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CiviMail Best Practices
March 7, 2011
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Email is Still King
"E-mail continues to be the core way in which money is raised and volunteers are driven to go to events. ... In terms of response rates, e-mail will come out on top.”
- Joe Rospars, Blue State Digital
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Complexities of Sending Email
» 78% of all email sent is considered SPAM
» It’s annoying to consumers and it is problematic to ISPs
» ISPs utilize a variety of different measures to reduce the level of SPAM, unfortunately this creates additional legwork for digital marketers
» Mechanisms for Combatting SPAM• ISP Throttling• IP Blacklists and Whitelists• SPF (Sender Policy Framework)• Feedback Loops
» Chances are if you are sending email out through your web host a large portion of your email is not being received
» Free utility to check: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
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CiviMail’s Shortcomings
» No ISP throttling
» Bounce processing libraries out of date
» No support for SPAM feedback loops from major ISPs
» Requires a lot of expertise to setup the proper infrastructure
» Sending speed is greatly determined by your server configuration
» Running CiviMail on shared hosting accounts is often problematic
But don’t let that discourage you…
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Why Use CiviMail
» CiviMail is still a very powerful email engine
» With the proper setup CiviMail can reliably deliver 250,000+ emails/hour
But the real reason to use CiviMail is…» It offers one centralized database for all of your contacts
• No importing and exporting• No 3rd party APIs• Just the ability to email to email your donors, your event
attendees, your petition signers, your volunteers, your contacts that like pistachio ice cream at anytime anywhere without having to call in the IT swat team and data wranglers
» The more personal and relative you make your emails the higher your conversion rates will be
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Scalability: What’s Possible
512MB
1GB
2GB
4GB
0 100,000 200,000 300,000 400,000
40 Threads20 Threads10 Threads5 Threads2 Threads1 Thread
Emails/Hour
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# Threads
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3rd Party MTAs
• Price: $0.001 - $0.00045 per email
• REST API for Feedback Loops
• Control panel to monitor sending
• No limits on simultaneous threads
• Project Code: https://github.com/emotive/CiviCRM-sendgrid-integration
• Price: $0.003 - $0.0008 per email
• REST API for Feedback Loops
• Control panel to monitor sending
• 10 Threads at a time
• Project Code: https://github.com/emotive/CiviCRM-socketlabs-integration
• Price: $0.0025 - $0.0003 per email
• REST API for Feedback Loops
• Control panel to monitor sending
• Reputation Management
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Dashboard Analytics
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Feedback Loops
» Failed Messages (messagesFailed)• Utilizes unified failure deliver codes to sort hard/soft bounces• Places hard bounces in group in CiviCRM• Hook on the CiviMail process marks all people in the bounce group as on hold in
CiviCRM before it calculates the total number of messages• Comcast, Time Warner and Charter all use soft bounces to flag SPAM
> Socketlabs can work with you to get your IP cleared if you have been flagged
» Spam Messages (messagesFBLReported)• Supports AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo• Marks each email as Do Not Email in CiviCRM preventing them from ever being
contacted using CiviMail
» Multi-site/client configuration available with a small hack on outbound mailing code
» Google does not provide any feedback on SPAM
» API Documentation: https://www.socketlabs.com/od/api
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Our Mail System Setup
Cloud Sites Database Server
LAMP Stack with Civi and Drupal
Qmail Mail Relay
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Available Modules and Resources
» Check for Blacklisting: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
» Check your Sender Score with Returnpath: https://www.senderscore.org/
» Setting up a SPF Record: http://old.openspf.org/
» ISP Resources• AOL Postmaster: http://postmaster.aol.com/• Yahoo Postmaster: http://postmaster.yahoo.com• MSN/Hotmail Postmaster: http://mail.live.com/mail/postmaster.aspx
» Feedback Loop Modules• Send Grid: https://github.com/emotive/CiviCRM-sendgrid-integration
> Looking for people to help debug/test!
• Socketlabs: https://github.com/emotive/CiviCRM-tools
» ReturnPath Blog: http://www.returnpath.net/blog/received/
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Questions and Discussion
» Contact Information
Matthew Brineyemotive, [email protected](703) 379-4218
