Delivery best practices

Last update: 2024-11-11
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Read out the following best practices with Campaign delivery capabilities.

Optimize delivery

Before even starting creating deliveries, you can take several actions to secure and optimize the sending process upstream. The following section outlines best practices and recommended procedures for the optimal configuration of Adobe Campaign.

Platform performance

Several factors can directly impact server performance and slow your Campaign platform:

  • The number and type of personalization elements: personalization in emails pulls data out of the database for each recipient. in case of many personalization elements, the amount of data needed to prepare the delivery is higher. This can slow your platform. Learn more about personalization guardrails in this section.

  • The server load: when the marketing server is handling many different tasks at the same time, it can slow down performance. The marketing server needs to coordinate all of the incoming and outgoing data for all of the deliveries to ensure that the data is correct and on time.
    To avoid this, coordinate the scheduling of deliveries with the other members of your team to ensure the best performance.

  • The workflow execution: monitoring your workflows is essential to avoid platform performance issues. Follow the guidelines listed in this document.

  • Connect to your Campaign Control Panel capabilities to monitor your platform, using performance monitoring functionalities.

Quarantine management

It is in your best interest to maintain good quarantine management processes.

When starting to send emails on a new platform, you may use a list of addresses that are not fully qualified. If you send to invalid addresses or to honeypot addresses (mailboxes only created to trick spammers), this will start to diminish the reputation of your platform. Good quarantine management processes help to: maintain address quality, avoid denylist by internet access providers, and reduce your error rate, speeding up deliveries and throughput.

Learn more how to start a new platform in the Adobe Deliverability Best Practices Guide.

Technical recommendations are listed in this section.

 Read out few best practices

  • If you have a list of invalid addresses, Adobe recommends importing it to the quarantine table, through Administration > Campaign Management > Non deliverables Management > Non deliverables and addresses.

  • The recipients whose addresses are quarantined are excluded by default during the delivery analysis: they are not targeted. This speeds up deliveries, as the error rate has a significant effect on delivery speed. An email address can be quarantined for example when the inbox is full or if the address does not exist.
    Adobe Campaign manages erroneous addresses according to the type of error returned. Learn more about quarantines

  • Some internet access providers automatically consider emails as spam if the rate of invalid addresses is too high. Quarantine therefore allows you to avoid being added to denylist by these providers.

Double opt-in mechanism

To avoid sending messages to invalid addresses, limit improper communications and improve sender reputation, Adobe recommends implementing a double opt-in mechanism for post-subscription confirmation. This helps ensure a recipient subscribed intentionally.

Use templates

Delivery templates allow for increased efficiency by providing ready-made scenarios for most common types of activities. With templates, marketers can deploy new campaigns with minimal customization in a shorter amount of time. Learn more about delivery templates.

Subdomains and branding

When you manage several brands in Adobe Campaign, Adobe recommends having one sub-domain per brand. For example, a bank can have several sub-domains corresponding to each of its regional agencies. If a bank owns the bluebank.com domain, its sub-domains can be @ny.bluebank.com, @ma.bluebank.com, @ca.bluebank.com, etc. Having one delivery template per sub-domain enables you to always use the right pre-configured parameters for each of your brand, which avoids errors and saves you time. Learn more about subdomain branding in the Campaign Control Panel documentation.

Configure addresses

Make sure to apply the following guidelines:

  • The sender’s address is mandatory to allow an email to be sent. Some ISPs (Internet Service Providers) check the validity of the sender address before accepting messages.
  • A badly formed address may result in it being rejected by the receiving server. You must make sure a correct address is given.
  • The address must explicitly identify the sender. The domain must be owned by and registered to the sender.
  • Adobe recommends creating email accounts that correspond to the addresses specified for deliveries and replies. Check with your messaging system administrator.
 Steps to configure addresses in Campaign UI

To configure addresses in Campaign interface, follow the steps below:

  1. In the delivery template, click the From link. In the Email header parameters window, enter the settings.

  2. In the Sender address field, make sure the address domain is the same as the sub-domain that you delegated to Adobe. You can change the part preceding the ‘@’ but not the domain address.

  3. In the From field, use a name that is easily identifiable by the recipients, such as your brand’s name, to increase the opening rate of your deliveries. To further improve the recipient’s experience, you can add a person’s name, for example “Emma from Megastore”.

  4. In the Reply address text fields, the sender’s address is used by default for replies. However, Adobe recommends using an existing real address such as your brand’s customer care. In this case, if a recipient sends a reply, the customer care will be able to handle it.

Set up a control group

Once the delivery is sent, you can compare the behavior of the excluded recipients with the recipients who did receive the delivery. You can then measure the efficiency of your campaigns. Learn more about control groups this section.

Use typologies to apply filters or control rules

A typology contains checking rules that are applied during the analysis phase, before sending any message.

In the Typology tab of the template’s properties, you can select a custom typology if needed.

For example, to better control the outbound traffic, you can define which IP addresses can be used by defining one affinity per sub-domain and creating one typology per affinity. The affinities are defined in the instance’s configuration file. Contact your Adobe Campaign administrator.

For more on typologies, refer to this section.

Optimize your content

Build personalized content

To personalize your messages, you can use recipients’ data stored in the database, or collected through tracking, landing pages, subscriptions, etc. Personalization basics are presented in this section.

 Read out few best practices

  • Check your personalization settings - Make sure your message content is properly designed to avoid any errors, which can be related to personalization. An Adobe Campaign personalization tag always has the following form: <%=table.field%>. The incorrect use of parameters in personalization blocks can be an issue. For example, variables in JavaScript should be used as follows:

    <% var brand = "xxx" %>

    For more on personalization blocks, refer to the this section.

  • Prepare personalization data - You can prepare personalization data in a workflow to improve delivery preparation analysis. This should be used specially if the personalization data come from an external table through Federated Data Access (FDA). This option is described in this this section

Build optimized content

When building your emails, apply the general best practices for email content.

 Read out few best practices

  • Keep design simple

  • Keep mobile users in mind

  • Avoid entirely image-based emails

  • Use email-safe fonts

  • Encode special characters

Subject line

Work on the email subject line to improve open rates.

 Read out few best practices

  • Avoid subjects that are too long. Use 50 characters maximum

  • Avoid using repetitively words like “free” or “offer”, that could be considered as spam

  • Avoid capital letters

  • Do not use special characters like “!”, “£”, “€”, “$”

Mirror page

Always include a mirror page link. Preferred position is a the top of the email. Learn more about the mirror page in this page

The unsubscription link is essential. It must be visible and valid, and the form must be functional. By default, when the message is analyzed, a built-in Unsubscription link approval typology rule checks whether an opt-out link has been included and generates a warning if it is missing.

Learn how to insert an opt-out link in this section.

 Apply this best practice

Because human error is always possible, check that the opt-out link works correctly before each time you send. For example, when sending the proof, make sure the link is valid, that the form is on-line, and that the No longer contact this recipient field is changed to Yes.

Email size

To avoid performance or deliverability issues, the recommended maximum size of an email is about 35KB. To check the message size, browse the Preview tab and choose a test profile. Once generated, the message size is displayed in the top right corner.

 Read out few best practices

  • Remove redundant or unused styles

  • Move some of the email content to a landing page

  • Minify your code

Make sure to test any changes before the final sending.

SMS length

By default, the number of characters in an SMS meets the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standards. SMS messages using GSM encoding are limited to 160 characters, or 153 characters per SMS for messages sent in multiple parts.

 Read out few best practices

  • To keep all of the characters in your SMS messages as they are, to not alter proper names for example, do not enable transliteration.

  • However, if your SMS messages contain a lot of characters that are not taken into account by the GSM standard, enable transliteration to limit the costs of sending your messages. Learn more in this section.

  • You can apply SMS transliteration, which consists in replacing one character of an SMS by another when that character is not taken into account by the GSM standard. Note that inserting personalization fields into the content of your SMS message may introduce characters that are not taken into account by the GSM encoding. As a Campaign Administrator, you can enable character transliteration by checking the corresponding box in the SMPP channel settings tab of the corresponding External account. Learn more

Avoid attachments

Attachments remain one of the most common vectors for the proliferation of malware, most especially when they are sent in bulk. Include a secure link to the document instead of attaching it. This ensures an additional layer of security to prevent unintended redistribution, and vastly reduces the chances that the message will be rejected at inbound email gateways for message size or security reasons.

Manage images

Here are some specific guidelines for optimizing images for your email marketing campaign.

Prevent images blocking

Some email clients block images by default, and users may change their settings to block images for saving on data usage. herefore, if images are not downloaded, the whole message can be lost.

 To avoid this, you can apply these best practices

  • Avoid entirely image-based emails. Balance your content with image and text.

  • If text must be contained in an image, use alt and title text to make sure your message gets across. Style your alt/title text to improve its appearance.

  • Avoid the use of background images as they are not supported by some email clients.

Make images responsive

Try to make images responsive and resizable to make them visible in all contexts and devices. Note that this can have a cost impact as it takes longer to build.

Use absolute image references

To be accessible from the outside, the images used in emails and public resources linked to campaigns must be present on an externally accessible server.

  • From the delivery assistant, you can import an HTML page containing images or insert images directly using the HTML editor via the Image icon.

  • If images are not displayed, check that the images are available on the server. To do this, browse to the Source tab of your delivery. Find your images and copy-paste each image’s URL in a web browser. If the images are not displayed, contact your IT administrator or the third-party vendor providing your delivery content.

Preview and test your message

Adobe recommends previewing your message to check its personalization and how your recipients will see your delivery.

In the delivery assistant, the Preview sub-tab lets you view the rendering of each content for a recipient. The personalization fields and the conditional elements of content are replaced with the corresponding information for the selected profile. Learn more.

Define the right audience

Targeted population is key: build your lists carefully, test your emails on popular email clients and mobile devices, and ensure that your email lists are up-to-date (with no unknown or obsolete addresses). You can also send proofs that help set up a complete validation cycle. Learn more about audiences in this section.

Target the right audience

When you have your content ready, you need to carefully define who will receive your message.

To make your delivery successful, you want to send the most relevant personalized content to the right recipients. Adobe Campaign enables you to build the most accurate target: you can select recipients according to their age, localization, what they bought, if they clicked a link in a previous delivery, etc. With Adobe Campaign, you can also define test profiles, control groups and seed addresses to make sure your target is correct.

Target mappings

In Campaign, by default, delivery templates target Recipients. Adobe Campaign offers other target mappings for your deliveries, that you can change based on your needs. For example, you can deliver to visitors whose profiles have been collected via social networks or to visitors who are subscribed to an information service.

These mappings are presented in this section.

External recipients

You can deliver to recipients who are stored in an external file rather than saved in the database. Learn more in this section.

Test recipients

To test your delivery, use proofs before sending to the main target.

Make sure you select appropriate proof recipients, because they validate the form and the content of the message. The steps for defining the proof recipients are presented in this section.

Deduplicate addresses

It is important to avoid having duplicate email addresses, because this can have an impact on your target:

  • The same message can be sent more than once when a target is split.

  • If a recipient unsubscribes after receiving a message, their duplicate profile will still receive future messages.

Deduplicating addresses protects your sending reputation and ensures good quarantine management.

Related topics:

Perform all checks before sending

Once your message is ready, make sure its content is displayed correctly, on all devices, and does not contain any errors such as wrong personalization or broken links. Before sending your message, also ensure that the parameters and configuration are consistent with the delivery.

The steps for validating a delivery are presented in this section.

Proof messages

Sending proofs enables you to check the opt-out link, mirror page and any other links, validate the message, verify that images are displayed, detect possible errors, etc. You may also want to check your design and rendering on different devices.

Make sure your message is delivered

As a final step, maximize your chances and leverage the power of Adobe Campaign to ensure that your message will be indeed delivered to the relevant recipients.

Go through a validation process

You can define a full validation process, involving Adobe Campaign operators and groups, to validate both the target and the message content. This will ensure full monitoring and control of the various processes of the campaign: targeting, content, budget, extraction, and sending a proof. Depending on their permissions, users will be notified, receive proofs and be able to validate or reject the message. Learn more in this section.

Use waves

You can progressively increase the volume sent using waves. This will avoid your messages being marked as spam or when you want to restrict the number of messages per day. Using waves you can divide deliveries into several batches instead of sending high volumes of messages at the same time. Learn more in this section.

Prioritize messages

You can set the sending order for your deliveries by stating the priority level. To do so:

  1. Edit the delivery properties, and select the Delivery tab.

  2. Define the priority level for the delivery on a scale from Very low to Very high.

NOTE

It is not possible to define the order of sending messages from within a delivery.

Use typologies

You can use typology rules to exclude part of the target based on specific criteria. This guarantees that the messages sent best meet the needs and expectations of customers, in keeping with company communication policies. For example, you can filter the recipients who are underage from the target of your newsletter. Learn more in this example.

Track and monitor

You clicked the Send button? Let’s see what happens. Once the delivery is sent, Adobe Campaign enables you to keep track of the sent messages and discover how your recipients react to your delivery. This will help you improve future sending and optimize your next campaigns.

Monitor deliveries

To control your campaigns, you must ensure that the message has indeed been delivered to your recipients.

From Campaign delivery dashboard, you can check the processed messages and delivery audit logs. You can also control the status of the messages in the delivery logs.

Learn more about delivery monitoring in Campaign Classic v7 documentation

Track behaviour

To better know the behavior of your recipients, you can track how they react to a delivery: reception, opening, clicks on links, unsubscriptions, etc. In Campaign, this information is displayed in the Tracking tab of the recipients targeted by the delivery and in the Tracking tab of the delivery.

Message tracking is enabled by default. To configure URLs, select the Display URLs option in the lower section of the delivery assistant. For each URL of the message, you can choose whether to activate tracking.

Learn more about tracking capabilities in Campaign Classic v7 documentation

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