Best Practice Advice

Best practice tips to improve and maintain your email delivery

The issue of deliverability is as old as the email marketing industry itself but it should by no means be overlooked. Deliverability means getting your email delivered to the intended recipient however, as a marketer there are a number of issues that can prevent this from happening. Deliverability is based on a number of variables; sender reputation, domain names and the IP addresses used to send the messages as well as the content and relevance of the messages themselves. It is fundamental for email marketers to understand and take ownership of maintaining high levels of deliverability. Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and independent companies have developed tools and technologies to help you maintain good deliverability. There are also a number of free solutions available that you should consider using.

In this best practice article, Robert Westaway, Head of Operations at eCircle, outlines a number of free tools along with some top tips to help you improve and maintain your deliverability.

1) Database Cleansing: There are many key influencers that will determine the quality of your recipient database, and in turn the success of your email deliverability. These include your recipient acquisition policy, bounce management, prompt processing of unsubscription requests and spam complaint management.

A number of data cleansing issues can be handled automatically by your ESP. For example, if a spam compliant is reported most ESPs will track this and automatically make the subscriber inactive in your list.  You can outsource your bounce handling to your ESP, however you are still responsible for deciding how to manage the elimination of addresses.

Sending email to spam traps (addresses used by ISPs as honey pots to identify spammers) is a quick way to build yourself a bad sending reputation. They are tricky to remove from your lists, as obviously an ISP will not tell you what addresses are being used as spam traps. Additionally some spam monitoring algorithms now factor in the percentage of recipients who open the message and give a negative score to senders who have a high percentage on non-opening or dormant addresses. For these two reasons it is important to attempt to reactivate non-responsive addresses and if that fails removing them from your list after a specific period of inactivity.

Having a good reputation is under your control. The ESP broadcast platform is only half of the deliverability equation, sender’s best practices make up the other half.

2) Sender Reputation: A sender’s reputation is based on message content, complaint rates, presence of spam traps in your lists, bounce management, number of rejected addresses and unsubscriptions. You can measure your sender reputation free via IPs or website domains, such as http://www.senderscore.org or http://senderbase.org.
 
Reputation scores will show you what level of deliverability you should expect based on your reputation. You can also obtain information on the possible blacklisting of IP addresses, volume, existing spam traps on send outs via these IPs. Some ISPs like Microsoft (Windows Live Mail) offer follow-up tools. Microsoft offers a program called Smart Network Data services (SNDS) to measure day after day reputation of IPs by domain and volume according to spam complaints and bounces. This program works thanks to user panels that are regularly used by Microsoft for the scoring and classification of emails received by their subscribers. According to the panel classification, IP or domain reputations will have a positive or negative impact. Different colours represent classification:

• Green: Reputation is OK
• Yellow: To be monitored
• Red: Act urgently

Find more information here: https://postmaster.live.com/snds

Some anti-spam lists allow you to verify if an IP or domain are blacklisted or grey listed. If an IP appears in one of these lists, results of email campaigns can be badly affected. If you want to be removed from this list, you should contact them directly via their website.

3) Performance Measurement and Statistics: Measuring campaign performance is essential in monitoring deliverability. Clicks, opens and conversions are a good indicator of possible spam issues, bad reputation or unknown blocking problems (without feedback). Looking at metrics by domain and can also help you identify any big blockages. If your email statistics are dropping off you should check the points listed above as a possible cause.

4) Message Content: This aspect is often overlooked but whether your email gets delivered or ends up in the spam folder depends partly on message content.  You should consider the HTML structure, image to text ratio and any dynamic elements. You can check your HTML on websites using W3C as a reference like http://validator.w3.org.

ISPs such as Windows Live Mail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail or Mail User Agents like Outlook 2007, Thunderbird and Lotus Notes will judge whether the email should be considered as spam in different ways.  The HTML and content (images, spam words, URL….) provides you with a “spam score” and success of your campaign will depend on this spam score. Scoring tools and software are available for free on the internet. The most commonly used spam filter solution is the SpamAssassin tool: http://spamassassin.apache.org
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5) Make your Emails Relevant: Sending irrelevant emails will lower your chances of getting your message into the intended recipient’s inbox. To achieve email relevance make the most of email segmentation and targeting techniques, decide on a sending frequency and stick to it, respect any unsubscribe requests and remove dormant address.

Your email deliverability can make or break the success of your email campaigns so it is important to get it right. Your ESP should be able to guide you on best practice in this area but ultimately email delivery is a marketer’s responsibility. Make sure you send relevant messages, keep your list clean and analyse email performance alongside of your deliverability measurement.

This article is a summary of eCircle’s newsletter "Inside Digital Marketing". If wish to receive further news from the email marketing sector yourself you can subscribe here: http://www.ecircle.com/en/newsletter