A lot of people sign-up to receive email newsletters from their favorite businesses, but they weren't quite expecting to receive daily marketing emails. In annoyance, they might mark the emails as spam or unsubscribe from the email list. This type of practice leads to an email being considered graymail.
Graymail is a mass email that a recipient agrees to receive, but they actually don't want it. This isn't the same thing as receiving spam, which is usually unsolicited by the recipient.
Characteristics of graymail include:
You might even receive graymail from a list you didn't sign up for, but this doesn't mean the email is spam. Companies frequently share and purchase email lists, which means you will inevitably receive legitimate (i.e. not spam) marketing emails that you weren't expecting. In this case, your easiest course of action is to unsubscribe.
While graymail isn't technically spam, it can hurt your email metrics if your recipients perceive your email as spam. People might not engage with your content, or worse, mark it as spam. If your emails get marked as spam too often, this could damage your domain and IP reputation. It could lead to email providers moving your emails to the spam folder where it never gets seen by the recipient. Email providers have started using priority-based inbox placement to sort graymail from the rest of the emails a person receives. For example, Gmail has three different inbox categories; Primary, Social, and Promotions.
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The Gmail algorithm sorts emails into different inbox categories. Primary emails are from people you know or engage with regularly, Social emails are from social networks and media-sharing sites, and Promotions are emails from businesses.
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If your emails are identified as graymail, Gmail will likely put them into the Promotions tab. It's a less-important inbox category, and it's possible that the recipient hardly checks it. This could have consequences, like patients missing important emails or your emails having a lower email engagement rate.
There are a few tactics that you can use to stop your healthcare email marketing from becoming graymail:
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It all comes down to ensuring your marketing emails are personalized, engaging, and relevant, but of course, healthcare providers must also consider HIPAA implications as well. Paubox Marketing allows healthcare providers to send HIPAA compliant email marketing. You can send personalized emails protected with the latest TLS email encryption directly to patients' inboxes.
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Yes, Paubox Email Suite Plus comes with robust inbound security tools, including spam filters. A healthcare business can configure spam filters to be more or less strict and flag certain emails to be sent to quarantine. Our security tools also stop threats like viruses, malware, and phishing emails from entering a user's inbox. Paubox Email Suite Plus also comes with our patented ExecProtect feature that lets you say goodbye to ever receiving display name spoofing emails. Paubox is easy to integrate with your current email provider, including Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. This means that your employees can send HIPAA compliant email directly to a patient's inbox without using client portals or login credentials.