What is Graymail? Here’s what you need to know
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You may know it as ham. Or bacon (spelled “bacn”). I guess email marketers have a thing for meat products. However, most people call it graymail.
Never heard of it? Me neither, until a colleague dropped it during a conversation and left me a few dozen follow-up questions. Here is what I learned.
How Does Graymail Affect Email Marketers?
What is graymail?
Graymail is email that you choose to receive but never open or click on.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping and the cashier asks you during checkout if you’d like to submit your email address to receive offers in your inbox.
While you initially said yes, you eventually grew tired of subsequent emails from the store and didn’t interact with them anymore. They then become graymail. Graymail may include newsletters, promotional emails, advertisements or advertisements that are continuously ignored.
ISPs know these messages are gray messages based on the recipient’s engagement — or lack thereof. So if you open an email from a retailer – and you never open or interact with the next 50 or so emails – that’s a good sign it’s a graymail.
Over time, ISPs learn what you consider graymail based on your actions — and the actions of all recipients in emails sent from that domain — so categorization becomes smarter.
Graymail against spam
Graymail is not spam. Spam is sent to the recipient without their consent, usually for commercial reasons. Although it can get boring after a while, graymail is sent to recipients once permission is given.
Another key difference between spam and graymail is that the latter is often harmless, while the former may contain malicious links and scams.
Graymail and Greylisting
Graymail is also different from greylisting. Greylisting refers to the idea that ISPs might not deliver an entire batch of mail at once if they don’t trust your IP address. So let’s say you just got a new dedicated IP address and you want to send 100,000 emails. They might accept some of these emails, greylist others, and send the rest when they know it’s safe to deliver messages from you.
Graymail and graylisting, however, are not directly related: they both have gray in their name.
Where does the graymail go?
So you’ve got all that graymail over there – where does it go?
Many companies have developed products specifically to combat graymail. This is, for example, what Gmail’s priority inbox is. Hotmail helped coin the term graymail and created a product to address it.
If your message is identified as Graymail, it will likely be routed to one of Graymail’s products, such as your Promotions folder. It has therefore been delivered, but it may not be seen.
How Does Graymail Affect Email Marketers?
Graymail is another reason to do what good email marketers already do: focus on segmentation, personalization, and engagement. You should:
Use engagement data after sending
Post-send engagement data can help you develop a strategy to combat the possibility that Graymail may route your messages to other inbox tabs and folders. You can use this data to see which marketing emails are opened, clicked on or ignored.
What we like: You can then use this information to send relevant content that will drive consumers to engage.
Test the frequency of sending your e-mails.
Much of marketing relies on trial and error. Experiment with your email to see its impact on your email engagement. Are recipients more or less likely to engage if you send content every two weeks, every other day, or once a month?
Pro tip: Emails sent on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday typically get the most engagement. In contrast, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday emails have the lowest open and click rates.
Develop re-engagement campaigns.
Leverage re-engagement campaigns for contacts who have stopped interacting with your messages. A re-engagement campaign can increase open rates, reduce bounce rates, increase engagement, and improve your email reputation.
Pro tip: Attract recipients with incentives such as discounts, freebies, or customer service.
Also, constantly work on improving your segmentation rules so you can send more personalized and relevant content that recipients will take the time to research and read in their day.
Graymail is excellent for email marketers because it shelves marketing emails when recipients are in the mood to be marketed.
And when they’re in the mood and have time to check marketing emails, they have all those messages at their fingertips. It’s a better experience for the recipient and therefore a better result for the marketer.
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