accelerated lead generation Improving Your Email Deliverability

accelerated lead generation Improving Your Email Deliverability

Improving Your Email Deliverability ISPs NO LONGER RELY ON ANY ONE SINGLE FACTOR TO DETERMINE IF YOUR EMAIL IS SPAM OR A LEGITIMATE EMAIL. THEY USE A MULTIFACETED APPROACH TO DETERMINE WHAT IS 'GOOD' EMAIL AND WHAT IS 'BAD' EMAIL. IN A NUTSHELL, AN ISP WILL ASSIGN THE IP ADDRESS YOU ARE SENDING FROM, A SCORE. THE HIGHER THE SCORE, THE BETTER YOUR CHANCES OF INBOX PLACEMENT. Each ISP has a different algorithm they use so it s worth acquainting yourself with the top domains/isps of your email list, understanding how their scoring system works and adjusting your email sending to maximise deliverability through the top domains. Most ISPs have established Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) with messaging rules to be read and implemented before attempting to deliver mail to their domains. Acquainting yourself with these policies for receiving domains, ISPs and hosting companies and adhering to them will show a marked improvement in your deliverability rates. Email deliverability is affected by 6 basic components: Content List management Reputation Sending characteristics Authentication Accreditation Content There are many online resources and guides on email marketing content, but as far as deliverability is concerned, the one simple rule about content other than obviously getting your message across is to avoid being reported for SPAM. So you need to address two things: Your Spam Score: which is effected by keywords and content ratios Your Audience: what is their perception of you? Do they recognise you and is your content relevant? Being reported for SPAM will directly affect another important factor: your sender reputation. Getting your email content right will help you avoid being blocked by spam filters or being reported for spam. Top-tips to improve your email content: 1. Avoid large graphics, or a high proportion of graphics to plain English text, that can be scanned by a spam content filter. 2. Don't use lots of different colours for text and links.

3. Don't include an excessive number of links relative to the number of words in your email. 4. Avoid suspicious subject lines. Aside from the obvious, web text words such as 'free', 'special offer', etc. should be avoided wherever possible, as should words in full caps and lots of exclamation marks - they're beloved of spammers. 5. Double-check that your email content isn t being caught by spam content filters at the last hurdle, by using a spam checker to analyse and score your templates. 6. Make sure your content is relevant to your audience. Sending irrelevant content, even if your audience members have opted-in, may lead them to believe it is spam. 7. Consider splitting your audience and sending smaller, more targeted email shots to different sectors within your customer base, adjusting the content and message to suit the audience. List management Whether you re acquiring email addresses to build a list or regularly using and updating an existing list, there are a number of important considerations that will help to maximise its performance and improve deliverability. Acquisition First of all, consider how your acquisition process will work. Will you use single opt-in or double opt-in? Single opt-in involves the recipient merely ticking an opt-in check box on a website. A double opt-in email marketing means the recipient then receives an email from you asking them to reconfirm their subscription before being actually put on the list. Double opt-in email verification is one of the best, as it involves complete confirmation on the side of the recipient that they actually wants to receive the mail. This can lead to a safer email marketing campaign with long lasting customer relationships. Building your own email list is the most effective and trustworthy method. If you do plan to purchase an email list, be extremely careful. You need to ask as many questions as possible from the supplier as to how they collected these email addresses. Check the validity of the opt-in procedure, what questions were asked of the subscribers? Were they single or double opt-ins? What do they believe they were opting in to receive? It might be that your email messages are completely irrelevant. How old is the data? How has this list been maintained and updated? Maintenance Many marketers make the mistake or neglecting their email lists. People change their email addresses daily. 30%+ of email addresses are going to need updating each year. Some of these will be forwarded, either to a new email address or to a new recipient. Making sure your emails contain a link to change/update information will allow the recipient (old or new) to keep you informed before your email comes bouncing back. The payoffs for bounce-proofing your email list are substantial: lower customer acquisition costs, increased response rates and sales, reduced messaging and support costs, and the decreased likelihood of winding up on blacklists due to high bounce-back rates. There are two types of bounces: A soft bounce is an email message that is temporarily undeliverable. It might occur because the recipient's mailbox is full, the server is down or swamped with messages, the message is too large or the user has abandoned the mailbox. Most email service providers will attempt to deliver the email regularly for a few days. Some servers interpret bounces differently, meaning a soft bounce on one server may be classified as a hard bounce on another. Perform a sanity check on your soft bounces from time to time as some people use out of office to announce they are leaving the company. Consider setting up search strings on words like leaving, left no longer works to identify the soft bounces that require removal.

A hard bounce is an email message that is returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable. Causes include invalid addresses (domain name doesn't exist, typos, changed address, etc.) or the email recipient's mail server has blocked your server. Hard bounces should be taken seriously and removed from your email list as soon as possible. You should perceive these kinds of removals and unsubscribes as a positive thing. Processing erroneous email uses up ISP resources so they quickly lose patience with senders who repeatedly email a high percentage of unknown user rates i.e. dead or non-existent addresses, and may start blocking or quarantining your campaigns as a result. By removing bad or unresponsive email addresses, your lists are kept populated with recipients who actually want to receive your mail - which isn t just great for deliverability, it s good news for response rates too. Feedback Loops Many of the major ISPs have something called a Complaint Feedback Loop that alerts senders when their messages generate spam complaints. These feedback loops take the mystery out of email delivery as they invariably require sender registration and may have other requirements, such as meeting their other white list criteria. Even a 100% opt-in list will still receive a substantial number of FBL complaints. For years, end-users have been told not to trust email unsubscribe links, so many users hit the spam button as a way of unsubscribing. Smart marketers use feedback loops in two main ways: The first is for list hygiene: removing the subscriber from future mailings. The second is to analyse the complaint rate. Too many marketers dismiss complainants as troublemakers and malcontents. The reality is there's a wealth of data in who complains and what they complain about. Regardless of whether you believe the complaints are unfounded, if they complained - they were dissatisfied. Smart marketers aim to avoid dissatisfied customers (or prospective customers). Spam traps There are many different types of spam traps, but the ones most relevant to email marketing are honeypot and dormant addresses: Honeypots: Spammers often look for any email address listed on a website. This process is known as email address harvesting. Some organisations therefore put specific email addresses on a website for the sole purpose of attracting email harvesters. These addresses are never used for any other purpose: they are merely listed on a web page in such a way that no human would ever discover them or seek to send email to them. Any email sent to such honeypot addresses must, by definition, be spam. The address owner never added the email voluntarily to any email list: they just put it up on a website. Dormant addresses: Email accounts often fall into disuse. They are abandoned by their owners or shut down and as a result, the account is unable to receive email. Legitimate senders of email should remove such addresses as soon as they are notified that the email address is no longer in use. Some organisations will take dead email accounts and, after a suitable period of time has elapsed, repurpose them as spam traps. There is no easy way to identify spam trap addresses. They're not supposed to be easily identifiable; otherwise they wouldn't work as spam traps. So prevention is better than cure. If you're following email marketing best practices - only sending email to people who specifically requested those emails and keeping your lists clean, then by definition, your emails would never hit a spam trap address.

Honeypot addresses typically only land on your list if you're doing something inadvisable and spam-like, such as harvesting email addresses or buying lists of email addresses. Occasionally, some malicious entity will actively submit spam trap addresses to your list. Using a double opt-in approach would prevent this happening. Spam traps that are converted dormant addresses can, however, get on your list. Someone might sign up for your newsletter, then leave their job and close down the email address they gave you. In time that address might be converted to a spam trap. Top-tips for managing your email lists: 1. Never email to contacts who have not given you prior permission to email them your marketing messages- gain permission to email contacts, by providing a positive opt-in box for them to check. 2. Confirm email address validity and your permission to email, by sending a non-commercial welcome email to all new contacts. 3. Use the welcome email to invite new contacts to add you to their Safe/Trusted Senders list within their inbox or to add you to their address book. 4. Consider using double opt-in for new contacts. A welcome email requires the contact to clickthrough and confirm their details and consent. Not only will this enable you to avoid spam traps, it will build you a database of highly engaged and responsive contacts. 5. Consider collecting opt-ins offline (i.e. via call centre, customer care, sales team, registration cards). Then ensure these addresses are emailed and validated before they are added to your main contact database. 6. Always provide a highly visible link to unsubscribe in all your email messages 7. Ensure your unsubscribe link needs no more than 2 clicks on the part of the unsubscriber. Making it difficult for people to leave your list increases your risk of being reported or complained about. 8. Make sure your unsubscribe page is branded with your company name, logo etc. It will help to instil trust in unsubscribers, encouraging them to use this channel for unsubscribing, rather than clicking the Junk button in their inbox. 9. Process unsubscribe requests in real-time. 10. Ensure offline points of contact are available for unsubscribers (phone number and postal address) and that these requests are processed in a reasonable time frame. 11. Provide email address update links on your site and in all email communications. Make it easy for your customers to update their email addresses for you whenever they are interacting with your company. 12. Enable your customers to update their email addresses with a simple click-through. 13. Make sure you keep lists clean by deleting all hard bounces as soon as possible. This will also help you avoid dormant spam traps. 14. Don t ignore soft bounces. Depending on the send frequency, 3 consecutive soft bounces could be enough to classify a contact as a hard bounce. 15. Consider joining feedback loops from the top ISPs. 16. Treat your email database like you would treat your mailing database - keep it clean, up-to-date, de-duped, and free of gone-aways. Flag dead contacts and long-term inactive recipients who never respond, test email them to see if they can be reactivated, and if not then stop emailing them. 17. Determine how much a working email address is worth to you and properly analyse the results of all of your online efforts. Separately analyse the value of a new customer versus a recovered customer. Loyal, repeat customers are the stable of every successful company. Don't focus your efforts solely on new customer acquisition, put someone in charge of customer recovery 18. Develop a customer recovery plan and follow it. Determine how much time you can let pass before your subscribers will forget why they came to you in the first place? How frequently will you update your database? What is the most cost-effective process for recovering a customer? Review the costs and benefits of your options and decide what is best for you. 19. Plan your email address acquisition methods to assist with later recovery. Consider collecting a name, an alternate email address, a postal address, or a phone number.

Reputation By reputation, we are not talking directly about your company or brand reputation, but about your IP- Based Reputation. Your IP address is determined by DNS (The Domain Name System). This is a database system that translates the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for a specific computer, or host, on the Internet into an IP address. You can find out more about how the DNS system works at the following url: http://kb.iu.edu/data/aiuv.html, but for simplicity all you need to understand is that your IP address is like an online business address for your company. A static, consistent IP address will help ISPs (Internet Service Providers) see that you are a legitimate and trustworthy business. Would you trust a supplier or company who changed office address every time you spoke to them? Another element that can directly affect your reputation is Blacklists. These help keep the Internet clear of unsolicited email by giving mail providers a list of bad email senders they can automatically block and keep away from inboxes. Some lists are partially, or even completely, automated with specific listing requirements, such as the SpamCop Blocking List (SCBL) and the Open Relay Database (ORDB). Listing for the SCBL is based on complaints and spam-trap hits. Listing on ORDB is based on failing relay tests. Other lists are entirely manual, with hosts added based on spam accusations received by the list operator. What's the delisting process? The criteria can range from automatic (SCBL listings timeout on their own) to non-existent (if your server is US-based, it's impossible to be removed from us.countries.blackholes.us) and all shades in between. The process for delisting may require simply filling out a web form, making a charitable donation, or changing list management practices. Take a look at the section on accreditation for details of white lists. We ve already covered list management - another important component that will help maintain a good reputation. It can help you eliminate unknown users and avoid complaints and spam traps which could get your company blacklisted. Your sender reputation can also be influenced by sending characteristics more of this is covered later on Top-tips for building a better reputation: 1. Whether you use software or a hosted/asp solution for email marketing, make sure your email marketing server uses a static IP address. Unlike a dynamic IP address, a static IP address generally stays the same and is analogous to having a consistent phone number or physical address - it tells ISPs and the world at large that you re stable, that you ve been around, and that you plan on being around in the future. 2. Identify from your email database who the key ISPs for your campaigns are, and establish a relationship with them. Contact them to introduce yourself, explain your opt-in policy and ask for advice on how to avoid their black list. 3. Make sure your DNS entry is complete and correct. Many ISPs perform a reverse DNS lookup on incoming messages. This checks to see if there is a registered domain associated with it. If it doesn t match or the entry is incorrect, the ISP will most likely treat the message as spam. You can make sure your domain has all the correct entries by using a website like this one: http://www.dnsreport.com. 4. If you receive a bounce back with a black list message, always contact the ISP and get a named contact to speak to about the black listing. Have a copy of the bounced message to send them and be ready to explain your privacy and opt-in policies and to ask for advice on how to avoid their black list. 5. If you find you have been blacklisted, use email tools tips list for removing yourself from an email blacklist.

6. Consider using an Email Service Provider (ESP). Sending your emails via an ESP means you can benefit from their acquired reputation, white listings, accreditation and ISP relationships, built up over many years and over large volumes of legitimate email marketing. This level of reputation is priceless. 7. Choose an ESP that is signed up to Feedback Loops on the major ISPs. 8. Some email service providers will provide a ready configured domain - set up for authentication. This will also ensure you avoid the threat of an ISP blacklist impacting your day to day emails sent from your business domain. 9. Use an Inbox Preview or Email Proofing tool to check how your email templates render in different ISPs inboxes - particularly where images are turned off. Spam checking and email proofing tools are offered by some email marketing providers such as dotmailer.co.uk. 10. Follow practices required to be included on whitelists. The opposite of blacklists, whitelists provide companies with additional affirmations of their email practices. Sending characteristics Another of the factors used in this IP score are your sending characteristics: your email frequency and volume, your mail exchanger connections, sending speeds and authentication methods. Tracking your frequency and volume over time is one way an ISP gets to know your IP. ISPs like consistency - a consistent volume and a consistent sending pattern. Domain Throttling limits the number of emails to specific domains to keep on the friendly side of their system administrators. Batch Processing allows you to set the maximum number of sent messages in a given time period. And throttling will help avoid overloading the server by inserting a pause between each sent message. If you put some planning into your sending patterns and communicate consistently, you will find your deliverability to be greatly improved. Monitoring delivery rates at individual ISPs will help you pick up if an ISP has started to regard you as a spammer for some reason. This doesn t just mean monitoring non-delivery notices, it also means looking at those with a 100% success rate. The ISP could be just accepting all your mail, then dumping it into a bulk folder, or simply deleting it, without forwarding to your recipients at all. If a domain has more than 100 addresses, you really should be seeing a few failed deliveries from time to time - check your open and click-through rates to double check your mail is getting through. If you spot a problem, there are a number of steps you can take: Try slowing your sending speed; If you re sending in HTML, try plain text; Email the technical contacts for that domain. Show them you re responsible and ethical and as well as letting your email through, they may have suggestions on how to further improve your email practices. If the domain contacts are unresponsive, enlist the help of recipients - ISPs may listen to customer complaints. Top-tips for setting sending characteristics: 1. Set throttling rates to meet ISP requirements. 2. Make a list of the top receiving domains to effectively throttle email on a domain level and ensure you re sticking to receiving organisations rules for inbound connections and deliveries. 3. Send emails at a steady rate, from a dedicated, consistent IP address to help build/improve your reputation with the ISPs.

Authentication The definition of authentication is: The verification of the identity of a person or process. In a communication system, authentication verifies that messages really come from their stated source, like the signature on a paper letter. There are two methods of authentication: IP-Based: for example, SPF & Sender ID Framework (SIDF) which tie a responsible sending domain back to a set of ISP maintained IP addresses that are permitted to send mail from a domain. Cryptographic: for example, DomainKeys & DKIM which use public key encryption to sign each message in a way that proves the message came from the purposed sending domain by verifying the DNS domain of the sender and the integrity of the message. Authentication doesn t guarantee delivery into the end users inbox, nor does it put a large dent in spam immediately. But it will improve deliverability of emails, reduce phishing, spoofing and fraud because it s identity-based, which allows ISPs to determine what type of message is being sent and identify trusted senders through their domains. It also lays the groundwork for longer-term spam solutions, creating a positive identity for your company when working with ISPs and helping to protect your brands, consumers and future channel viability Top tips for addressing authentication: 1. Ensure the domain you use for sending emails is configured to enable authentication. 2. Use a dedicated domain name and IP address for your regular marketing email sends. 3. Ensure your messages are sent from a meaningful friendly from address in the message header - NOT from a string of numbers. 4. Display a privacy policy opt-in statement, and declare your identity and how you intend to use an email address at the time of collecting it. 5. Publish a complete SPF record for your domain. Many senders publish the IP addresses of their own company s internal email server in their SPF record, but neglect to list the IP addresses of their email marketing server in that record. For maximum deliverability, your organisation s SPF record should contain both sets of IP addresses. The following online tools can you help you with this: http://www.spf.pobox.com. http://www.anti-spamtools.org. 6. Display a privacy policy opt-in statement, and declare your identity and how you intend to use an email address at the time of collecting it. Accreditation Accreditation programmes are a great tool for improving deliverability. More often referred to as whitelists, having your IP address on an email whitelist is the functional equivalent of you should accept email from this IP address without reservation. And mostly, that's exactly what happens. That's because to get on one of the whitelists presently offered, the email marketer must either put up a financial guarantee as to the cleanliness of its email lists or contractually obligate itself to send only email that meets the whitelist's requirements. Commercial providers include: Return Path's Sender Score Certified (previously Bonded Sender) Habeas Safelist GoodMailSystems's Certified Email SuretyMail eco's Certified Senders Alliance

ISIPP s Accreditation Database (IADB) may also be used as a whitelist. In short, whitelisting is a useful and important tool; it may even be a necessity in some cases. However, it's not a substitute for good list hygiene and adherence to best practices and standards. It's not a panacea. Being whitelisted will not make your old and tired email list suddenly perform well. Top tips for getting your company accredited: 1. Start by applying to the whitelists of the Internet Service Providers that host at least 5% of the email addresses on your mailing list. Whitelisting information is available from each of their postmaster groups. 2. Consider Sender Authentication or Sender Certification programmes from commercial providers. emedia run effective, cost-efficient lead generation, brand awareness and clickthrough campaigns; utilising a portfolio of 70+ permission-based email bulletins sent to 5+ million UK B2B and B2C contacts. Contact emedia today to find out how they can help you with your marketing and sales campaigns. Call: 0207 098 2200 Email: sales@emedia.co.uk Visit: www.emedia.co.uk

accelerated lead generation Contact emedia today FIND OUT HOW WE CAN ASSIST YOU WITH YOUR LEAD GENERATION, CLICK-THROUGH AND BRAND AWARENESS CAMPAIGNS. Call: 0207 098 2200 Email: sales@emedia.co.uk Visit: www.emedia.co.uk emedia is a division of Reed Business Information Limited, part of the Reed Elsevier Group plc. Reed Business Information Limited is a company registered in England & Wales. Quadrant House, The Quadrant, Sutton, Surrey SM2 5AS. Company Number: 151537 VAT Number: GB 235 7235 65