We can all think of those annoying emails we get from companies we don't know. And where do those emails end up? Spam. That's the last place we want to see your emails go. You also wouldn't want to waste resources sending emails to bots and undeliverable email addresses.

To help your email deliverability, your account may undergo approval to ensure the subscribers you're emailing are ready to receive and likely to engage with your emails. Approvals are a normal part of sending email through any email service provider, which are meant to help:

• Keep spammers away.
• Confirm users follow regulations and best practices for email content and subscriber acquisition.
• Protect the email-sending reputation of all users of our platform.

It's important that you have permission to send marketing emails to subscribers, and that they're familiar with your company through continued communication. A current subscriber should have opted in for email marketing and received an email within the last 12 months.

Before we start, there are two things to note if you trigger an approval while trying to send a campaign:

• You won't be able to send that campaign until the approval is complete.
• Your campaign will not automatically send once you are approved. You will need to manually schedule and send it afterward.

In this guide

1. When you need to be approved
2. Prepare for an approval
3. Start the approval process
4. After account approval
5. Frequently asked questions

When you need to be approved

Approvals are triggered based on the number of subscribers you're sending to. This can vary based on how long you've been using the platform. Your account may need to be approved more than once, depending on how rapidly your audience grows.

Other situations might trigger an approval, such as abnormally high bounce​ or spam complaint rates​.

Prepare for an approval

The turnaround time for approvals is faster if your account and email content are in good standing. To guarantee a faster approval process, follow the guidelines below.

Legal requirements

Make sure to follow all applicable legal requirements (for example, CAN-SPAM) for the countries you are sending emails both to and from.

Subscribers

For subscribers, we check the following:

• How you obtained them.
• Whether they opted into your email list voluntarily.
• Whether they can opt out of your email list whenever they want.
• Previous interactions with your emails.

How to prepare your subscribers

Make sure that:

1. Your email address collection methods comply with the legal permission guidelines and anti-spam policy.
2. Subscribers can easily opt out through a single click unsubscribe link​ if they no longer want emails from you.
   

You'll need to provide us with:

1. Every method used collect email addresses (i.e. from an email signup form on your website, or a list collected at an in-person event).
2. Written or digital proof of permission. For example:
   • The URLs for your website signup forms.
   • Scanned copies of offline signups.
   • Copies of confirmed opt-in by personal email correspondence.

When describing where you got your email addresses from:

• Be descriptive and specific about the actions subscribers took to opt in. Telling us, "They signed up at trade shows and in our store" is good, but you should be more specific. We need to know exactly how or why they signed up at those locations.
• For offline signups, explain in detail how users joined. For example, did they verbally agree to be on your list, or sign a form during an event?
• If your recipients are paying customers, tell us how long ago they were customers, and how often you've emailed them since they purchased from you.

Email content

We take email content seriously, since spam complaints against your emails can affect other customers who use our platform.

Follow the content guidelines below to help reduce spam complaints. We will follow up with you after the initial review if we require any content changes.

How to prepare your email content

Make sure that:

1. Email content complies with our acceptable use policy.
2. Email content matches your subscribers' expectations for the type of content they signed up for.
3. Emails contain the sender's name and physical address.
4. You include a permission reminder that clearly explains to the recipient how or why they're receiving your emails.
5. You clearly identify yourself or your organization in your emails. The "From" name and email address should accurately identify the person or business sending the email, and your subject line should make clear to subscribers what you're sending to them.

Avoid:

1. Content about third party products or services. A line in the fine print that says, "we'll occasionally email you affiliate content" tells us you're at least trying to be honest - however, many recipients might ignore the fine print and report the email as spam.
2. Unsubscribe links that are hard to find.
3. A complicated unsubscribe process. For example, forcing recipients to enter their email address or check boxes to unsubscribe.
4. Content that resembles spam, such as subject lines including spammy terms like "FREE! WIN! SALE!" or image-heavy emails with very little text content.
5. Irrelevant content, or content that doesn't match your subscriber's expectations. 

Start the approval process

You can start the approval process from multiple places on the platform. However, you will only see the option to start the process when you are approaching or have triggered an approval.

Before this happens, it's worth preparing your account and email content to ensure that the approval process will go as quickly as possible.

• Pre-approval
• Approval from campaign snapshots
• Submitting your request for approval

Pre-approval

Pre-approval is the best way to avoid delays in your campaigns sending. When you're approaching an approval, you'll see a message on the Overview and Campaigns dashboards.

To start the pre-approval process, click Request approval, then complete the form to submit your account for approval.

Approval from campaign snapshots

When the total number of subscribers you're sending to exceeds what you've been previously approved for, you'll see a prompt to begin the approval process. When you see either of these messages, it means that your account has been "flagged" to require approval to send emails.

Here is how you can request approval:

1. Navigate to the Email app, then select the Email Campaigns tab at the top of the page.
2. Click on one of your email campaigns from the list.
3. Select Assistant at the bottom-right corner of the page.
4. Click Request approval.
   

Submitting your request for approval

To ensure that you are approved quickly, please provide as many details as possible. Here are some tips for providing detailed answers on the approval form:

How were subscribers added to your list?

How did you obtain the subscribers' permission to be emailed? This permission must be specifically for marketing/ongoing emails from your company. Attach examples of where people have signed up such as form URLs or screenshots. If the subscribers' emails were collected offline, share how the permission to email was collected.

When were the subscribers last emailed?

Email permission is not valid after 12 months of inactivity. At that point, the subscriber may not remember you and mark your email as spam.

If you haven't emailed this list yet, be sure to share the timeline of when the addresses were collected. This must also be within the past 12 months.

How have you emailed these subscribers in the past?

Share the campaign and/or automation name from Marketing 360®. If you did not use Marketing 360® to send your past emails, share the name of the other program you used.

Please provide more details about past campaigns

What was the purpose of previous emails? If you have reports, share them.

Confirm whether or not all bounced, unsubscribed, and spam complaint addresses have been removed from your subscriber lists.

After account approval

After your account has been approved, campaigns can be scheduled or sent and journeys can be turned on.

Be sure to turn on any journeys that were previously on before the account was flagged for approval. If anyone missed joining the journey, you may consider re-triggering the journey for that group.

Frequently asked questions

How long will my approval take?

All approvals enter a queue. It can take up to 12 hours for the submission to be received, although it's usually much quicker. From there, the time it can take to complete an approval can depend on:

• First time approvals for new accounts — These often take longer than subsequent approvals, and can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to complete.
• Subsequent approvals — Usually completed within a few hours.

If you provide all information required through the approval form, then the approval process will go faster.

How will I know I've been approved?

You will be contacted via email when you've been approved.