Deliverability…lifting the veil
Deliverability has long been a challenge faced by legitimate email marketers but it is still an area veiled in complexity, plagued by guess work and deluged by conflicting advice. Ray Welsh, sales and marketing director at Mailtrack explains more.
You can blow entire marketing budgets on the latest all-singing, all-dancing email campaigns. But if the message does not make it through to the intended inbox then all the investment will have been for nothing. Many email marketers are aware and understand that messages should avoid the obvious trigger words, provide clear unsubscribe links and undergo spam score testing before any campaign commences. However the deliverability debate has now moved on and the focus has shifted to ‘reputation management’.
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In truth, it is reputation management that is the foundation of good deliverability. At its simplest this is sending relevant messages to an opted-in target audience, over accepted periods of time. But as marketers look to overcome the next hurdle in the deliverability challenge, relationships with the major ISPs has come under close scrutiny.
Given that the majority of emails will pass through Googlemail, Hotmail and Yahoo, relationships need to be forged with each of these main providers. Indeed if messages are to get through, it’s essential that you remain on their ‘whitelists’ as this will ensure their respective spam filters are bypassed.
For email marketers getting added to the white list of trusted senders can significantly aid message deliverability. However getting on a white list is not easy and the process is no longer routine. Rather than a simple sign-up-and-go process for legitimate senders, white listing requires patience, persistence and legwork.
As well as content and subject line filters; all ISPs have rules in place to identify patterns of email sending behaviour that indicates spamming activity. As a result, it is essential that the data used in every campaign is up-to-date and is constantly monitored to ensure those who opt-out are not contacted. Failure to do so, risks your messages being reported as spam. This is a serious problem in the industry and a self-defeating one at that. The more zealous the email marketers are in sourcing data, the greater likelihood that their emails will be reported as spam. This in turn increases the pressure on ISPs to improve their spam filters, which ultimately makes it even more difficult for legitimate emails to get through.
To prove the legitimacy of the messages you are sending, you need to forge closer relationships with the ISPs and build a good reputation. There are formal processes for managing your reputation, but you also need to make sure that the ISPs are familiar with your organisation and as a result spend time building a rapport with the relevant person. Larger organisations may have the resources to do this, but small-to-medium sized organisations mostly don’t. Also ISPs don’t want to work with every company sending marketing emails. They can realistically only work with a smaller number of email service providers.
Moving forward, the emails we send will continue to get ‘richer’ in terms of the content included and this will result in ISPs getting tougher on fighting spam. Therefore email service providers need to be prepared to spend time and financial resources building close working relationships with ISPs. Along with the rest of Europe, we are lagging far behind the U.S in terms of the access that we have to ISPs and the deliverability of legitimate emails is suffering.
