Wordfly IP Migration - successes/challenges?

For those of you on Wordfly and just had to deal with the IP migration - has it gone smoothly for you? We created our warm up plan, and WF signed off on it.  We sent our first deployment on Monday (20K names or so) and it went out promptly, and had good open rates, and low bounces, but now we're seeing delayed sends and inconsistent delivery of tests emails.  We'll open up a support ticket if it continues, but wanted to see if others were experiencing the same thing.

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  • So we appear to be having a similar issue. Our first email went out on Tuesday to about 6k emails and didn't have any issues. It had a strong open rate of 17%. We sent an email yesterday (Wednesday) around 5:30 pm to 11k emails and all of a sudden our open rate is only 5%. Looking at who has opened, I don't see a single Gmail or Yahoo address. But on Monday we had opens from both those providers. It's interesting that they told you this was about sender reputation. I opened a support ticket this morning and am waiting to hear back.

  • We're seeing some Yahoo but no gmail.

    Related-unrelated, I'm having major PTSD to The Great Mail2 Disaster of 2016, for those that were around back then. :)

  • (That gif was me remembering the great Mail2 debacle of 2016). But interesting turn of events! WordFly replied and said there was a block affiliated with Comcast (a major internet provider in our area). They are working to clear that up. They said there is also a somewhat lower reputation associated with Gmail and Yahoo and referred us to their documentation for warming up specific ISPs. I think I might shift my calendar a day and try sending again tomorrow. 

  • We experienced the same problem today with Gmail and Yahoo but not with Comcast. Yesterday we sent to 6,000 and got an open rate of 40% with the majority opens being Gmail users. Today we sent to 8,000 with a ES4-5 and got 14% opens and no opens by Gmail or Yahoo. Like Reynaldi said earlier, sending to Yahoo and Gmail 10 at a time isn't sustainable, but I guess we have to do it! Thank you, Gabriela, for the link to warming up specific IPs.

  • Our deliverability issue is definitely just with gmail. We started the new plan, sending to a batch of 20 emails, but so far none of those have registered an open, so it's back in Wordfly's court. 

  • Would it help if we also opened tickets with WF regarding Gmail, or are they aware this is a universal problem? Looking forward to hearing what they have to say.

  • If you are having that same issue, I definitely recommend opening a ticket!  

    Also, here's WF's response when I asked them if this was a scenario they anticipated, and if we could have been better prepped for it. It sounds like they did not anticipate it, though I would put it back to them and say that as an Email Marketing Service Provider, they should have.

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    We did and do have a good understanding of the complexity around IPs and ISP reputation. With that knowledge and experience of bringing on new IPs in the past, we crafted our recommendations.

    What was unforeseen was two fold:

    1. The challenges some organizations would have with safe listing the new IPs for internal delivery.
    2. The impact of a brand new full block of IPs with ISPs

    For the second issue which has impacted your organization, we are seeing positive improvements and responses with ISPs once they evaluate the mail being sent and authenticate our platform. Given that this evaluation is required, we are in a fast-follow position vs leading. It’s a bit of a chicken or the egg conundrum.

    Of course, we completely understand there’s never a good time to have email marketing unsettled even for a day or two. But we are seeing clear improvements across the board. We’re confident things will level out over the coming days. We have three people dedicated full time to resolving deliverability all day. I’ve attached a helpful graph from the Google Postmaster showing our progress.

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  • If you are having that same issue, I definitely recommend opening a ticket!  

    Also, here's WF's response when I asked them if this was a scenario they anticipated, and if we could have been better prepped for it. It sounds like they did not anticipate it, though I would put it back to them and say that as an Email Marketing Service Provider, they should have.

    --------------

    We did and do have a good understanding of the complexity around IPs and ISP reputation. With that knowledge and experience of bringing on new IPs in the past, we crafted our recommendations.

    What was unforeseen was two fold:

    1. The challenges some organizations would have with safe listing the new IPs for internal delivery.
    2. The impact of a brand new full block of IPs with ISPs

    For the second issue which has impacted your organization, we are seeing positive improvements and responses with ISPs once they evaluate the mail being sent and authenticate our platform. Given that this evaluation is required, we are in a fast-follow position vs leading. It’s a bit of a chicken or the egg conundrum.

    Of course, we completely understand there’s never a good time to have email marketing unsettled even for a day or two. But we are seeing clear improvements across the board. We’re confident things will level out over the coming days. We have three people dedicated full time to resolving deliverability all day. I’ve attached a helpful graph from the Google Postmaster showing our progress.

Children
  • Late last night I got an email from Kirk at WordFly that they are making headway with the Google Postmaster. I asked this morning if we should filter out an gmail accounts from any email we are sending today, but haven't heard back yet.

    They are definitely aware and working on it.

  • We got a reply from WordFly this morning that the issues with Gmail continue - they asked us to limit our use to one campaign per day, and start with a list size of 50.  We've got 40k+ subscribers, with daily newsletters plus smaller donor-related emails, so that plan is not workable - and I don't understand why this can't be addressed on a larger sense with Google for all WordFly users (since we're all sending from same block of IPs and sending subdomain).