Contoso Ltd is a made-up online shop for garden tools. All figures are invented for teaching.
The situation
For two years Contoso sent a monthly newsletter from its shop software. In March the team moved to a new email service, imported every address it had ever collected, including an old list bought at a trade fair, and sent a spring sale to 40,000 addresses at once.
Within a week, opens fell from 35 to 6 percent and customers said the newsletter was in their spam folder.
The evidence
What the team found | Value |
|---|---|
Hard bounces in the March send | 9 percent |
Spam complaints | 0.6 percent |
SPF record | Still lists only the old shop software |
DKIM | Not set up with the new service |
DMARC | No record |
Addresses from the bought list | 12,000 |
Diagnose it
1.Which three problems hurt delivery most? Pick three.
More than one answer is right.
Fix it in this order
- 1Send again to recent, engaged subscribers first
- 2Publish a DMARC record with p=none to get reports
- 3Grow the volume step by step over several weeks
- 4Stop sending to the bought list and remove hard bounces
- 5Add the new service to SPF and switch on DKIM signing
Notes for teachers
Mailbox providers watch bounce and complaint rates closely; a complaint rate above about 0.3 percent is widely treated as a warning sign (Google names it in its sender guidelines). Bought lists usually breach consent rules in the EU as well, which makes removing them a legal step, not only a technical one.