When you send an email message to a candidate, you want to make sure that candidate receives it. Almost any candidate you want to send messages to will be using some sort of spam filter. Email services use a variety of technologies to detect and filter spam, and data from a number of sources to inform their filtering. This means that Gem can’t guarantee that messages will not be filtered as spam.
This document covers steps that you and your team can take to maximize the deliverability of messages sent with Gem to your candidates.
Email Authentication
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are tools for authenticating email messages. They ensure that email messages are sent from an authorized server and have a digital signature that validates the sending server. Having these set up ensures your recipients that your domain is actually sending these messages, and will make anything you send significantly less likely to be filtered as spam.
Setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC may require the assistance of your IT or Network Administration team. Because Gem sends messages directly through your existing email provider, setup is dependent on the provider you are using; please see the documentation appropriate to your provider for more information.
For Google Workspace:
- SPF
- DKIM
- DMARC
For Microsoft Office 365:
- SPF
- DKIM
- DMARC
For other providers, please consult their documentation.
Google Postmaster Tools
Google Postmaster Tools allows the owner of a domain to see information about email traffic sent from that domain to recipients using Google to handle their email. This information includes details about email traffic, reputation, and spam rates. These tools are available once you have SPF and DKIM configured, and do not require that you use Gmail for your domain’s email. You may need assistance from your IT department to set up and monitor these statistics. We recommend reviewing the User Reported Spam Rate in particular. This is a gauge of how many recipients are manually marking messages from your domain as spam. If this is above 0.5% you will likely see deliverability issues, and should consider making changes to your sequence content.
Send Limits
Recipients treat senders which send large amounts of email over short periods of time as more likely to be spammers. Because of this, you should consider limiting the number of sequence messages that you send per day. Gem Admins can use the Sending Limits page under Team Settings to set a maximum number of sequence messages a user can send per day. We recommend setting this to 400 or less at a starting point. If you regularly send at a lower volume, you should consider setting the limit lower as well.
Other Sequence Considerations
- Keep your message sending volume consistent. Sudden increases in message volume can be seen as a sign of spamming. If you need to increase your sending volume, ramp it up slowly.
- The simpler your message looks, the better. Messages which have high volumes of links, images, or other content are more likely to be flagged as spam.
- Make sure your messages don’t look automated. Use tokens to personalize messages to the extent possible, and try to keep the text and format as similar to an individually-written message as you can. If your message reads like it was sent automatically, it is more likely to be filtered.
- If your top concern is making sure that candidates receive your message, consider disabling click tracking and open tracking. Because these features use links to work, they can affect message deliverability. The caveat in doing so is that you will lose click and open tracking metrics for the sequence in Gem reports.
- If you use the same sequence for a long time, or if you regularly copy the text of stages across sequences, your message deliverability may decline over time. Email servers can treat messages they see repeatedly with similar or identical text as spam. It can be helpful to pay attention to open rates and if you see them start to decline, consider re-writing your sequences.
Have any issues or questions on this topic? Please feel free to contact your dedicated Gem Customer Success Manager directly or our Support team at support@gem.com.
- Email Authentication
- For Google Workspace:
- For Microsoft Office 365:
- Google Postmaster Tools
- Send Limits
- Other Sequence Considerations