy to assist you.

Transactional vs Non-Transactional Emails

While transactional and non-transactional emails have different goals and strategies, you still need to integrate both types.

In this article, we show you the difference between the 2 types of emails and the risks involved.

We also recommend using Sendgrid to ensure the deliverability of your messages.

Transactional vs Non-Transactional Emails

Transactional email

It is an email triggered based on your lead’s action with your business, and it’s sent programmatically.

It can be Purchase confirmation or receipt, Request for feedback, Identity verification, Unsubscribe link, Password reset, Account notifications, Account creation, Welcome email, etc…

Transactional vs non-transactional emails

Non-Transactional email

It’s about sending an email to communicate a promotional message (i.g. Promotions and sales, Newsletters) to a group of leads; with the intention to drive them towards an action you want them to make. The purpose is typically commercial.

However, non-transactional emails tend to have a much lower engagement rate. Which can impact deliverability. You don’t want this to slow down transactional emails or risk them landing in the spam folder. Learn how to avoid your emails being marked as spam.

You can send non-transactional emails through your email client who uses an SMTP relay or web API. But it’s preferable to use a comprehensive email marketing solution like SendGrid. SendGrid can help deliver your messages, no matter what kind of content you’re sending.