Mailkit’s Guide to Schemas - Part 1

However, in light of the recent Yahoo and Google changes, it is now expected of ALL marketers to set up authentication on their sending domains, including adopting DMARC with a minimum policy of p=none. Incidentally, Mailkit has been ahead of the curve with this one - we required fully aligned email authentication for the last 5 years, including DMARC. While we in the email community are thrilled with these changes that ensure a safer ecosystem for anyone sending and receiving mail, the question is now: As an email marketer who has been following best practices, how do I stand out in the inbox?

There are always ways to improve your deliverability. For example, BIMI is a great way to improve your visibility in the inbox, making it easier for recipients to recognize your brand and feel confident that your mail is coming from you.

However, one of the lesser known (and simpler) ways to improve the overall experience for your audience, and as a result improve your deliverability, is to implement schemas. And while it might at first seem arduous of a task, once you get the schema code into your email campaigns, it is incredibly easy to save the code in existing templates and reuse them in future campaigns. First, let’s talk about what email schemas are.

What are schemas?

Schemas are tiny snippets of machine readable information in the form of microdata (HTML with special attributes) or JSON-LD (JSON for Linked Data) that are added to web pages and emails to allow search engines, email services, and other systems that support schema to understand the content better and display it more intuitively. If you are familiar with HTML, imagine adding an <h1> attribute to your HTML so the webpage knows to render that text larger than the rest of the text (because it is the most important header tag). Think of it like a shared vocabulary, which builds on top of an existing coding language. 

Using the image above as an example, you can see the 20 Euro discount is surfaced above the body of the email, to make it easy for the subscriber to see without scrolling down further. 
 
While schemas are supported by both website and email, this guide will mostly focus on schemas for email, since we are an Email Service Provider (ESP). However, if you are interested in checking out more detail on schemas for websites, we recommend this comprehensive Getting Started guide.

Schemas for Email

What ISPs support them?

At the moment, schemas for email are supported by Gmail, Yahoo, and most recently Onet, Interia, and Seznam (in the very near future!), but it is expected that more Mailbox Providers (MBPs) will support schemas as well. Additionally, many other MBPs process schemas in various ways without surfacing them – more on that below. You might not think that is enough reason to implement them, but for many senders, this segment of your list could be anywhere from 50% or more of your total sending. Even in the EU, we are seeing a steep increase in the percentage of recipients receiving mail at a Gmail or Yahoo inbox, across multiple countries. 

*= As mentioned in our previous blog post, please consider adding the Order and ParcelDelivery schemas to your emails! The more examples of these that Seznam has, the sooner this feature can start surfacing live in inboxes. 

Why are they important (to deliverability)?

If you have ever received an email after attempting to reset your password or confirm your subscription to a newsletter, and you see a one click Confirmation, RSVP, or Reset password button, you have seen schemas in action. Using the image below as an example, the RSVP button is surfaced to the right of the preview text in the inbox, and clicking the drop down arrow displays an interactive module that allows you to see the details of the event and interact with the invitation.

These schemas are designed with your recipients’ experience in mind, so they can interact with important (generally transactional) emails without ever having to go through the hassle of opening the email.

That said, the benefits of using schema microdata in email campaigns extend beyond the user experience (UX). It is certainly a lesser known fact, but there are also deliverability benefits to be had by adding schemas to your emails.

When you focus on user experience and satisfaction by adding schemas to your emails, it becomes easier for the system to analyze your mail, which in turn can allow your customers to discover and interact with relevant content that could otherwise end up buried in an email. In the long run, this convenience will result in increased engagement, and an increase in inbox placement and deliverability over time.*

*= This is of course assuming basic best practices are followed, and spam is not being sent out. Schemas are a tool, not a magic wand.

This is because when you add schema to your emails, you are making less work for these MBPs, and making it easier for their system to analyze your emails. You see, even when you do not add schemas to your email code, Google and Yahoo use a process known as Automatic extraction (auto-extraction) to pull out images, flight details, calendar invites, discount codes, and so on, and they surface them in your inbox as if you had added them yourself**. What a considerate MBP! This information is then surfaced in place of the email’s preview text (ex: discount code below), or as a clickable engagement module at the top of a campaign when it is opened (ex: event details below).

**= Bear in mind that this functionality does not happen for every single sender, but rather for very large senders where it would improve the user experience. 

While it is certainly an asset to have more dynamic, intelligent emails, auto-extraction is not without its flaws. For example, if you were hoping to boost your open rate by including a discount code, you might be disappointed when a subscriber sees the discount code and immediately jumps over to the browser to use it, never engaging with the email. That said, it is my responsibility to remind you that engagement can be measured in a number of ways outside of opens and clicks - such as website and purchase activity. All are valuable indicators, and should be used to get a broader picture of who your audience is.

Sure, there are some existing issues with auto-extraction - which is all the more reason to purposefully implement schemas in your email, to have more control over how your content is intelligently displayed in the inbox.

"But I don’t send transactional mail!"

Schemas are used for both transactional AND bulk email. Check out the different types of schemas in the coming blog posts, and how they work for specific types of mail.

Part 2 coming soon

This guide is being broken up into multiple posts, so keep an eye out for Part 2 in the next couple of weeks. We’ll discuss how to qualify for using In-App and Go-To Actions, how to test schemas before sending live campaigns, and special caveats to keep in mind to ensure no tiny details are being missed.