Flase Opens

[Anonymous]

It was brought to my attention that when you send email blasts to schools (we are in the education industry) and the same email is hitting multiple domains at the same time, their SPAM filters are blocking this email BUT is able to relay to us that it has been opened.

I actually looked into this idea with a recent email deployment. I looked at a particular district in VA. The email sent this afternoon was sent out to 17 people in that district, all with the same email domain. ALL of those people opened the email, and all within a few seconds of each other.

The solution to this would be to stagger or slow drip the emails out so that one domain is only receiving one or a few of the same email per day. Does Marketo have that type of capability to deploy a slow drip campaign? Or does anyone know of any other type of work around for this type of situation?

[SanfordWhiteman]

There is no built-in ability to do this.  You also have to realize you're fighting a losing battle: if a recipient's mail server is intent on flagging your emails as spam even if you only sent to 17 addresses in an entire school district (which I'm assuming has at least 1000 email addressses, right?) then they will eventually punish you even if you send to those addresses over the course of a week.  

Our experience in sending to institutions that have hardcore restrictions on sends from the same domain in <n> timeframe is that, frankly, no pace is slow enough -- we would never be able to send them a second email on time because we'd still be spacing out the first email over weeks and weeks.

That said, you could play with segmenting the list -- and send times -- by letters of the alphabet or something like that.  It's not a truly random distribution, of course, but maybe the spacing would help. I wouldn't be hopeful.  Also realize that they may be considering your emails, content-wise, as spam (that phenomenon of "false opens" means that their server is parsing the content, downloading images, etc. before considering delivery to an Inbox).