Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's session, Improve Your E-mail Deliverability and Optimize Sends, and thank you all so much for joining us today. My name is Ariana, and I'm on the marketing team here at Salesforce. And before we begin, I'd like to cover a few quick notes with you about our webinar platform. Today's webinar will be available on demand after we wrap up, and it will be accessible through the URL that you are on right now. Please note the slides will advance automatically throughout the presentation, and you can enlarge them by clicking the Enlarge Size button located in the top right-hand corner of your Slides widget. Should you need technical assistance, click on the Help widget located on the bottom left corner of your console. We've also added some additional resources, which are available through the Resources window to the right of the Slides. There, you can find some additional related content. And lastly, we encourage you to submit your questions at any time throughout our presentation today using the Ask a Question widget at the bottom of your console. We'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can at the end of the presentation. And with that out of the way, I will be turning things over to Kyra to get us started.

Thank you so much, Ariana, and welcome, everyone, to our webinar. By way of introduction, my name is Kyra Meyer-Johanson. I'm a Senior Manager of Product Marketing here at Salesforce. And I focus on the Marketing Cloud product suite. So needless to say, I work with a lot of amazing e-mail marketers all over the world, who are working to improve their deliverability and their sense. And we're incredibly lucky today to have Jaina with us, who is from Litmus, who is our deliverability partner and also a deliverability expert, who actually sends e-mails and has great deliverability rates herself. So Jaina, I'll pass it over to you for a moment. Jaina, I just want to pause real quick. I don't think we can hear you. Any chance you're on mute? Thank you, everyone, for your patience. Sorry about that.

Sorry about that. Can everyone hear me now?

Yes.

This is what happens when you go live. Things go wrong, you got to hit refresh and you got to try it. I'm going to start my whole spiel all over again here. So I will [ introduce myself first ]. Thanks for letting me know that you can hear me. Yes, I'm Jaina Mistry. I am the Director of Content and E-mail Marketing at Litmus. And being an e-mail company, and e-mail is very, very important for especially making sure that all of our e-mails hit our customers and providers come up with the deliverability stage where we can [indiscernible]. We've had a lot of different experiences across different areas of deliverability that I am really excited to jump into. So shall we -- shall we get going?

Yes. And I'm already getting some great questions in the chat that I'm trying to respond to. So -- but before we dive into all the content and what records you need to set up for optimal deliverability, which Kyle, we will totally get to your question in a moment. I just wanted to warm everybody up with a quick pop quiz, just to see if you all are paying attention. So do your e-mails magically find their way into the inbox once you've hit send or do your e-mails go through a nuanced process behind the scenes before they make it into your customer's inbox? And so we're just waiting to have folks either respond to A or to B in this little pop quiz. Just take a moment. Think about this. Seeing folks answer here. We've got already 24% of attendees having answered. So thanks for engaging folks, and I think now we're already at 50%. So I will pop it over to the results here. So 90% of you were right. E-mails go through a nuanced process, definitely complex, before it gets into your customer's inbox. And so what we're here to do today is to really help break that process down and make it a lot simpler to understand this nuanced process. And so by way of just keeping it a little bit basic. So we're all on the same page, Jaina and I are going to just defining some key terms, and then we'll dive into the 4 components and best practices that you can take to really optimizing your deliverability.

Yes. So delivery and deliverability, right, 2 very, very different terms. Delivery tells you whether or not your e-mails were received by the service of your subscribers, inbox providers. So it's a little bit like knocking on a door and telling the inbox provider that you have a message to be delivered. They will either accept that message or bounce it with a specific reason why the message wasn't accepted. An e-mail counts as delivered if it didn't bounce. But delivery is just one step in this big old deliverability journey.

For sure. And then deliverability is the follow-up process to what happens once the message gets delivered. So it's the rate at which your e-mail actually makes it into your subscribers' inboxes instead of being labeled spam or going into the junk folder. And depending on your industry, your deliverability rate may vary, but we want to strive for a 90% deliverability rate. And the good news is we know what factors are most likely to influence deliverability and which ones are less critical to resolve. There are also preventative measures and ongoing monitoring that can help any e-mail marketer really minimize the likelihood of deliverability issues. And so we're going to dive into those factors and measures now. We've really basically broken this webinar down into 4 components to try to keep it as simple as possible. And the first one being priming your marketing for success and for deliverability. So I will go through some of those terms and, Kyle, this slide was built for you. To prime your marketing for success, you need to confirm your authentication and your infrastructure. Setting up your infrastructure correctly is critical so that inbox servers know your e-mails are legitimate and worthy of making it into the inbox. So first and foremost, ensure you are sending only from authenticated domains. If you send from multiple IP addresses for purposes like segmentation, make sure they're all authenticated domains. In addition, there are these 3 primary frameworks, which you see here, that are important to know about. There's SPF, DKIM and DMARC. These 3 systems guarantee and verify the identity of the senders and protect the receivers from insecure e-mails. So it's kind of like having a sender ID, right, or like a license or some kind of way of identifying who you are, so that the sender knows that you are who you say. So -- and just in case any of these terms are totally new to you, and I am speaking a different language right now. SPF means that it's really about allowing mail servers to double check that the incoming mail from a specific domain has, in fact, been sent from that domain. DKIM shows that your e-mail is associated with your domain and uses cryptographic techniques to make sure it should be there. And then finally, DMARC, super, super important, is designed to combat phishing, which all of us are looking to do. So those are some key terms and some key frameworks to consider when you're looking at your authentication and your infrastructure. Another foundational concept for success is determining your need for IP warming. So if you're new to IP warming, this is a practice of gradually increasing the volume of mail sent with a dedicated IP address according to a predetermined schedule. Basically, this is a gradual process that helps to establish a reputation with Internet service providers, or ISPs, as a legitimate e-mail sender. And here are just a few examples of when you may need to consider IP warming and a few best practices to follow. I would say, most folks do need to warm up their IP. But again, just a list here of reasons why you really should be considering it. And then, I would say, best practices, the one that's most important to call out here is just that you should allow at least 4 to 8 weeks for the entire process. And Jaina, you're the expert. You live and breathe this stuff. Can you give us a real live example of what this looks like over in your world of Litmus?

Yes. It was actually last year that we had to onboard a brand-new sending IP address. And we came to that need when we needed to warm us out [indiscernible] a really aggressive time line. We needed to warm out within a matter of 6 weeks. So that does land in that 4 to 8 weeks territory that you said, Kyra, but we were perhaps needing to be a little bit more aggressive on that. So what we did was we identified our most engaged audience and the e-mail programs that do have that really, really high engagement on it as well. And that was kind of some automated e-mails and actually our weekly newsletter called Litmus Weekly. And we focused our IP warming using those 2 components. So over the course of 6 weeks, we gradually increased our volume that we sent to that new IP address. It started with maybe just 1,000 in the first week and then we monitored our e-mail metrics on every single e-mail program that we sent out on that new IP address, just to make sure that the IP warming was going well and we wouldn't necessarily have to kind of go back and reduce our volume. And that's a really, really important part of IP warming. It's just kind of having an eagle eye on those e-mail metrics and making sure that you're having some positive engagement and interaction on your e-mails on that new IP address. One thing we did do is we leveraged automated e-mail. So it's kind of those e-mails that people are expecting after they filled out a form. Those tend to have really, really high click-through rates. And so those are great ones to help inbox providers understand that you're a good sender, you're sending valuable e-mails that your audience wants to receive.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Jaina, for sharing that. And there's just a few questions in the chat. I want to address [ Sue Cross ]. You mentioned, does the content of this webinar also apply to sending campaign e-mails through only Sales Cloud. I mean these are all best practices that could be applied to really like any e-mail tool that you're using. So hopefully, this is just useful to help you with best practices and things to consider. Jim, I know I did say 90%, we strive to get 90% deliverability rate, and there were some other questions about industry and nuances and, of course, that is just the goal. And depending on your industry, that rate will change. And there's definitely benchmarks out there that you can check to just kind of give yourself some kind of goal. I always think just having a goal or a number in mind just helps you get your deliverability up regardless of whether or not you hit it, right? But it's just nice to have a benchmark.

[indiscernible] question from Jim, I think Kyra, that I can try and help answer about what is the best starting quantity on starting to warm up an IP address. And I think that one is a little bit like -- it's one of those questions where it depends on your total volume. So say, for example, your final total volume that you want to be sending on an IP address is something like 100,000. Maybe start with 10% of that volume in the first week and then slowly ramp up to 20%, 30%, 40%, as those e-mail engagement metrics start to get a little bit better, but it does very much depend on what your overall volume is and your end goal is for that.

Yes. And then -- I know I received a question from Barbara here about do you need IP warming when you re-brand? I would say, if you're going to have a new domain, right, or like a new subdomain, like you're going to want to warm that up for sure. And I know, Kyle, you mentioned high bounce rates. We'll talk about that towards the end, about metrics that you can leverage to kind of keep ensuring you are staying on top of your deliverability. But let's move on, and we'll keep kind of trying to check on the chat to answer questions as they come in. Thank you so much for all of the engagement. This is awesome. It basically feels like we're having a conversation and not just sharing slides. So I'm stoked about it. All right. So -- okay. Final bit on just this kind of like setting yourself up for success section. Check in with your sender reputation, this is a score, and check on it on a regular basis. If you focus on this, you'll be better able to address any underlying issues that may be hurting your deliverability. I saw somebody here about being blacklisted or just like potentially just issues that you're seeing. Check your send reputation score because this might show you what's going on. The score is based on a number of different factors. And just a couple of them to give you an idea, right, it's based on the number of e-mails your organization sends. It's how many subscribers engage with your e-mails based on replies, forwards, deletes, clicks. It's based on how many recipients mark your e-mails as spam or complain about your e-mails. It's also based on how many people unsubscribe or e-mail bounces. So these are 3 paid and free tools that you can use to check your sender reputation score. We recommend taking a look every month or every quarter just to see how you're trending. And yes, any questions here, Jaina, that you see that you want to address?

I think everything is on that IP warming thing. Everyone is very, very interested in IP warming. There is a question here from -- I'm sorry, I'm going to butcher the name. I'm really, really sorry about this. Jaina, do different ISPs react differently to new IP addresses? It's a really, really good question. And I know we'll dive into some specifics on that a little bit later on. But every single inbox provider has different sets of rules and algorithms that we are not necessarily permitted. So yes, different ISPs do react differently to new IP addresses. So it's worth really understanding the makeup of your audience and knowing which ISPs your subscribers are using to kind of tailor your ISP warming to those specific inbox providers too.

Awesome. Thanks, Jaina. All right. So with that, I'm actually just pass it over to you for the next section here on validating and testing before you send.

Yes, 2 very, very vital parts of your deliverability. It's kind of areas that we don't necessarily tend to think of a lot. But I'm excited to jump into both of them. So what does it mean to validate your list? So typically, e-mail validation is an automated process that uses sets of rules and data to review your e-mail list to identify e-mail addresses that are safe for sending, valid, unknown or even invalid. Now there are loads of different platforms out there that can provide services for you that will help you validate your e-mail list. But it is worth noting that simply validating your list using one of these services won't necessarily help you to take things like spam traps or honeypots. And it won't help you identify valid e-mail addresses that are either no longer being used or don't actually belong to anyone. Plus, there are some risky or unknown e-mail addresses identified by validation services that might actually be valid e-mail addresses that belong to someone who wants to hear about your services. So the best way to ensure that you've got a high-quality list to send to is by performing regular list hygiene checks. And bonus, these checks will even help you improve and maintain your e-mail deliverability over the course of time so your e-mails continue to land in inbox versus a spam folder. And I'm going to jump into some of those list hygiene checks right here as well. So the first check here is a little bit of a given, but it's always worth stating and worth reiterating. Never use bought or rented lists. Even if you think you know the source of these lists, you could be violating rules of consent under GDPR. Many ESPs and marketing information platforms simply don't allow you to send to purchased lists and often the folks on these purchased lists don't know you or your brand, so are even less likely to engage with your e-mails, which is a negative sign for inbox providers, which can then end you up in the spam folder. And then the next check might feel a little bit scary for a lot of e-mail marketers out there as it could actually impact your list size, but I want to say that it's not the size of your list, it's how engaged they are that is more important. So routinely identifying unengaged and removing inactive subscribers is the best way to ensure you're not going to hit potential spam traps. You could easily set up an automation ESP to be able to identify those folks who haven't engaged with their e-mails and actually surpass them in the future. And Kyra, walk through how people can do that within Salesforce itself.

Yes. So one of the capabilities that we have within Marketing Cloud account engagement is really powerful AI scoring. If you're a marketer and you've been in the e-mail world for a while, you've probably heard a lot about lead scoring or rule-based scoring, which you usually find more in B2B marketing, but essentially, right, you're kind of putting a score against a behavior that a prospect does, like maybe downloading a white paper, right? And over time, that score grows. And maybe if the prospect didn't engage for 90 days, score would then go down. But now with Salesforce, it's all AI-powered, so you don't have to guess what behaviors are more likely linked to a purchased or a lack of a purchase, right? And so this is just really good to know about. The AI scores that we have are: one is based on fit and one is based on what they're actually doing in the engagement. And the scores are both between 0 and 100, and the model will depreciate the score in real time if the prospect is disengaged. And at Salesforce, we recently ran an awaken the dead campaign where we looked at prospects who had high engagement scores in the past and an open opportunity, but they didn't end up purchasing, right? So that's a great way to drum up pipeline and revenue for your business, right, because it's somebody that definitely had -- was interested in the past, like you're probably not going to be spamming them. But maybe at this point in time, they're now able to make a purchase. So that's kind of the new feature, I just wanted to quickly highlight, that might be able to help you.

Sounds awesome. It sounds really cool. I love that. And then the kind of last thing to consider in your list hygiene is that can also be automated to create a suppression list of commonly misspelled e-mail address. So it's not uncommon for typos to happen as you're filling in a form. I've done it so many times. I've spelled Gmail, G-M-I-A-L, and I've missed out a letter here and there. So it's really, really common for typos to happen as people are filling in the form, submitting their e-mail addresses. So creating a suppression list to stop those typos from actually your list is a really good idea so you kind of eliminate the need to monitor your hard bounces too much because those e-mail addresses will hard bounce. And one last thing that's not included on this list, but I thought it was worth mentioning, is another good tactic under that umbrella of hygiene -- list hygiene is employing a double opt-in process. So that's a process where you're asking subscribers to confirm their e-mail address before you start e-mailing them. And that's a really good way to make sure that you have genuine people on your e-mail list who want to hear from you. Again, it's probably one of these things that might be a little bit scary because you think, oh, but what if someone doesn't confirm their e-mail address, but that's kind of a good indicate that if they weren't expecting and waiting for your e-mail and have taken action on it, they may not be an engaged person that you want to reach out to there. I know we had some questions here on -- I think it was something on a spam trap and honeypots. What are honeypots and spam traps? I think a couple of people have asked them. So I thought I would get to that question. So those are e-mail addresses that once upon a time existed, they belonged to a person, but somewhere along the lines, they are no longer used by that person. So an ISP actually takes ownership of that to kind of not necessarily trick people. I don't want to say trick people, but it's kind of their way of identifying senders out there who's still e-mailing inactive e-mail addresses, and that's how they identify them. We don't know what the spam traps and honeypot e-mail addresses actually are, but that's just -- it's another reason why you should be removing those inactive e-mail addresses from your e-mail list because they could be potential spam traps and honeypots. All right. I'll move on to the next part of this. So after validation, kind of you know what your e-mail list looks like, you're pretty secure in the e-mail addresses that you can be sending to. Before you hit send comes the testing part of it. So imagine for a second, you're minutes away from sending your next big e-mail campaign. Everything looks correct and accurate in the e-mail itself. The links work, images are loading, there aren't any spelling mistakes or typos. So you're good to go. But you hit send and then seconds later, your colleagues tell you the e-mail ended up in their spam folder and you just kind of sit. Then you've got kind of the green face on. It's happened to me more than once, and it will probably happen to me again sometime in the future. But it kind of feels like all that time spent creating that e-mail campaign feels wasted if the customer subscribers aren't actually going to see it. So running a presend spam filter test is very critical to ensure you won't waste that e-mail send and you and your team's hard work is paid off. Presend spam filter tests typically show you if your IP address or domain appears on any block lists, ensures your e-mail structure -- infrastructure is set up correctly and can even give you visibility into how e-mail scores or spam filters and score-based filters are scoring your e-mails. For example, something like Barracuda or SpamAssassin. And Litmus offers spam filter testing within its platform where you can get visibility on all of these things to make sure that your e-mail is going to be delivered even before you actually hit send. And now we're going to dive into what triggers spam filters because I think that's kind of a really, really common question. It's like, hey, my e-mail just landed in the spam filter, but why? So it's complicated. But every inbox provided spam filter uses a unique set of data points and algorithms, which are constantly changing to keep their users safe from spam or e-mail abuse, which is probably why that e-mail you received in your inbox might have gone to your colleague's spam folder. Inbox providers will look at user-specific behavior too, to choose whether to deliver an e-mail to the inbox. But there are a few key aspects that contributes to how spam filters are triggered. The reputation of your sending domain and IP address. So if your sending domain and IP address is associated with low engagement, high user complaints, high bounce rates, and your sender reputation just simply isn't going to be great. And to a small degree, your content can trigger spam filters, more often if there are mistakes in your code, you use a link shortener that's not associated with your domain or even a change to your e-mail envelope, that's the sending domain or the friendly from name. That's a bit of a mouthful to say. But I can tell you one example that happened to us in the past. We had a tiny, tiny error in our code and for -- the e-mail still rendered correct. It looked perfect in every single e-mail client. But that tiny little mistake in our code ended us in the spam folder for Outlook specifically. So even though you think you've done everything right, it's so critical to really kind of look at your code as well to make sure that, that's not going to end you up in the spam folder. So if you are sending quality content that's relevant to your audience who are engaging with your content and e-mails, those are really positive signals that inbox providers can see that you're a good sender and that will keep you out of the spam folder. And part of being that good sender also means not using misleading subject lines, using all caps and like shouting at your subscribers in the subject lines and not bombarding your audience with a high volume of e-mail they weren't expecting. So right then, once you've click send on that e-mail -- have we got some questions there?

No, go ahead. I was going to answer one, but finish your thought. I'm so sorry to interrupt.

No worries. So after you click send, it's good practice to monitor the e-mail metrics, not just from a performance perspective, but from the delivery of any -- to identify any deliverability issues that you might want to respond to.

So here are some metrics that you should monitor. And real quick, let me just -- there is a question from [ Louise ] from the University of California Davis Medical Center about the level of e-mailing that's below the radar of warming concerns. If your sending volumes are really low, like then you probably don't need to do IP warming, but it's a best practice. I would suggest doing it in general. But I don't know, Jaina, do you have any other thoughts on that?

I agree. I mean even if it feels like you're only spending a few hundred or a few thousand e-mails, it's always worth just tracking those trends over time because you never know when you might want to increase that volume as well. Having a historical set of data just to understand what your sender reputation does look like at one point in time gives you something to fall back on and kind of say, "Hey, we were there then with this volume. We're now increasing our volume. We should try and keep within these same scores."

Yes, I think that's a really good point because if you -- especially when you have sent less e-mails, right, it's easier to probably have a better sender reputation. And then as you start to scale, all of a sudden, it can go south really quickly. So just be careful about that. I also saw a question about, okay, I've been blacklisted, like now what? You can submit an unblock request. There's an article that we can share that Litmus has. It's really good about this. So I'll try and drop it into the chat, but just there's -- this has happened to other people, you're not alone, and there are ways to move forward with that. Jaina, do you have any other points of view?

Yes, I do. So I think Google, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, they all have postmasters that you can actually reach out to. This is either a form or an e-mail address, you fill it in, you tell them you're a good sender, you probably have to give some good reasons and kind of qualify what makes you a good sender, what sending practices you have. And that includes, I think, one of the ISPs also ask if you are using any sort of reengagement or suppression program for those older e-mail addresses. So just make sure that you have all of your kind of ducks in a row before you fill in that form and send those requests up to postmasters. And usually, they are really, really responsive and just know that they're real people behind those e-mail addresses and forms. So treat them with kindness even though you're probably feeling a little bit stressed that your e-mails aren't getting delivered and that you are blocklisted but they're there to help you. So give as much information as possible as you can and they'll help you get unblocklisted.

Awesome. Thanks so much for that. Okay. So let's monitor your e-mail metrics post send, right, kind of along the same lines here to make sure that those metrics stay positive. But it's kind of interesting, right, like in e-mail marketing, we'd like to talk about like open rates and click-through rates and like pipeline generated and all the positive metrics, right? But like these are, I guess, "maybe a little bit less like exciting metrics," but just as important, if not more important, because if these are not good, then your success metrics are going to -- they won't come. So once you've sent your e-mail, it's important to keep these 3 metrics in mind to keep your deliverability health. So monitoring your bounce rates is the most direct way to track your day-to-day deliverability health and understand why your e-mail may have bounced. Kind of breaks down into 3 different categories which you see here. So there's the hard bounce, which is the most straightforward. This means that the e-mail address that you use just does not exist. Maybe it's no longer in use, maybe there was a typo in the e-mail, but ultimately, it's bad data, which can result from buying a list or not regularly validating that list or just happenstance because that inbox is closed. But if you get a lot of hard bounces, right, like good time to look at your data and see maybe you need to refresh or maybe that list that you -- that, that e-mail came from, maybe don't trust that or you're just like -- it's just a good place to kind of go digging. Soft bounces are a little less clear-cut. They often happen when e-mails are rejected for a temporary reason. It can be if the subscriber's mailbox is full or disabled. Even if it's temporary, some e-mail service providers will also automatically try resending when a soft bounce is noted. So just a couple of nuances there. And then a block bounce is usually something more serious and indicates a deeper deliverability issue. Block bounces occur if the e-mail inbox rejects the e-mail because of a lack of authentication or if the domain or IP address appears on a blocklist. So if you see the block bounces, you really want to start reviewing your deliverability practices and make that a top priority, so you can get your messages out to your prospects and have a great e-mail marketing campaign. Unsubscribe rates and engagement rates are also really important. So unsubscribe rates impact deliver -- let me just see -- are there any questions, Jaina? Should I pause for a second or are we good?

No, I think we're good to keep going.