Overview

When you send your SmileBack NPS surveys you may run into some common issues. In the journey through the various servers and routers that each email makes there are a number of pitfalls. These can include overactive security policies, full mailboxes and server downtime. We have built our email service with this in mind and followed industry best practice to get our success rate as high as possible. There are also a number of practical steps you can take to improve deliverability.  

What SmileBack does

• Before the launch of NPS we thoroughly tested our mail server to identify and fix any issues.
• We include an unsubscribe link in all NPS emails, an important feature to demonstrate the legitimacy of the survey emails to receiving mail servers.
• We check our performance against independent benchmarks, scoring 10 out of 10 with mail-tester.com and 99% with senderscore.org.
• We tested the appearance of our NPS survey emails across dozens of email client and browser versions using the industry-standard software Litmus. This informs the email preview we show during the set-up process.

What you can do

• Before you start your first NPS campaign, check your contacts list for any outdated or inactive email addresses, this will reduce the number of bounced emails and protect the sender reputation of the SmileBack email survey.
• Tell your customers to expect NPS. When you're ready to start your first campaign, let your customers know what to expect. That gives anyone who strongly objects a chance to let you know, so you can exclude them. And the other customers will know to look out for your survey, meaning better open rates. We have a sample text for an email here.
• Use the custom domain option provided in the NPS set-up. This means you can give SmileBack permission to send email from your company's domain. Your customers will recognize this domain and be more likely to open the email.
• Keep your sender addresses for your helpdesk, NPS surveys and marketing emails separate. This will help reduce the chances of issues with one address affecting the others.
• Ask you customers to add the sending email for your surveys to their contacts list and/or SafeSenders list in their email client.
• Ask customers to whitelist your sending address and our email server's IP address with any third party email security services, such as Barracuda and Mimecast. Our server is smtp.smileback.com
  at IP: 18.219.199.40.
• Follow best practice with your subject lines. Words and phrases such as "free", "time limited" and "for your review" are often avoided by savvy subject line writers as they can increase the chances of your email being marked as spam.