51����

We know how vital list generation, contact management, and email marketing are to growing your knowledge business. We also promised you that we’d stay laser-focused on improving email deliverability for every 51���� Hero. 

We’re adding improvements and new features to improve your contact list management and boost your email deliverability. These ensure you have the innovative email tools you deserve with much-needed protection, reliability, and stability.  

These improvements have a simple goal: helping you get more of your emails in more inboxes.

Not all contacts are created equal

At 51����, we’re big fans of keeping all communication explicitly opt-in. However, when importing a list, you may have outdated contacts, contacts that had previously opted-out, dreaded “spam traps,” and other high-risk contacts. 

Filtering Out High-Risk Contacts During Import

We’re putting in place filters that will help: 

• prevent high-risk contacts from being imported or emailed
• ensure that your lists are free of any contacts that could put your deliverability at risk
• keep your contact lists healthy and clean. 
  

Starting this week, as you import new contacts, you may notice that certain contacts do not successfully import. This is due to them being marked as high-risk. If you experience this, we’ll send you a follow-up email to let you know which specific contacts didn’t import, as well as the reason why.

Understanding the risk levels of your contacts 

We’re planning several enhancements, such as contact risk labels, to help you identify the risk level of sending to each individual contact. By precisely labeling the contacts that pose a risk to your sender reputation, you’ll be able to see and understand which contacts you should avoid mailing. 

Along with contact risk labels, we’re also adding the ability for you to maintain a suppression list. This helps you avoid sending to high and medium-risk contacts. To get one of your contacts off of a suppression list, you’ll need to re-engage them with an opt-in.

You can expect these updates to roll out over the next few weeks.

Using ReCAPTCHA to prevent abuse 

We’re also adding ReCAPTCHA for any form that is not utilizing double opt-in. Many of you have requested this, and we’re excited to deliver for you. 

Implementing ReCAPTCHA will limit automated abuse by protecting your contact lists and business from bots.

We’ve initially rolled it out to a very small group of customer accounts, and as next steps, we are planning to add it to 51���� Labs as a beta feature on the 16th of March. 

This will give you time to turn it on for yourself and experience it before it is eventually rolled out to all forms that do not utilize a double opt-in. After rolling in 51���� Labs initially and based on what we learn, we’ll plan to roll out and require it on all forms not utilizing double opt in towards the end of the month For those that aren’t interested in reCAPTCHA, we recommend enabling the double opt-in feature to your forms to filter unsolicited leads better. We’ve put together an article on .

Protecting your lists from suspicious activity

We’re also enhancing the contact submission process by adding Rate Limiting. Rate Limiting protects your contact lists from bots and other bad actors. It automatically identifies and prevents suspiciously massive submission of emails via your forms. 

Improving your email deliverability 

We know how important email deliverability is to you, and we’ve got several enhancements on the way. 

Identify and exclude inactive contacts from email sending

When you email inactive contacts, it can be detrimental to your email deliverability and reputation score. Industry best practices typically indicate that emailing any lead that hasn’t opened an email in 60-90 days, depending on the frequency of mailing, can reduce your deliverability. Even more detrimental, sometimes they’re even “spam traps” masquerading as legitimate emails.

To help improve deliverability, we’re creating a filtration process to identify inactive contacts on your list and give you the opportunity to re-engage them. The timeline for this specific feature has not been finalized yet. We’ll be sure to inform you once it is.  

Automated spam trap detection

We’re implementing new processes to identify accounts that have hit an excessive number of spam traps and require contact list remediation. This remediation requires the Hero to remove unengaged/inactive, purchased, or non-opted-in contacts. We’ve started manually applying this process and will be automating it shortly.

Operational enhancements for transactional emails

We’ve also started the process of building improved architecture and protection for our transactional emails. Transactional emails include announcements or membership credentials. This new update, along with an investment in additional resources, will ensure:

• your sender reputation stays healthy
• your transactional emails are further protected from any sort of deliverability challenges

One goal in mind: your success

We’re making these changes and investments because no one cares more about the success of your business than we do, and we recognize the important role email plays in helping your business thrive. We’ll always continue improving our platform to deliver the best outcomes for you and your business. 

We know these updates may leave you with follow up questions, so we’ve created an to help clarify any you may have.