Office 365/Hotmail Email Deliverability – July 2023

Our deliverability team noticed a change with Office 365 emails, mostly .edu email domains that started in June and continued on to July. We also identified more strict spam controls for Hotmail[.]com, and Outlook[.]com personal email domains.

Office 365 - Email Scanning

Office365 has a few email security products. One is to track phishing and malware by scanning the links in an email. Most of the time this default is to scan on click which preserves the intent of that event for Email Service Providers (ESPs). In June there was a sharp increase in emails sent to .edu domains that on delivery scanned each link in the email using an IP address owned by Microsoft. All links are scanned at the time of delivery. While this is common for other email tools like Proofpoint, and Baracudda, this is new behavior for Office 365 domains. Word to the Wise has their own article tracking this back to the end of May Is .edu a canary?.

Bot Clicks in Campaign Deputy

Bot clicks have been an issue for less than <1% of delivered emails for Campaign Deputy customers. With this change in Office 365 we are going to make the following changes:

  • Create a new event “Bot Clicks”
  • Bot Clicks will now count towards the “Bot Clicks” category.
  • Add this new category to our Email Analytics similar to Apple’s MPP opens.
  • Update past bot clicks to this new category to allow for proper segmentation in emails.

While this is not an exhaustive list of all the changes, this will be the most visible change we will be making that our customers will see from their end.

We hope to complete creating the new event and back-dating the old bot clicks in the coming weeks. We will then focus on showing this information in our analytic reports later on.

Outlook, Hotmail, and Live domains

As part of our research in the bot clicks we also identified that a new filtering is being applied more aggressively to outlook[.]com, hotmail[.]com and live[.]com email addresses. These are hosted outside Office 365 though we suspect use similar rules minus the bot clicks. As part of this new change future segments to these domains should focus on the most actively engaged email addresses. Gmail can allow for 90 day active for some emails without any long-term deliverability impacts. Microsoft is more aggressive where we have seen email deliverability be blocked at 10% open rates. We recommend to segment your Microsoft emails to a closer group of engaged emails with limited re-engagement schedules to prevent any sort of block on your sending domain. 

As always we recommend to keep your main email list to the most active subscribers while dropping inactive emails every 30 days. A healthy open rate is above 20% across email providers which shows you have good deliverability.

*We use [.] when referring to a domain name as it’s industry best practice to prevent that domain from being linked to the real domain.

Facebook iOS 14 changes with ActBlue

With the recent privacy changes with iOS 14 and Facebook we have a solution to track your conversion events with Facebook using our Forms.

Now edit the Thank You Page with your custom message and add a HTML Block with the Javascript code below. Make sure you have already added your Facebook Pixel ID in your setting.

Copy paste the code below in. The /100 is from ActBlue as they pass the value over as total Cents not as a dollar amount, so $21.21 would be 2121 as the amount.

function() {
const actblueParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
fbq("track", "Purchase", { currency: "USD", value: actblueParams.get("amount")/100 });
})();

For the Javascript developers, we poly-fill the URLSearchParams for Internet Explorer users which makes the code a lot easier to read than parsing out the location.search parameter by hand.

Now redirect your http://act.campaigndeputy.com/thankyou/{formname}?amount={{amount}}&refcode={{refcode}}&name={{name}}

What about custom domains?

Glad you asked, talk to your account manager to get the DNS entries needed. Depending on your account there may be a small up-charge. Someone from your team will need to apply the DNS entries. If you are using SquareSpace, Wix, Weebly or Campaign Partner the DNS change likely will need to be made in those systems. If not, ask who registered the domain at a place like Name.com (preffered), Google Domains, Godaddy, 1&1 or Gandi.

Track your Link Clicks

As the campaign trail moves towards November 3rd, digital teams are ramping up their analytics. One request we had was How do you track when something happened with your lists? We looked at how our internal sales team tracks their actions and worked on ways this could apply to a campaign. We found that campaigns could track the conversion but not the pipeline. It’s great to know you just signed up 100 more donors, where did they come from and how many didn’t convert?

We built dpty.us, a new URL Shortner to help track your links. You may have seen these in social media feeds from various tools, but they started to become expensive to enable an API, and then would require each campaign to setup their own account and setup an API key. Yeah, we just lost 90% of our campaigns right there. We wanted this to be integrated into Campaign Deputy, and we need a link tool for our future plans for broadcast texting.

Our Digital Dashboard is where we are migrating most digital tasks to.

We will be enabling our our new Digital Dashboard for campaign starting in July 1st, 2020.

For the techies in the crowd, we knew that the scale on this feature would be huge. We build it using serverless technologies and it’s currently hosted in an Ohio cloud datacenter. If 10,000 people click on a link in the same second, our cloud provider will instantly spin up our code to handle the load and then spin down those servers after the load drops. As the popularity of this grows, we will launch additional regions on the East and West Coast. Currently our average response time is 0.25 seconds with 95% of users seeing a response tie of 0.44 seconds. To most this will be almost invisible for them.

Tech Talk: Performance

Most of our posts have been about fundraising, this will be about how we built Campaign Deputy to be quick to use for campaigns throughout the country. We started with the idea “be better, faster, and don’t crash”. With that, we set out to build a web application that can be fast, even if you happen to be on a 3G connection. Then we apply that same performance to out outbound features, forms, and page analytics.

Over half of our site loads in under 1 second.

We have been using a third party to measure how long it takes to load a page, commonly called RUM, Real User Monitoring. This tracks each time a user loads a page in our application, and records the time, and the time it takes to pull new updates for the page. Overall, more than half of our pages load in under a second. We accomplish this by creating the smallest possible page to load. The average size of a web page is over 3MB, ours is under 1mb down to 1/2mb. If you have ever tried to load a news article on a slow connection the page size matters a lot. After you load our site once, we cache everything and that page load turns into 1/16th of a MB. You likely have a word document larger than that.

Locations throughout the US that can load our forms.

Speed and distance also matter, so we have our code throughout the US that helps to load our forms. This allows our PopUp forms to load as fast as the page loads so you can capture all those new donors who go to your campaign page!

Further plans for 2019

First we are launching a new cloud based load balancer for our applications with more support for IPv6. We have redundant sites and connections to our servers, but they can be slow to react to changes. We also launched a status page so you can see in real-time how our system is doing at
status.campaigndeputy.com so we can be transparent out our system health. Also with our launch of our mobile app, you’ll start to see more API access for integrations from the technically savvy campaigns out there.

Our development team says thanks for reading!