Development Seed Blog

How You Can Fix It

In my last post, I took a quick spin through some email deliverability stats and explained how to judge how much deliverability should matter to you. Today I'd like to share some quick ideas about exposure to deliverability issues and what you can do to diagnose and treat the problems, if you have any. If you are using an email provider you're probably okay, but it's always good to know about deliverability to make sure that your vendor is on top of it.

State of SPAM Filtering by Email Providers

You may wonder why your email could be filtered or blocked in the first place. Well, back in the day most SPAM filtering was based on keywords in your email. That's no longer the case, and now ISPs are paying much more attention to the behavior (reputation) of you as a sender or more accurately the reputation of the IP address that your email is sent from. Ken Magill explains in Direct what he identifies as the three biggest factors leading to deliverability problems:Spam complaint rate: the percentage of people complaining that that a marketer's email is spamUnknown user rate: the percentage of the mail going to email addresses that no longer existHitting spam traps: ISPs often turn unused addresses into spam traps - hit these, and there is going to be troubleThe first and second issues are functions of your opt-in policy. If you are making sure that your users actually sign up for your emails, have a solid opt-in list, and are clear to prospective signups that you are going to email them on a regular basis, then you should be good to go. If you are just subscribing every email address you come across or don't clearly tell users that you are going to email them, then you are going to get a lot more complaints. If this sounds like you, it's time for a new opt-in policy.

The last issue - the unknown user rate - is even easier to control. First, check to make sure that your email software isn't repeatedly sending messages to addresses that bounce. If there is no way to prevent this, that means you'll need to clean your list after every send. This will be fairly time-consuming, but it is something you should do (or signup with a more robust email system). Really it comes down to a math problem - cost of lost revenue/action/education and manual cleanup   vs. subscription fees and transition costs). Your answer may vary depending   on your needs.

Am I Being Blocked?

Only you can answer this question. Well, actually that's a lie. ISPs usually get your "reputation" information from other providers, who thoughtfully allow you to check your reputation for free (thanks to Dr. Pease for pointing these out in an email to the Progressive Exchange and to Mark Rovner for posting it on his firm's blog. A few other reputation monitoring options are Secure Computing's TrustedSource, ReturnPath's Sender Score, and Ironport's SenderBase.

One other way to check your deliverability rate is to check segments of your email lists. If you know your average response rates for your emails, just calculate the average scores for the biggest chunks of your list. If you are seeing seriously lower response rates for your gmail or hotmail subscribers, you may have a deliverability issue.  

Whitelisting

If you decide not to use an email provider, you may want to consider signing up with white listing services to help you with ISPs. Listing isn't that expensive, but it will take some work. It's kind of like getting an SSL certificate in that they will want to verify that you're an actual organization before moving forward. The two best ones I have seen are

Goodmail Certification:  This is the system used by AOL, AT&T, Yahoo, Comcast, Cox, RoadRunner, and Verizon as part of their filtering services. A sending IP can become Goodmail certified in a week for a one-time fee of $399. The upside is that it not only assures that your email arrives but also that images won't be blocked by default - which is very important for sales or donation email response rates. Goodmail requires six-months of history sending from a dedicated IP for certification, so you may not be able to sign up right away or if you don't send emails from a dedicated IP address.

Senderscore Certified: This is a similar service with a similar fee ($400 one-time) for nonprofits that's been used by Hotmail (er... Windows Live Mail). It's pretty much the same service as above - in services it provides you and the steps to apply.

Assessing ROI

If you go through all of that, you'll want to go back and prove to your boss that you made a difference. Thankfully, this is relatively easy. Simply go back to your segments and see if the balance returns to your response rates. There will be a lot of noise since email responses do vary, but if you found a serious deliverability problem you should see a substantial improvement. It may take a while to kick in, so keep an eye on it.  

And beware - by this time next year the ISPs will have come up with a whole bunch of new hurdles for you to jump through.