Today's smart marketers want to engage their customers in new ways, and that means avoiding deliverability issues that stop your communication efforts dead in their tracks. Finding the right email service provider to help you improve deliverability and build long-term relationships with customers is forefront on many marketers' minds, but how can you differentiate one ESP from another? Here are five key questions to ask when comparing ESPs:

1) Do you support all authentication methods?
A lack of authentication subjects companies to increased scrutiny from anti-spam technologies. Look for an ESP that supports Sender Policy Framework, Sender ID, DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail.

2) How do you handle and report bounces?
All bounces are not created equal. You want an ESP that reacts to hard bounces and soft bounces differently and allows you to set parameters on how they're handled. For example, you may want to allow three delivery attempts for soft bounces over a certain period of time, but remove hard bounces from your list immediately.

3) Do you provide inbox monitoring?
Look for an ESP that can tell you if your message wound up in the recipient's inbox or went to their spam or bulk folder instead.

4) Do you give your clients a unique IP address?
Some ESPs will lump you in with other clients, making you vulnerable to their mistakes and putting your deliverability at risk through no fault of your own. Generally, choose an ESP that gives you your own IP address, which also has the benefit of allowing for quicker resolution if there's an ISP block.

5) How do you check for blacklisting?
You don't want to be the last one to know you're being blocked from communicating with your customers. Make sure your ESP casts a wide net when monitoring blacklists, including checking for blacklisted domains and URLs in addition to IP addresses.

For more tips on deliverability, visit our White Papers page to download the Silverpop white paper, "Email Delivery Rates Above 95%: 16 'Must Dos' to Make it Happen."

Posted by Ted Roberts at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're mad as heck and we're not going to take it anymore. At least, that's what the results of our recent study, "Spam: What Consumers Really Think," seem to show.

To find out why people report messages as spam and how much they know about what happens when they do, Silverpop conducted an online survey of 400 email recipients age 18 to 55, and the results were eye-opening: If people don't like a message, they won't hesitate to get rid of it. And they don't care who gets hurt in the process.

While most people (76 percent) said they hit the spam button because they had not subscribed to the senders message, 30 percent said it was because they didn't trust the unsubscribe link. Another 7 percent acknowledged they had subscribed to the message, but simply didn't want them anymore; and 7 percent said they hit the spam button because of message frequency.

Another interesting finding was how people define spam. While most respondents (52 percent) defined spam as any email they haven't subscribed to, 40 percent also said it was any email they no longer wanted to receive, and 35 percent said it was email from any commercial entity.

Aside from the obvious negative brand implications of having your messages thought of with the same regard as Viagra ads and stock market picks, use of the spam button poses very real deliverability concerns for legitimate marketers. If even a tiny portion of your recipients hit the spam button, Internet service providers may decide to block all your messages from delivery.

Interestingly, the study found that 83 percent were unaware that clicking the spam button could cause a sender's messages to be blocked from other people who wanted them. And, here's the kicker: two out of three said they would continue to brand unwanted emails as spam even after learning that it could block senders' emails from reaching others who had requested them.

Regardless of whether you have permission, all the necessary technical configurations in place and a sterling reputation at the ISPs, in the end good deliverability ultimately boils down to whether your recipients perceive your message to be worthwhile.

To learn more about our findings, and to get tactics for reducing spam complaints and making sure your messages remain welcome in the inbox, you can download our study free on our Web site here.

Posted by Ted Roberts at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to a recent study by deliverability provider Return Path, commercial emailers who apply best practices get deliverability rates of 88 percent, compared to 56 percent for well-intentioned marketers who commit blunders when trying to get their email delivered at Internet service providers. Factors that caused big hits to deliverability, according to the study, included:

• Hitting a spam trap. Marketers who sent to even one spam trap—a defunct email address that ISPs use to identify spammers—saw their delivery rates plummet to 38 percent on average, versus 58 percent for senders with no spam trap hits.
• Getting on a blacklist. Those whose IP addresses were listed on one of the top 12 blacklists—lists of domains or IP addresses deemed to be sending spam—saw delivery rates fall to an average of 35 percent, versus 58 percent for senders not listed on any of the top blacklists.
• Sending to unknown users. Senders with “unknown-user” or invalid-address return rates of 10 percent or more got delivery rates of 44 percent, compared to 67 percent for those with unknown-user rates below 10 percent.

In the end, adherence to your own best practices forms the foundation for good email deliverability. But email marketers also need experts on the inside who constantly monitor the changes and go to bat for them when necessary. As Silverpop’s director of deliverability and ISP relationships (you can check out my bio) I keep my eye on that moving target and do everything I can to ensure that our clients get maximum deliverability.

Stay tuned for more posts from me on all aspects of email deliverability, including reputation, authentication, list hygiene, spam filters, blacklists, white lists and all the ins-and-outs of deliverability. Until next time, see you in the funny papers.

Posted by Ted Roberts at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)