7 Ways to Improve E-Mail Deliverability
A recent whitepaper from the e-mail marketing firm StrongMail, called Mastering Your Email Reputation: Seven Strategies for Improving Deliverability, provides tips to multichannel marketers looking to improve the effectiveness of their e-mail campaigns. Among others, the whitepaper lays out best practices to improve sender reputation to protect against e-mails being filtered or blocked by Internet service providers (ISPs), preventing them from reaching consumers’ inboxes. Here’s a look at the whitepaper’s seven strategies.
1. Maintain a clean list. Sending to bad addresses not only skews response rates, it’s a core metric ISPs use to determine sender reputation, the whitepaper notes. To maintain a clean list, consider the following tactics:
* Bounce management: Have a system in place to automatically process and categorize varying bounce codes. To implement this system effectively, capture all data streams, including asynchronous and synchronous bounces; interpret the data by processing bounce data and the varying bounce descriptions that come from each receiving domain; organize the data into logical categories, such as hard bounce, soft bounce, block and technical failure; take action based upon the data, including creating reports that address the causes of failures; and update your rules continually to keep up with the dynamic e-mail environment, which causes ISPs to periodically update bounce codes.
* List hygiene: To keep deliverability rates high, scrub your list regularly by running it against a register of known bad domains and role accounts; remove and/or correct bad domains by reviewing failure reports, identifying bad addresses, and evaluating whether they’re the result of a data capture problem or a nonexistent domain; remove distribution accounts simply by adding “info@*,” “sales@*” and other common addresses to your suppression list; remove inactive addresses (customers without any opens or clicks within a 12-month period); and use data checkers on your Web site to help ensure e-mail addresses are properly formatted before accepted into the database.
* Feedback loops: This tool enables you to stop sending e-mails to customers who’ve indicated they no longer wish to receive your communications. Popular feedback loops are offered by AOL, Comcast and Windows Live Hotmail.
* Spam traps: Take every precaution possible to avoid sending to a spam trap, including using a confirmed opt-in process for collecting e-mail addresses to prevent someone from inputting a spam trap address.
2. Adopt e-mail authentication. Authenticating your e-mail enables receiving domains, reputation service providers and other related entities to establish your identity and associate a reputation with it, the whitepaper says. Unauthenticated e-mails often are assigned negative points by spam filters, which can lead to your e-mail getting sent to the junk folder, the whitepaper adds. Currently, two forms of e-mail authentication are being used: IP/Path-based and Cryptographic.
3. Reduce complaint rates. Develop and implement a strategy to keep customers from hitting the “this is spam” button. This will positively affect your sender reputation and at the same time improve response rates and customer satisfaction, the whitepaper says. To accomplish this, send relevant messages, manage the frequency with which you contact your customers according to their wishes and strictly adhere to your company’s privacy policy.
4. Monitor your sender reputation. Take advantage of the following resources to assess your sender reputation:
* Blacklists/blocklists: Check regularly to make sure your domains and IP addresses aren’t listed on these lists used by ISPs and spam filtering providers. Some of the more popular lists include http://www.spamhaus.org, http://www.spamcop.net and http://www.mailabuse.org.
* SenderScore.org: This tool from reputation service provider Return Path evaluates your sender reputation. By creating a user account, you can enter your domain or IP address and receive a score based on compiled data from ISPs to help determine what kind of sender you are.
* Key performance indicators: Track your performance on metrics including complaints, unsubscribes and inbox delivery rates.
5. Avoid alliances with disreputable partners. Assess the sender reputation of any potential marketing partner the same way you would your own IPs and sending domains. A partner’s bad sending reputation can have a lasting negative affect on your e-mail campaigns, the whitepaper cautions. This includes posting a link to its site in your promotional e-mail, causing your message to be blocked as well.
6. Verify setup of commercial e-mail server. Check that your e-mail is being delivered by a commercial e-mail server that’s set up properly to guarantee it will be recognized correctly by receiving domains. Consider assigning separate IPs to your promotional and service-based e-mails, the whitepaper advises. Because marketing messages are sent in high volume and more likely to be miscategorized as spam by recipients, they’re more susceptible to reputation issues. By isolating your promotional e-mails from your transactional e-mails, you can better protect the reputation of this business-critical communication channel with your customers.
7. Ramp up new IPs slowly. ISPs are very cautious of allowing large amounts of e-mail into their systems from new, unrecognized IPs. To properly build your reputation on new IP addresses, throttle back the amount you send until you’ve established a positive sender reputation. E-mail smaller segments of your list, testing to make sure those e-mails are being delivered, including hard and soft bounces, and unknown user and complaint rates. Start with your most active customers to help reduce complaint rates. As you begin to see optimal delivery and complaint rates, gradually increase the percentage of your list until you get into full production.
The entire copy of the whitepaper can be accessed at www.strongmail.com/pdf/sm-wp-email-reputation.pdf.
