Does anyone email their inactive users to encourage them to come back to the forum?

[Alternadiv]

I'm looking to contact a few thousand inactive users to encourage them to come back to my forum. A lot of them were very active once and have even donated to the forum. I think some of them got caught up with real life and eventually forgot about us. Either way, at least reaching out to a few thousand of them is bound to bring back some.

Does anyone successfully do this? If so, how do you do it without your email going into their spam folder? I have tried services like SendPulse, but I think most of the emails went directly to spam. I know I have a few hundred invalid email addresses but I will filter those out before sending another mass email. Besides making sure emails won't bounce, what can I do to make sure the email is at least seen by the recipient? I am trying to learn how Amazon SES works and while it seems a little confusing right now, I do think this could be the best option. But do you need to pair it with a secondary service to be able to send email with it?

Any tips you have would be great.

 

[djbaxter]

Yes. On all forums I own and manage.

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[Alternadiv]

Yes. On all forums I own and manage.

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But does this work for not going to the spam box? And I think my server only allows around 600 emails to be sent in a short amount of time.

 

[djbaxter]

I don't know of any way to guarantee that emails won't end up in the spam folder.

 

[Mr Lucky]

I don't know of any way to guarantee that emails won't end up in the spam folder.

Probably the best chance is to use a paid SMTP email delivery service. I am currently using either Amazon SES or mailgun - but I'm using the free service as my sites are non profit it isn't worth me paying the monhly fees for didticated IP.

Both seem to have occasional non delivery issues (due to the shared IP being blaclkisted - and generally they got those sorted out within a day or two)

But generally I don't think the emails end up flagged as spam. They will usually pass the server fileter (e.g. spam assasin) but individual recipients may have their email client spam filters sett rather aggressively. But you do have to configure them correctly, which means editing your DNS settings. Amazon SES has terrible documentation.

Amazon will send you bounce notification emails but has not very good logging capabilities, mailgun doesn't send bounce notifications, but the logs are quite clear and if you check regularly you can see if there are issues.

When there are issues it's mostly due to someone else on the same shared Mailgun IP - you report it and they tend to fix it but can take a day or two.

 

[djbaxter]

The problem is also that email providers are becoming increasingly aggressive in filtering what they think is spam and especially mass or bulk emails. Gmail is noted for this.

If you're not using a third part email delivery service, make sure that you have your forum email properly set up with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC if you can. That helps.

 

[Mr Lucky]

The problem is also that email providers are becoming increasingly aggressive in filtering what they think is spam and especially mass or bulk emails. Gmail is noted for this.

I have one of my forum test users with a gmail account. I can then send them a test email from the forum, look at the raw source and can see that Google has passed or failed various criteria.

Check raw source for a spam bar score with details (e.g. UK domains get penalised!)

Also btinternet - this is the one that I had most problems with in regard to Amazon SES.