Introduction
When it comes to eMarketing, the critical metric that marketers traditionally use to determine their overall email program's success is deliverability. Without high deliverability performance marketers cannot move beyond the basics to build customer relationships, grow robust opt-in lists, scale email programs and generate new revenue. This white paper provides a quick and compelling roadmap for discovering new tactics to increase email delivery performance rates.
Let's define deliverability. Deliverability in email marketing is all about reputation, more specifically an organization's 'email reputation.' Understanding the many reputation-based obstacles a marketer's communication will face on the way to its destination is critical to boosting email deliverability rates.
The Obstacle Course
In today's complex world of email marketing, these obstacles can take the form of automated spam filters at the service provider (ISP) or desktop level that rate and filter through only email that meets a certain set of criteria. However, obstacles are more and more taking the form of 'Human' filters recipients, who feel that a message is not relevant enough to them, and therefore block a marketers' communications or report an organization to their ISP. With AOL, Hotmail, Outlook and Yahoo! taking up most of the space, marketers cannot afford complaints to ISPs.
With all these obstacles in the way, a marketer's task of delivering their message becomes even more difficult. And if this weren't enough as even the most diligent email marketers know too well filters that keep out real spam also block 'good email' from reaching its destination. By recent estimates nearly 21 percent of all permission-based sent email suffers from 'false-positives' (diligent permission-based email flagged as spam) and never reach the intended inbox. At the going rate, erroneously blocked permission-based email will cost marketers $400 million by 2008.
While industry analysts agree that the numbers are finally starting to trend in the right direction, they still remain significant enough to cause concern. However the reality for many marketers is that they still don't have the time, budget, resources or expertise to understand the complexity of the evaluation process to ensure their next email campaign gets into that all-important inbox. The chart below shows just how big 'false-positive' rendering of email messaging is for organizations.
Filtering the Noise
More and more consumers are adopting new technologies to help them 'box out' all that excess noise. As a result, spam filters have become a mainstream across nearly all marketing channels. A Forrester Research study found that 57 percent of US email users have filters built into their Web-based email applications and 55 percent into their ISP or workplace applications. That's a significant number of consumers trying to 'box out' a marketer's message.
What's an email marketer to do?
Assuming a marketer already has a wellmanaged subscriber list here are a number of high-impact tactics that are sure to help your organization elevate their 'email reputation' and increase deliverability performance. Remember, 'do onto others as you would have others do onto you,' may sound like a clich, but when it comes to the most important factor impacting email marketing today, it couldn't be more relevant.
ISP Filtering: Tactics for Success
With anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of a typical email list made up of AOL, Hotmail, Outlook and Yahoo! customers, optimizing email communications with ISPs has long been a top challenge for business-to-consumer (B2C) email marketers. Paying attention to the high-performance best practice tactics below can have a significant impact on a marketer's deliverability rates.
Authenticate
Marketers may want to start by making sure their email program is compliant by ensuring a valid identity on an email through authentication. This can be done by using one of the popular protocols mandated by their ISP. Why authenticate? ISPs use authentication to identify a sender to more effectively protect their users from unwanted spam. By being authenticated marketers should avoid filtering and reduce their chance of incurring 'false-positives.'
There are two forms of authentication; IP based Sender Policy Framework using Sender Identification (SPF/Sender ID) and Cryptographic based Domain Keys and Identified Mail (DKIM). The first combines Microsoft's Caller ID for email proposal and Meng Wong's Sender Policy Framework. The second is a signature-based approached supported by Yahoo and Cisco.
