Email Delivery Issues: Success Stories

The client had been seeing some anecdotal evidence of email delivery issues, with concerns raised with the IT and CRM provider on multiple occasions. Every time, it was reported that “everything looked fine” and “we can’t see any issue on this side”. IT also told them DMARC was in place and they couldn’t see anything wrong. Only when a major new campaign failed to bear fruit, the alarm bells were raised and they called Quinset.

First thing we did was check all the DNS, set up proper DMARC reporting, and set up Google Postmaster. It was clear that the SPF record wasn’t setup ideally and DMARC reporting wasn’t actually being monitored properly. Google was not reporting a high amount of “user reported SPAM”, but emails were going to Junk all by themselves.

After monitoring for a few days, we identified issues with the setup of both Microsoft 365 and the CRM system.

An additional email marketing tool had been setup correctly, but the tracking links were turning simple links into “triple-jumps” as the tracking links had been put over shortened URLs.

We tracked two of the DNS issues back to a poorly applied change by the IT company. Others issues were simply missing DNS records.

We temporarily turned off the tracking links and, with the corrected SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place, we saw a few days of clean running emails.

We revised the link being added to emails, and confidently turned tracking links back on.

Change control processes are now in place with the IT company.

The client now monitors their own DMARC, after being provided training on all things “email DNS and DMARC”, spotting signs of potential email delivery issues before they happen

It took a few weeks for their domain to be trusted again, to be expected after 6 months of malformed DNS. Since then, return rates on email are higher than ever and revenue targets are back on track.

Email delivery had never been an issue for the client, with five brands under their belt, each with their own domain name. They had a good handle on setting up systems correctly and their IT company seemed to know what they were doing.

However, across the board, they were seeing a steady decline in responses and then started to hear from clients and candidates that emails were going to junk. Worried they would start to suffer like others they’d been hearing about in the industry, they contacted Quinset to look into these email delivery issues. 

Although the IT company had setup DMARC records for each domain, the reports were not being analysed. We realised they were unaware of what value DMARC reporting could give.

We deployed Quinset Powermail right away, and had to wait 3-4 days for some real data. It was clear the CRM system was failing DKIM verification on around 30% emails, primarily with emails sent to customers on Microsoft 365.

After a couple of failed attempts, we finally got the right people from the CRM provider on a call and explained what Powermail was showing us.

After a few days, they came back with the recognition there was an issue and that a fix was now in place. This was a global issue that had been affecting all customers for some time.

Months of complaints from customers were being misdiagnosed but finally, we helped them find the root cause that had been causing email delivery issues for all. 

Immediately, responses were improved and stats are looking better than ever.

Quinset have even provided DMARC training to the IT company so they can provide a more complete service to all their other customers and better diagnose email delivery issues.

After months of continually dropping open rates, Matthew contacted his IT company after hearing from other agencies how Google had upped their game in the battle against spam, and was worried they were getting blocked as well. The IT company realised they hadn’t setup DKIM for Microsoft 365 and the CRM, which was quickly fixed. Open rates went up slightly, but nothing like they were the year before. After three months, Quinset were asked to assess their email delivery issues.

Although the IT company had setup the DKIM records, they hadn’t actually enabled the feature in 365 or validated the change in the CRM. The open rate increase was down to another email marketing tool Matthew had set up himself.

The IT company had not been looking fully at the DMARC reports and missed the fact that two other systems were also failing DMARC checks; timesheets and invoice chasing. 

Right away, we updated all the correct SPF and DKIM records, watched the DMARC reporting for a few days and validated everything was now spot on. We also had to dig the domain out of a damaged reputation by engineering some valuable email marketing campaigns to the hottest contacts in their database.

We also discovered bad links in some email campaigns that were affecting their spam score, and fixed those too.

Finally, we spent time with the IT company and taught them how to analyse DMARC reporting from a delivery perspective, not just a security perspective. They were really happy and these new skills helped them solve problems for two more of their clients with email delivery issues.

Over 12 weeks, the open rates steadily increased, higher than they had ever seen before. Click-through rates were increased even higher, thanks to pushing more valuable content to the right recipients.

More deals, more money, happy customer!