The art of deliverability

By: Tim Roe | November 11th, 2009

Deliverability management is sometimes regarded as the black art of email marketing. This is due to the complexity of the issues and solutions deliverability offers. Deliverability relies on technical good practices, such as ISP friendly delivery management and authentication, and the correct interpretation of the response metrics to determine a recipient’s engagement.

All metrics need to be considered when you are trying to identify what is causing delivery problems. Solutions generally focus around the application of modern direct marketing principles and practice, and the change of focus to the customer. It’s not about what “you” (The Marketer) want to send; it’s about what “they” (The Customer) want to receive.

Reputation matters

The rules and solutions for dealing with spam seem to change daily. As spammers constantly change how they send their spam, the ISP’s and filtering companies have to change how they combat it. This has a knock on effect on us all, and it is important to monitor changes in ISP behaviour (blocking, throttling, junk box placement).

Improving your sending reputation is one of the best ways to avoid the spam folder. ‘Sender Reputation’ is the classification put on an email sender, to determine whether the emails sent are more or less like spam. The data used to determine this changes from organisation to organisation. Some use one or two data points like “complaints” and black list inclusion, others use multiple data points like bounces, volume, authentication, and other third party “reputation” scores.

Sender Reputation has most recently become one of the key drivers that determine whether you go into the Inbox, or into Junk.

Customers rule

A number of ISP’s have suggested they use the sender’s reputation to set a delivery priority in times of high load. This leads to the companies with the best mailing practices being affected the least by increases in spam volume, and general mail volume. It also goes on to follow that those mailers with a neutral, or poor reputation seem to suffer regular delivery issues, as, understandably, their unwanted mail is “de-prioritized”.

ISP’s are trying to protect their customer’s inboxes from unwanted mail and to do this they monitor the behaviour of recipients. They are trying to determine what email is wanted and what is not. So it’s not really the ISP’s that are setting the rules and causing the delivery issues, it’s your customers. More often than not, delivery problems can be tracked back to the poor use of customer data, causing recipients to be sent emails they don’t want to receive.

It’s understandable why untargeted mass mailing is very tempting; email is very cheap, why not go by the law of averages and bombard as many people as possible? However when sending unwanted emails you run the risk of alienating customers and damaging the future potential of your list (and getting blocked of course!)

White Lists

Getting on a white list will certainly help deliverability as it is like a free pass into an inbox. The difficulty however is getting on the white list to start with.

The largest and most important “White List” is the Sender Score Certified scheme, run by Return Path. This “White List” is used by Hotmail and Yahoo among many others. To become eligible to join this scheme, you must comply with stringent criteria both technical and best practice related, so it’s not a license to “SPAM”.

By complying with the schemes criteria, you get default inbox placement, as well as images and links enabled, and with some receivers, you are able to bypass some of their filtering technology. You also get less stringent throttling limits. It’s a great scheme to be part of, but you do need to stay on top of your mailing programs to ensure they continue to reach the high standards required.

You can run but you can’t hide

Recently some ISP’s have admitted that they are monitoring an increasing number of metrics, to try to determine whether an email is wanted or not. In the past, the reputation metrics were complaints, hard bounces, volume consistency, authentication, trap hits and RTBL inclusion. The new metrics are the ones that we, as marketers, are more familiar with, being opens and clicks and unsubscribes (through the list unsubscribe header).

So, if you are sending out email campaigns that go mostly into junk, and have 90% of the recipients neither opening nor clicking, you can be pretty certain that the writing is on the wall for your current mailing practices.

Like the ISP’s, over the last few years RedEye has been looking closely at the subject of “engagement”. By pulling together multiple online and offline data points we have been using this to drive the mailing selections for campaign segments. I see this type of approach as being essential for future customer communications via email, driving relevancy and improving customer relationships.

The other change for the future, will be the gradual move over to domain based reputation; meaning it will be the domain that you are sending from, and the domains within your emails that will be tagged with your reputation, not only your IP. This will be good news for the marketing departments who have built a good reputation for its company’s domains, but bad news for those who haven’t. Unfortunately you can’t just swop IP’s (or ESP’s) to get around poor reputation.

The future’s segmentation

Deliverability is 20% technical (authentication, volume throttling, etc) and 80% what you do with the data.

As I have said before, the goal of many of the ISP’s now is to ensure all “wanted” emails get into the inbox. Those that aren’t wanted end up in junk or blocked or just disappear into the ether.

Getting back to direct marketing basics and choosing an email segment by its relevance, activity and likelihood to buy should be the first priority. With direct mail we segment to improve ROI (due to the cost of the media) but with email, we segment for “relevance” and deliverability, which improves impact and ultimately leads to better ROI.

2 Responses to The art of deliverability

Gary Martin says:

November 14, 2009 at 8:07 am

I have a website that is due for launch. It is for clinicians to send videoclips of home exercises to their patients’ email address. The deliverability of these clips is currently poor due which is frustrating as the patient wants the exercises. In most cases I think they are rejected by company filters (when emails are sent to business addresses) and don’t even reach spam folders. Is there anything we can do about this. I appreciate this isn’t to do with email marketing (that will come very soon after this beta testing) but I suspect the principles are the same. Can anyone help ?

Reply
- Tim Roe says:
  
  November 26, 2009 at 1:15 pm
  
  Hi Gary
  I think the general answer to this, is that firewalls treat anything that is an attachment, as suspicious, as this is a common mechanism for virus delivery.
  It might be worth experimenting with a link in the email, that will download the video to the client (once clicked), so in effect you will be using the email to deliver the link, and not the video file.
  Are the emails from your servers being delivered, if they are sent without an attached file?
  
  Reply