How does sending internal system notifications affect transactional email deliverability when using the same ESP?
Summary
What email marketers say9Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Reddit explains that poor list hygiene for internal notifications (sending to old or invalid addresses) can lead to high bounce rates. High bounce rates signal poor sending practices and can hurt your overall deliverability.
Email marketer from Litmus Blog explains that proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is crucial for establishing trust with mailbox providers. If internal notifications are not properly authenticated, they can be flagged as spam and impact your overall sending reputation.
Email marketer from EmailGeeks Forum explains that if you're using a shared IP, the sending habits of other users on that IP can affect your deliverability. If internal notifications generate spam complaints, it can hurt the reputation of the shared IP and impact transactional emails.
Email marketer from Mailjet Blog explains that sending transactional and marketing emails from the same IP address can affect IP reputation. If marketing emails have low engagement, it can negatively impact the deliverability of transactional emails.
Email marketer from SendGrid Blog shares that using a dedicated IP address is crucial for maintaining a good sender reputation, especially when sending different types of emails. Separating mail streams can help isolate issues and improve overall deliverability.
Email marketer from Stackoverflow says that it is important to remove unengaged or bounced emails from your email lists to keep your deliverability high. Therefore ensure this is done in the internal emails as well as external ones.
Email marketer from MailerQ mentions that it is important to configure the system to have a certain amount of SMTP connections to ensure there are not any delays and that you are not negatively impacting your deliverability.
Email marketer from Gmass blog shares that using a dedicated IP can ensure deliverability of each type of email sent, but a shared IP is okay. Sending the right volume, being correctly authenticated, and the reputation of the sender are all key.
Email marketer from Hubspot Blog discusses that sender reputation will be affected by sending internal notifications and this will impact deliverability. Some of the core factors affecting sender reputation are IP address reputation, domain reputation, complaint rate and email authentication. Therefore it's important to segment your internal and external email sending to increase deliverability.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Spamresource explains that a poorly managed list is a huge cause of spam reports. If a business' internal email list is poorly maintained, and emails are sent to addresses that are not expecting them, this can generate high spam complaints which will affect the sender's reputation and impacting transactional emails.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that whether the different mail streams affect deliverability depends on if Google recognizes them as different. Different DKIM d= would be one way to explicitly announce they’re different. Also to fix badly handled internal campaigns.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that to gain a good IP reputation you need to 'warm up' the IP by sending a moderate amount of emails before increasing it. Therefore if you set up a new ESP for your internal emails you need to slowly increase the amount of emails being sent.
Expert from Email Geeks says that sending both user transactional email and internal system notifications from the same domain and IP is not terribly bad. However, it would be better to have them more segregated, especially if internal notifications are unwanted. Separating the two streams would be something to try if delivery issues are present, otherwise, gradually move towards separating them.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from SparkPost explains that to maintain low bounce rates to keep a good sender reputation it is important to remove addresses that hard bounce immediately. Also it is important to remove emails that have soft bounced multiple times. This is important for internal and external lists.
Documentation from Microsoft SNDS shares that monitoring your IP reputation is essential for understanding how Microsoft views your sending practices. Issues with internal notifications can impact your IP's reputation with Outlook and Hotmail.
Documentation from RFC 5321 explains that understanding SMTP error codes is essential for diagnosing deliverability problems. When internal system notifications generate errors (e.g., invalid recipients), these errors can impact the sender's reputation and subsequent email delivery.
Documentation from Google Postmaster Tools shares that monitoring your domain's reputation is crucial for understanding deliverability. High spam rates from internal notifications (due to irrelevant content or outdated lists) can negatively impact your domain's reputation with Gmail.