When you send an email for your brand, you obviously want recipients to read it.
For this to happen, your email needs to be delivered, and recipients should recognize it as valuable and worthy of their attention. While the email content is important, there's another crucial aspect to consider.
If your email lacks clear branding and fails to establish its origin as the entity recipients willingly subscribed to, there's a risk they may overlook your message or, worse, mark it as spam.
Therefore, we emphasize the importance of aligning your sent emails with your company by following the best practices outlined below.
Before You Start Sending Emails
Ensure you're only sending emails to individuals who have directly subscribed to receive emails from you—not addresses acquired through other means.
This includes purchased or rented lists, addresses collected via third parties or partners, or emails collected from another brand of yours.
Clearly Align Your Emails With Your Brand
Let's say you want to email people who subscribed to receive emails from mybrand.com. Make sure the following is always true:
The "From" address should be @mybrand.com. This is the address from which you send emails and should be verified in your Messaging & Workflows → Settings Tab
The "From" name should clearly be associated with @mybrand.com. This field represents the name displayed as the sender, which recipients see in their inbox.
The email must be distinctly branded as communication from @mybrand.com. We recommend prominently incorporating your brand's logo within the email. Relying solely on small company name text in the footer may not be enough for recipients to confidently recognize the email as originating from your brand.
Note: We recommend using a tool like TinyPNG to compress the image files, which also improves your deliverability
Add a reminder in the email explaining why the recipient is receiving the message. For example, include a phrase such as: "You signed up for our newsletter subscription here [provide the URL to the page with the form]."
Example 1: Email Promotions Coming From Partners
A visitor subscribes to a newsletter on an agency website that offers multiple services, expecting to receive emails about those services, deals, etc.
However, the emails they actually receive are branded from a specific service instead of the agency website they signed up with. This leads users to believe they're receiving emails from a company they didn't sign up with, marketing a specific service.
Even if there's a sentence in the footer explaining that this email is received because the user is registered with the agency, it's not enough. Recipients expect clearly identifiable emails from the agency brand, not the partner. This can result in spam reports.
The solution is simple: Send the email from the agency directly and include service information by clearly identifying the agency's branding, then list partner promotions within the email content. This makes it clear to recipients that the service provider's message is coming from the agency they signed up with.
Example 2: Email From A Product Brand
Let's say you have a shop offering various products from different brands—shoes, clothes, phone cases, etc.
If a customer signs up to receive emails about product offers and deals, they expect emails clearly branded as being from your store.
However, if they receive an email with the sender being the product brand and content exclusively showing that product's items, it might seem acceptable since the user agreed to receive product offers and deals. Wrong.
Recipients expect emails from your store, not the company producing the product.
The Solution Is The Same
Only send emails from the store. Use the store's from address and name, and start the email with something like: "We think you'll love this deal from Product X." In this scenario, things are aligned, and recipients receive emails directly from a familiar organization they signed up for, reducing the temptation to report it as spam.
This Is About Best Practices & It Actually Makes Your Business More Money Too - It's Not Just About The Law
In both cases above, there may be language at the original site indicating that by signing up, recipients give permission for partners, affiliates, or third parties to email them. By including this language, this kind of sending may be legal, and recipients may have technically given permission.
However, this kind of sending is still problematic and may cause us to revoke a bad actors ability to send emails in order to improve the deliverability of everyone who uses our platform.
Unless a user explicitly and directly signed up with the brand that appears to be sending them emails, there's a high likelihood the message will be identified as spam—either explicitly by the user or by automated algorithms that track engagement.
To protect our ability to deliver high-quality emails for all senders, we require that senders on our platform make it obvious to recipients that messages are from an organization they signed up with. If this isn't obvious, we consider the message unsolicited.
Recap
The key emphasis is on maintaining alignment. When a user enrolls with a specific brand, only that organization—without involvement from partners, other brands, affiliates, or third parties—should send emails to the user.
To prevent confusion, email content must unmistakably establish its relation to the brand the recipient initially signed up with.
Any attempt to obscure this relation may confuse users, making the email appear unsolicited, even if the user had subscribed to receive such emails. We strictly prohibit emails lacking a transparent link to the original brand the recipient signed up with.
If you ensure that subscribers, "From" addresses and names, and the branding of your emails are aligned, this will keep your sending reputation intact.
(Which directly correlates to your business generating more money, as your marketing messages to subscribers ACTUALLY MAKE IT to the subscribers in the first place)