The Approval Process
We go to great lengths at Cloud 9 to ensure we can offer you a reliable service with great deliverability. An incredibly important part of this effort is ensuring Cloud 9′s email marketing is never abused by spammers, and also to ensure the “good guys” are behaving themselves and sticking to best practice.
How the approval system works
Before you can send your first larger campaign (to more than 500 recipients or so), a member of our approval team will need to check out your creative and subscriber list to ensure it complies with our anti-spam policy.
We do this by asking you to answer two quick questions after you’ve imported your campaign content and set the recipients for that campaign. You’ll notice an alert pointing you to these questions at the top of the Campaign Snapshot, like the screenshot below.
Clicking the link in this notice, or proceeding to the next step in the Create/Send process will take you to an approval form just like the one below.
As soon as you complete the form and provide us with an answer about how you obtained permission to contact your recipients, an email will be instantly sent to our approvals team. They can then check out your creative, subscriber list and the explanation provided.
9 times out of 10 they will approve your campaign on the spot and send you an email confirming the campaign will be ready to send. This is normally a one-off process, but you may need to be reviewed again if you send to a significantly larger list. In most cases this process shouldn’t take more than 12 hours to complete, however please allow for this.
How can I get approval in advance to avoid any delays?
To get your campaign reviewed and approved in advance, we recommend going through the steps mentioned above (actually creating the campaign, importing the content and selecting the recipients) a day or two before you plan on sending the campaign. This will give our team more than enough time to approve your design and also leave plenty of time for you to make any changes we might occasionally request.
We changed to Cloud 9 and they pointed out where we were going wrong with targeting and content, and made some suggestions that we had not thought of before. When our next edition went out we instantly enjoyed a massive improvement in positive click rates.
