How does Percept Research ensure the deliverability of survey invitations?

As an experienced market research firm, we take the deliverability of our survey email invitations seriously and employ multiple techniques and strategies to maximize the chances our emails successfully reach their intended recipients. Below are some of the measures we take:

1. Sender Domain Authentication with SPF and DKIM

We authenticate our sender domain using Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). SPF and DKIM are email authentication methods that help protect email senders and recipients from spam, forgery, and phishing.

• SPF allows the receiving mail server to check that an email claiming to come from a particular domain indeed comes from an IP address authorized by that domain's administrators.

• DKIM provides an encryption key and digital signature that verifies that an email message was not faked or altered.

These authentication protocols are essential for building trust with Email Service Providers (ESPs), ensuring our emails are recognized as legitimate and thus improving deliverability.

2. Spam Report Rate Management

Our firm diligently works to keep spam report rates below the threshold of 0.3%, with a best practice goal of 0.1% as noted by Google Postmaster Tools. This ensures our sender reputation remains high and our emails continue to be welcomed by recipients' inboxes.

3. Securing Email Transmission with TLS

We use a Transport Layer Security (TLS) connection for transmitting email. TLS is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network, ensuring that all emails sent are encrypted during transit and inaccessible to eavesdroppers.

4. Easy Unsubscribe and Swift Opt-Out Processing

We respect our recipients’ inbox and their right to choose what they want to receive. We enable one-click unsubscribes (opt-out) in our emails and ensure these requests are processed within 2 days.

5. Implementing a Strict DMARC Policy

We implement a Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) policy, set to “reject” - the strictest level. DMARC is an email authentication protocol that uses SPF and DKIM to detect email spoofing. It allows senders to instruct receiving servers on how to handle emails that fail the DMARC checks. There are three DMARC policy options:

• None/Monitor: This policy tells the provider to take no action against unauthorized emails but to report back to the sender about them.
• Quarantine: This policy sends any unauthorized emails into a separate folder, similar to a spam folder.
• Reject: This policy tells the provider to block any unauthorized emails so that they cannot reach recipients.

6. Domain Blacklist Monitoring

We regularly monitor our domain’s blacklist status to ensure that our emails are not being blocked by email providers.

7. Engaging Throttling for Large Target Audience Lists

Some ESPs (Email Service Providers) and ISPs (Internet Service Providers) enforce a daily send/delivery limit to protect against spammers who tend to send big amounts of emails at once. If a sender exceeds the acceptable threshold, the email messages will bounce.

For larger target audience lists, we throttle the delivery of survey invitations to boost our sender reputation by reducing the chances of getting complaints, soft bounces, or spam reports from recipients. This approach also helps avoid overloading your ESP's servers or violating their terms of service.

The optimal throttling rate for delivery depends on several factors, such as list size, email frequency, email content, industry, and ESP policies. 

Additional Steps for Improved Deliverability

To further bolster our email deliverability, we implement additional strategies:

Maintaining a Clean Mailing List: Regularly cleaning our client email lists to remove inactive or unengaged addresses helps maintain our sender reputation and ensures our emails reach active users.

Craft quality content: We craft our content carefully to avoid words and phrases commonly associated with spam and personalize messaging to enhance deliverability and engagement.

Analytics and Feedback Loops: We utilize analytics tools and feedback loops to continually refine and improve our email strategies based on recipient behavior and feedback.

By incorporating these practices, we guarantee not just compliance with the technical requirements of email deliverability, but also engagement with our recipients in ways that encourage positive interactions with our surveys and other communications. Our commitment to these practices ensures we remain ahead in market research deliverability standards.