There’s a lot to think about and to manage on an ongoing basis if you want to become a reputable sender capable of delivering emails that actually land in the inbox.
It’s not difficult to do things the correct way and build sender reputation, ISPs want to deliver your emails if your campaigns are exactly what you say they are – so make it easy for them to identify you and if they give you feedback, listen!
Every business that sends email needs to overcome different challenges but this handy guide should get you going in the right direction…
Use dedicated IPs
Always an important factor, dedicated IPs are still the best guarantee of good deliverability and good Email Sever Provider (ESP) relations. More and more ESPs are requiring dedicated IPs in order to join a feedback program, get whitelisted or resolve a deliverability problem. When you contact an ESP to resolve that block they just put on your domain, ticking that “dedicated IP” check box goes a long way in getting this matter resolved.
Find out more about the importance of dedicated IPs.
Use feedback loops
Feedback Loops are a mechanism whereby an ISP can send information to a marketer regarding who is clicking the “This is SPAM” button on their emails. It is typically a subscription service that any marketer can subscribe to, and works by forwarding a copy of the email sent to an email address specified by the marketer every time someone clicks the button. The marketer is then supposed to unsubscribe anyone who did click on the SPAM button, and compliance with that goes a long way in improving relations with ISPs.
Yahoo! just started offering a feedback loop in 2009, and many others have also come on board recently. We are all waiting to know when we will be seeing that Gmail FBL.
Find out more about to enroll on Feedback Loops.
Ensure compliance with international laws
More and more companies that do business online are finding that online commerce doesn’t always end at the border. Beyond the US CAN-SPAM act, are you doing everything you should be doing to ensure your emails are compliant with all International laws? Read this overview to find out what you can do to ensure that you are.
Don’t forget about open rates
It has never really been the case that open rates gave an actual count of the total number of people that opened an email campaign, it always under reported it. For starters it only works with HTML email and now many html mail clients block images by default (most open rate tracking systems work via image download).
But don’t throw away those open stats so quick. While for sure, they don’t give an accurate count of the total number of opens, they are still very useful for comparative analysis. For example, if you break out your open rates on a particular mailing by ISP say, you can get a good indication of whether or not any particular ISP is blocking you or not.
The same is true for A/B subject line testing. The difference in open rates between subject A and B is really the best indicator of which subject line performed better; a better indicator than overall response rates.
Know your Spam score
Most anti-spam software works by assigning a particular score to everything that is spammy within an email message. For example, if the email contains the word “Viagra” it will get a score of 1.0, if the subject is ALL CAPS, it will get a score of 2.0. Each of these spam points are then summed together to produce an overall spam score for the message. A very popular and open source anti-spam system called SpamAssassin considers any piece of email with a score above 5.0 to be SPAM.
It is good to know your Spam score, since if a program like SpamAssassin were to assign a score of say 7.0 or above, you could probably expect to see some major deliverability problems. Our email solution runs your content through SpamAssassin and checks whether your email will pass popular spam filters, including Outlook and Google’s Postini.
Use inbox detection software
Another very interesting tool provided by Return Path is inbox placement. How this software works is a special seed list is included with your batch mailout. This seed list includes email addresses for a wide number of ISPs, typical all over the world. After you send out your batch email, the vendor’s software then logs into those ISPs to figure out if their seed emails went into the spam folder or the inbox. This is a very effective way of knowing whether or not your mail is being seen or going JUNK.
Monitor blacklists
There are several websites that allow you to freely monitor whether or not your email is on any public blacklists or not (for example: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx). It is a good idea to check your IPs now and again at these sites to ensure you are not listed on any. Being listed on some of these blacklists can have some serious effects on your deliverability; but most have a straightforward process for requesting removal.
It is also good to check the IPs of any third party vendor prior to sending any emails with them. A good check to make sure they are doing all they can with the reputation of their IPs.
Find out more about how you can monitor blacklists using neteffekt
Don’t hide that unsubscribe link
Nobody wants anyone to unsubscribe from their marketing program, so people sometimes have the tendency to try to hide their unsubscribe link in fine print at the bottom of the email. Further, once clicked on, the process for how to actually unsubscribe can sometimes be confusing at best.
The tendency to want to try to hide the unsubscribe link should be avoided. No matter what, if you are doing Email Marketing on a regular basis, someone will eventually think it is spam and want to unsubscribe. And if they do want to, best that they click your link than click their email provider’s “This is SPAM” button. Spam complaints (people clicking the SPAM button) are the number 1 reason that an ISP will block you. So don’t hide that link thinking it will keep your list healthy, it won’t.
Authentication
There are two major email authentication schemes that have gained a fair amount of critical mass over the last few years called SPF and DomainKeys/DKIM. These systems are designed to improve the identity of the sender of an email in the hopes of reducing the possibility of phishing.
Authentication schemes are something that need to be implemented at the email infrastructure and DNS level. They are a good thing to do though, for example Yahoo! won’t allow you to subscribe to their Feedback Loop unless you are using a DomainKey or DKIM. They also likely would not be quite as helpful in resolving any deliverability issues if you don’t have one. And Microsoft (Hotmail/MSN) will always recommend that you set up an SPF record (they call it SecureID) before resolving any block.
Our solution enables you to not only use your own sending domains but also configure and monitor DKIM & SPF records.
Get to know your ISPs
ISPs and anti-spam vendors are constantly tweaking and modifying their systems to ever combat the plague of spam. As a marketer, the results of this is that one day you might get blocked, say by Microsoft. For whatever reason, your mailing habits and their software hit a confluence that resulted in Microsoft thinking you are a spammer. How do you get out of this? The only way to really get it resolved is to contact the ISP. Usually this involves submitting a ticket to their anti-spam department via an online form, then negotiating (pleading) with them to resolve the issue via email.
However, the most important thing in resolving these types of matters is to make sure to keep an open dialog with the ISP. They will always provide recommendations (many of which are already listed here) and it is important to show that you are taking those recommendations seriously. Spammers are masters of deception, so any sign of that will get you into hot water quick with an ISP. By keeping the dialog open with the ISP relations improve over time and resolution times tend to drop.
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