Approvals for sending emails

Our most important job is to bring you a reliable service with great deliverability. As a shared service, this means we need to ensure that everyone is playing by the rules, to minimise any impact one customer's behaviour may have on another.

One of the ways we achieve this is through approvals. Approvals are a normal part of sending email through an email service provider, and are designed to help:

• Keep spammers at bay.
• Ensure people are following best practices for email content and subscriber growth.
• Safeguard the sending reputation of all customers who use our service.

When approvals happen

Approvals are triggered based on the number of subscribers you're sending to. The point at which they trigger is different for each account, and can change based on how long you've been sending with us. Your account may need to be approved more than once during your time sending with us, depending on how rapidly your audience grows.

There are other situations which might trigger an approval, such as abnormally high bounce or complaint rates, but the procedure is much the same, and our team will help you through.

Prepare for an approval

Turnaround time for approvals is faster if your account and email content are already in good shape beforehand. For a higher chance at a speedy, successful approval, follow the guidelines below.

Legal requirements

Make sure that you follow all applicable legal requirements (for example, CAN-SPAM) for the country you're sending from, and the countries you're sending to.

Subscribers

For subscribers, we check the following:

• How you sourced them.
• Whether they opted into your communications voluntarily.
• Whether they can opt out of your communications whenever they like.
• Interactions they may have already had with your emails, so we can advise you on the current health of your lists.

How to prepare

Make sure that:

• Your email address collection methods comply with our permission guidelines and anti-spam policy.
• Subscribers can easily opt out through a single click unsubscribe link if they no longer want emails from you.

You'll need to provide us with:

• All the different ways you collected email addresses. For example, did some come from in-store sign ups, and some from your website?
• Written or digital proof of permission. For example:
  • URLs for online subscribe forms.
  • Scanned copies of offline signups.
  • Copies of confirmed opt-in by personal email correspondence.

When describing where you got your email addresses from:

• Be descriptive and specific about the actions subscribers took to opt in. Telling us, "They signed up at trade shows and in our store" is good, but it's not enough. We need to know exactly how or why they signed up at those places.
• For offline signups, explain in detail how people actually joined. For example, did they verbally agree to be on your list at a conference, or sign a form during a business meeting?
• If your recipients are paying customers, tell us how long ago they were customers, and how often you've emailed them since they purchased from you.

Email content

We take email content seriously, as a spam complaint against your emails can affect other customers on our service.

Follow the content guidelines below to help minimise spam complaints, and to put you in a great starting position for when you need approval. We'll get back to you after the initial review if we require any content changes.

How to prepare

Make sure that:

• Your email content complies with our acceptable use policy.
• Your email content matches your subscribers' expectations for the type of content they signed up for.
• Your emails contain the sender's name and physical address.
• You include a permission reminder that clearly explains to the recipient how or why they're receiving your emails.
• You clearly identify who you are in your emails. The "From" name and email address should accurately identify the person or business sending the email, and your subject line should make clear to subscribers what you're sending to them.

Avoid:

• Content about third party products or services, and focus on your own. A line in the fine print that says, "we'll occasionally email you affiliate content" tells us you're at least trying to be honest, but almost no one reads the fine print, and it won't stop people from clicking the "spam" button.
• Difficult to find or hidden unsubscribe links.
• Complicated unsubscribe processes. For example, a multi-step unsubscribe process, or asking people to enter their email address to unsubscribe.
• Content that resembles spam, such as subject lines full of "FREE! WIN! SALE!" or image-heavy campaigns with very little text content.
• Irrelevant content, or content that doesn't match your subscriber's expectations. For example, filling your email with features about sporting goods and equipment, when your signup page promoted homewares and kitchen appliances.

Start an approval

You can start the approval process from multiple places in our application. However, you will only see the option to start the process when you are approaching or have triggered an approval.

Before this happens, it's worth preparing your account and content so they're in the best possible condition. This ensures the approval process will go as quickly as possible.

Pre-approval

Pre-approval is the best way to avoid sending delays. When you're approaching an approval, you'll see a prompt on the Overview and Campaigns pages.

To start the pre-approval process, click Request approval, then complete the form to submit your account for approval.

Approval from campaign snapshots

When the total number of subscribers you're sending to exceeds what you're approved for, you'll see a notification pop up in the Assistant in the bottom right corner.



Clicking the Assistant will reveal the "Request Approval" button. Click it, then complete the form to submit your account for approval.

There are two things to keep in mind if you trigger an approval when trying to send a campaign:

• You won't be able to send that campaign until the approval is complete.
• Successfully passing approval doesn't automatically send your campaign.

Frequently asked questions

Below are some answers to questions we're commonly asked about the approvals process.

How long will approval take?

All approvals enter a queue. The longest it takes us to get to an approval submission is 12 hours, although it's usually much faster. From there, the time it can take to complete an approval can vary:

• First time approvals for new accounts — These usually take longer than subsequent approvals, and can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to complete.
• Subsequent approvals — Are often completed within a few hours.

In all cases, if you've provided all the information we need through the approval form, and you've prepared beforehand, the process goes faster.