Deliverability is all about your reputation

There is a common misconception in the UK, that getting high deliverability rates is mainly about checking that you don’t use blocked words or bad code and ensuring that you are not black listed.

Although true, the third and most important element is your reputation as an email marketer.

Like elephants, most ISPs “never forget” and use their previous experiences of receiving mail from you to filter your mail. Like Elephants, the reputation can be the heavy weight element that decides whether your mail is delivered.

According to deliverability expert and Adestra partner, Return Path (2006), when a mail is filtered into the junk mail folder, the sender reputation can be blamed 77% of the time.

Your sender reputation is based upon:

• Email volume: sending consistent volumes
• Email infrastructure (including authentication): properly set up sending technology
• Unknown user rates: continuously emailing bad addresses
• Complaint rates: responses from recipients
• Spam trap hits: email addresses set up to identify people that are harvesting email addresses off web sites
• Listings on public blacklists: lists of know offenders
• Listings on whitelists: lists of accredited senders

Your email sending reputation is something that your ESP (email service provider) should work with you on to manage and improve. However, both your ESP and you as a marketer have responsibilities.

How to help your reputation

• Get your data in order: ensure people are suppressed if they are a hard bounce or request to unsubscribe. Keep the source and permission status of each contact in your database so you can deal with complaints swiftly. Check your data collection programs- If you employ list builders ensure they are not searching the internet and copying email addresses as they may pick up a spam trap address.

• Keep control of your marketing: if you have a large team all producing their own email marketing, make sure everyone abides by best practice. You only need one colleague to send a destructive campaign to influence everyone’s reputation

• Follow direct marketing principles: sending a loosely targeted campaign to your peripheral lists via email because “it is cheap” may make sense from a financial point of view, but also factor in the potential impact on long term deliverability if it affects your reputation.

• Keep in contact: more regular email communications to users not only help them remember that they signed up to receive information from you (it is amazing how many people use “mark this as spam” buttons simply as they cannot remember signing up to the sender) but also allows them to use your unsubscribe options should their preferences change. It also allows ISPs to ‘remember’ you and differentiates you from large sporadic senders.

• Ensure people can unsubscribe: simple, obvious unsubscribe links are key if you are to convince your recipient to choose your unsubscribe link rather than the “mark this as spam” link.

Without these steps being in place, it is very hard for ESPs to provide you with the more advanced deliverability solutions.

Free whitepapers

All Adestra clients enjoy unlimited support. Let us support you with one of our free whitepapers on email marketing:

• Challenges facing UK Email Marketers: survey of email marketers and advice on how to overcome them
• The future for email marketing: steps to take today to prepare for the future of email marketing
• Deliverability defined: business case and steps to take
• SPAM Filters demystified white paper: a marketers briefing
• How to pick the right email partner handbook
• Best practice email design: A guide for designers and marketers to creating HTML for modern email clients

For your free email marketing whitepapers, please contact us