Complete this checklist before sending your first email

Your onboarding sessions include custom deliverability guidance from your Customer Success Manager. If you must send your first email before your onboarding session, follow these essential steps to a successful first email send to match the email engagement from your last ESP or improve your deliverability. Email your CSM with any questions.

❗❗**Skipping any steps in the checklist below could result in low deliverability in your first send at best and serious damage to your domain reputation at worst.**❗❗

Engagement based imports and sending

You’ve likely built up engagement history in another tool. Bring that with you to keep deliverability as high as possible.

During your first month in Customer.io, send only to an audience that has recently been highly engaged with your email content.

• [ ] DETERMINE WHO TO IMPORT - If you’re setting up for email-only messaging, you might be able to skip importing people who you will NOT want to email from the platform. In this case, you can skip importing anyone who hasn’t opened a single email from you in the last six months, who has previously unsubscribed, who has hard bounced, and/or who has marked one of your emails as SPAM.

  If you’ll be tracking behavior and/or sending messages via other channels in Journeys, you’ll still want to import them. Consider bringing them in without an email address to ensure nothing will be emailed to them. If you create a segment to exclude them, you must include this segment as criteria on every email and/or campaign you send from Customer.io.

• [ ] LEVERAGE EXISTING ENGAGEMENT DATA - When pulling contacts from your existing/previous ESP, be sure to capture:

  • The last date they opened an email in Unix seconds timestamp format
  • If they unsubscribed from your emails
  • If they ever hard bounced (suppressed)*
  • If they ever marked you as SPAM (suppressed)*

• [ ] SEGMENT ON ENGAGEMENT - Create an engagement segment based on the last opened email date you imported from your previous ESP. During the warm-up period:

  • Send emails only to people who have opened one of your emails in the last four months. Don’t send to contacts who haven’t opened any email from you in more than six months.

  Never send email from Customer.io to anyone who previously:

  • Unsubscribed
  • Hard bounced
  • Marked you as Spam

• [ ] *BRING YOUR SUPPRESSION LIST TO CUSTOMER.IO - Anyone who ever hard-bounced or marked your email as SPAM will be on a suppression list kept by your previous ESP. If possible, export the suppression list from your current ESP to bring to Customer.io. This will be the most reliable method to exclude these people from email sends. Contact your Customer Success Manager for more details.

• [ ] SEND TO OPT-INS ONLY - Ensure everyone on your list has opted in to receive your emails. Per Customer.io’s Terms of Service, you may only send an email to someone who has agreed to receive emails from you.

Extra Caution Required 🚧

Take these extra precautions if you are working with an older list, or if engagement metrics aren’t available.

• [ ] VERIFY EMAILS WITHOUT RECENT METRICS - If you no longer have access to delivery and engagement history for the contacts you want to import to Customer.io, run your list through an email verification tool like Kickbox, Zero Bounce, or BrightVerify first. Take the most conservative approach with the output the tool returns and send emails to only the most trusted email addresses based on the verification tool’s analysis. Apply these rules for both initial and ongoing sends.
• [ ] OLDER LISTS - If your only choice is to start with an older list that hasn’t been contacted in the last six months to a year, treat the list as missing engagement metrics and run the entire list through an email verification tool (as per above). Understand that sending to an old list, even one that’s been verified, has its risks. Expect that you may run into some deliverability issues due to high bounce and spam rates, as well as spam traps. Discuss approaches with your CSM. Per Customer.io’s Terms of Service, you may only send an email to someone that you’ve sent an email to in the last two years.

Slowly ramp up the number of emails you send

Inbox providers like Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo! and the rest are familiar with seeing your domain sending from other providers, but not yet Customer.io.

Get them used to your new Customer.io sending domain being affiliated with a new set of sending IPs by gradually increasing the number of emails you send from Customer.io over a period of one to three weeks, depending on volume.

Never surprise inbox providers by sending a large volume of emails right away. It can severely damage your reputation.

Even if you had a great reputation with your previous email service provider (ESP), sending a large initial volume from a new sending subdomain with a new provider is a major red flag for inbox providers and can cause major damage to your domain reputation. Damage that will take much longer to repair than starting with a steady, measured warm-up.