Never Heard of 'Graymail'? Here's What You Need to Know

您可能知道它是火腿。或培根（拼写为“ BACN”）。我想电子邮件营销人员有一个penchant for meat products.

莫st people, however, just call it graymail.

Never heard of it? I hadn't either, until a coworker casually dropped it in conversation and left me with a few dozen follow-up questions. Here's what I learned.

What is graymail?

Graymail是您选择接收的电子邮件，但真的不想要。

例如，您知道当您购物时，购买了一些东西，在结帐过程中，有人向您询问您的电子邮件地址，以便他们可以向您发送交易吗？您从它们那里收到的随后电子邮件通常是一种Graymail。从技术上讲，您选择接收这些电子邮件，但是大多数人会厌倦它们，并且不会与它们互动。

ISPs know these messages are graymail based on recipient engagement -- or lack thereof. So if you open an email from a retailer -- and then never open or engage with their subsequent 50 or so emails -- it's a good sign that it's graymail.

Over time, ISPs learn what you consider graymail based on your actions -- and the actions of all recipients across email sent from that domain -- so it gets smarter with categorization.

What不是格雷梅尔？

Again, graymail isn't spam. It's content that's perceived as spam-like, in that recipients often don't want the email and may mark it as spam out of annoyance -- but it doesn't meet the legal definition of spam.

It's also not the same as graylisting, a term you may have heard a few times. Graylisting refers to the idea that ISPs might not deliver an entire batch of mail all at once if they don't trust your IP. So let's say you just got a new dedicated IP and want to send out 100,000 emails -- they might accept some of those emails, graylist the others, and send the remainder when they know it's safe to deliver messages from you.

Graymail and graylisting, however, aren't directly related -- they just both have gray in the name.

Graymail去哪里？

So you've got all this graymail out there -- where does it go?

A lot of companies have come up with products specifically to address graymail. That's what Gmail's Priority Inbox is, for instance. Hotmail actually helped coin the graymail term and created a product to address it, as well.

如果您的消息被识别为Graymail，则可能会被路由到Graymail产品之一（例如您的促销文件夹）。因此，它得到了交付...但可能没有被看到。

Graymail如何影响电子邮件营销人员？

Graymail is another reason to do what good email marketers already do: focus on segmentation, personalization, and engagement. You should:

• Use post-send engagement data制定一种策略来打击Graymail可能将您的消息路由到其他收件箱选项卡和文件夹中的潜在客户。
• Test your email send frequency.
• Develop re-engagement campaignsfor contacts who have stopped engaging with your messages.
• 工作以始终改善您的细分规则，以便您可以发送更多个性化的相关内容让收件人take time out of their day to seek out and read

这样，Graymail实际上是伟大的for email marketers -- because it sets aside marketing emails for a time when recipients are in the mood to be marketed to. And when they're in the mood and have the time to consume marketing emails, they have all of those messages at their fingertips. It's a better experience for the recipient and, thus, a better result for the marketer.