E-mail Marketing: Three Keys to Successfully Maintain a Good E-mail Reputation

E-mail marketing is effective only if it reaches its intended recipient’s inbox. The Direct Marketing Association and e-mail marketing firm Bigfoot Interactive, in their white paper,”Authentication, Accreditation and Reputation--for Marketers,” offer three keys to ensure your e-mail marketing efforts arrive at the intended destination.

1. Maintain good e-mail list hygiene. E-mail address providers often blacklist entities that send e-mail to too many non-existent addresses, the white paper’s authors state. Spammers often randomly generate e-mail addresses to send to, resulting in many addresses that aren’t real. Address providers do acknowledge there is a lot of churn in terms of consumers changing e-mail addresses, but it’s generally accepted that marketers should aim to keep invalid addresses to less than 10 percent of each mailing, say the authors.

2. Develop a sound e-mail sending infrastructure. Spammers often redirect bounces from the bad addresses they’ve e-mailed to spoofed, non-functional or non-existing e-mail addresses.”Legitimate e-mailers are expected to be capable of receiving the volume of bounces that typically accompany any high-volume e-mail campaign,” notes the white paper. Automated reputation systems or mailbox provider abuse desk professionals often consider not accepting error replies for bounced e-mail addresses as suspicious and may not accept future e-mails from those sources. You should be able to receive at least 90 percent of messages that are bounced back to you.

3. Keep e-mails relevant. One of the major keys to developing a good reputation is keeping complaint rates from your e-mail recipients low. The best way to do that is to ensure that any e-mails you send are as relevant as possible, say the white paper’s authors. Many mailbox providers believe there should be little to no reason for a consumer to complain about legitimate e-mail. As a result, mailbox providers keep their tolerance for any complaints very low. A good complaint rate recommended by the authors is less than 0.1 percent.