Two good articles about ESPs

I ran across a couple of good posts about deliverability today. Both address deliverability issues people see who use ESPs.

http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2007/11/dont-expect-your-esp-to-have-t.php

http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2006/12/esps-and-deliverability-what-t.php

A couple of pertinent quotes:

“ESPs only control one out of the five possible causes of deliverability problems - infrastructure ... And, in almost all cases, ESPs do a good job about keeping up with the changing industry standards around how to send email.”

“ESPs should absolutely provide diagnostic tools that allow clients to monitor and analyze deliverability issues in real time”

The Little White Book

As I’ve discussed a bit before, it is important to ask your subscribers to add you to their personal whitelists. This allows you to bypass at least some filtering and increases your chances that your emails will be delivered to the inbox. How much impact these listings have varies by domain, ranging from being the final step in the filtering process and only allowing inbox delivery if it passed the other filters to bypassing all filtering whatsoever.

Included in these instructions can also be ways to ensure that images are turned on by default for your email. If you send HTML email, this is very important. Most email clients turn off images by default and your readers may not get your message as it was intended.

There are several good sources of info out there in terms of how to set up a page of instructions for your readers:

- This new one includes how to whitelist on a blackberry amongst others and has great tips on how to design the page.

- Another set of instructions can be found here.

- Here is an article about the importance of personal whitelisting and how many clicks it may take some readers before they can actually see your email.

How are your mails perceived?

When it comes to matters of deliverability, CAN-SPAM is merely a starting point. I once had a teacher that told me to look at laws as the bare minimum of acceptable activity. If you want people to respect you, invite you in, or simply not ignore what you have to say, people know that they have to go above what the law outlines. Things like manners, ethics and values often exceed legal expectations in terms of personal interactions. The same should be true of email legal compliance.

CAN-SPAM outlines a number of policies for senders of mail in the US and there are a myriad of international laws on the matter as well. The more important issue to senders than “can I legally do this”, is “how will sending this be perceived”. Receiving servers can block email for any number of reasons ultimately lumped together as, ‘we are trying to protect our users’. An email can be legally compliant and still find itself directed to the junk folder or worse blocked. We recently encountered a case of blocking based on URLs because they perceived emails sent from that domain as not being compliant, even though the sender responsible may in fact have been following legally acceptable practices.

The FTC certainly seems to be moving toward interpreting can-spam as a transparency issue. If it isn't clear and obvious and easy, it could be viewed as non-compliant. More importantly, however, is the damage done to the reputation of both your brand and your IP addresses if things like unsubscribing are not simple and quickly observed.

Some advice from Yahoo!

On Monday I sat in on a call with Yahoo’s Mark Risher. Mark is in charge of deliverability at Yahoo and described his role there as one of “the shepherds of the inbox”. One question that was asked was what takeaways he would like us to pass along to our clients. He responded with 4 items that senders should keep in mind:

• Ensure prompt response to unsubscribe requests. CAN-SPAM currently allows a 10 day lag time between the time that a subscriber notifies you of a wish to leave your list and the time you actually cease mailing them. It is better to remove those people from your mailings as quickly as possible. Continuing to email subscribers that have asked to be removed leads to increased spam complaints which is the highest contributor to blocking at Yahoo.
• Use data returned from their feedback loop. Yahoo recently implemented a feedback loop that is still in beta for senders utilizing domain keys. The feedback loop allows you as a sender to monitor your complaint rate. You can see if it is coming from specific portions of your list, for different content-types, frequency, or other factors. It also allows for the removal of complainers from your list.
• Be certain to use a meaningful from name and subject line. Users most often decide to open your mail based on these fields, but many also base the decision to complain on these factors alone. Emails should be clearly branded by the sender and accurately represent the content of the message.
• Avoid disreputable senders and use a consistent send strategy. He recommends not sending email from ESPs that are trying to game the system and get messages through by sending at non-peak times or other means. By consistently sending you can establish a reputation on your emails and your subscribers can become familiar with the cadence they will be arriving.

As Yahoo moves further along the path to domain based reputation it is imperative for senders to adhere to email best practices. Yahoo hosts a significant number of corporate domains in addition to the yahoo domains. While they are working on increasing transparency regarding their expectations and how you are performing, they also expect senders to do their part in keeping the users of Yahoo happy. The user is their top priority after all.

Cleaning Up a Bad Reputation

Having a bad sender reputation can wreak havoc on your deliverability. Your emails are likely to be delivered to the spam folders if they aren’t blocked altogether. This is damaging to both your brand and your delivery rates. While it is much better to get off to a good start to begin with, there are things that can be done to clean up a bad reputation. It isn’t an easy process, and, depending on how bad that reputation is, it can be a bit painful in the short term. The long term effects will pay off in the long term.

Use feedback loops

Many feedback loops provide not only the complainer’s email address, but also the mailing that is being complained about. From this information you can determine if specific types of mailings or certain cross sections of your list are causing the complaints. It could be that the opt in language needs to be updated for certain acquisition sources to alert subscribers what types of email they will be receiving. The branding on certain emails may not be obvious to alert the subscriber as to why they are receiving the emails. A simple creative revision, like adding personalized text saying “As a subscriber to Publication X, you are being sent this special offer,” may alert readers that their information hasn’t been sold or given away to a third party. Consistent branding in your from name can not only help decrease complaints but also lift open rates as found in an unreleased study conducted by Silverpop. Any patterns that can be found in your complaints are a good place to start finding problem areas with your emails. Read more about this topic here.

Revise bounce processing rules

High unknown user rates can be another source of bad reputation. While high rates of bounces will cause blocking in and of themselves, it is important to remember that after an email address has been abandoned for a few months it can be converted into a spam trap. Hotmail offers a program called Smart Network Data Systems (SNDS) that allows you to see how many of their traps you are hitting. Other services like Return Path’s Sender Score and Habeas’ SafeList also help monitor spam trap hits. These spam traps are used for a variety of things. Some are used to gather and fingerprint content to be used by content filters and others are considered de facto spam and enough hits to these traps will result in blocking or even blacklisting.

Reconfirm your list

This is a tough pill for all senders to swallow, but if spam trap hits, unknown user rates and complaint rates are high enough, it may be necessary. There are certainly things that can be done to make it have a minimal impact on your list size. If you have researched your complaint sources and trap hits you can determine which portions of your list are causing most of your problems. This subset of your list could then be sent a series of confirmation mails reminding readers of why they signed up for your list. One major B2B magazine publisher has had great success with a similar strategy. It is also possible that contacting your subscribers through other means (via mail or phone for instance) could yield updated email addresses and the need to reconfirm via email may be lessened.

The most important factor to keep in mind is to send relevant and useful emails. If you send emails that your subscribers want to read and they look forward to, your deliverability woes will start to clear up on their own. Give your subscribers a reason and means in every email that you send to update their email addresses if they are changing. It is also a good idea to offer options in which type and frequency your subscribers want to receive emails.

Hallmark Data Systems can provide you with reports on spam complaints, acquisition source information, SNDS data, bounce information, and much more. We can also assist with confirmation efforts and intermediary work with ISPs, other domains and blacklists. Talk to your account managers for more details. With a little effort and time it is not only possible to clean up a bad reputation, it will be more effective in the long term than abandoning that reputation and ruining the reputation of another domain.

A Little Reminder

People are forgetful. They walk out of the house and forget their keys. Sometimes they miss important meetings. They also sometimes forget that they subscribed for your mailings. Just like every other facet of life, it is important to have reminders. This can be done simply by placing wording in your emails to remind your subscribers that they signed up for your list. Permission reminders help establish trust in your brand.

ClickZ posted a great article about how to write permission reminders the right way. A vague message can actually do more harm than good for your brand image, and as he says it is important to explicitly let them know how and where they opted in to your list. If subscribers can’t tell from the reminder that you care for their privacy, they are far more likely to report messages as spam and hurt your deliverability.

He also provides a list of 5 simple steps to keep trust in your unsubscribe process:

1) Use an unsubscribe procedure that takes as few steps as possible. The more difficult that it is to unsubscribe from mailings, the more likely it is that they will be reported as spam. If it is difficult to unsubscribe, the reader will be less likely to resubscribe in the future, and worse they will let their colleagues know about their difficulties keeping them from subscribing as well. Read more about the brand damaging effects of difficult unsubscribe practices here.

2) Tell users exactly where you got their names. If there are multiple sources, a simple database flag will allow you to populate this for each reader.

3) Place the statement where readers can easily see it. The key to this one is to be consistent. While it is a good idea to place this at the top of the email, so that the person reading it knows right away why they got it and don’t have to read the entire message, consistently placing the information in an email admin center can work as well.

4) Test your unsubscribe procedure regularly, either by clicking the links or sending test e-mail. This one is critical for a variety of reasons, legal compliance, brand trust, and spam complaints are just a few. There are even companies that you can contract to monitor your compliance and unsubscribe functionality like Lashback.

5) Provide alternate methods for removal, such as a telephone number or dedicated postal address subscribers can use if they can't or choose not to use the online version.

I would add to this list to be consistent with your from addresses and names. If you are doing a list rental for another company, and present to your list that the email is “from” that other company, the likelihood of them complaining without even opening your emails is considerably higher. It would be better to present the email as from you on behalf of the company renting your list. You can even present it as a recommendation or exclusive offer based on the fact that they are in your elite list. Read this to find out more about list rental.

New Spam Laws

The email deliverability landscape is constantly changing. Default image suppression, smarter, faster filtering techniques, and many other efforts to thwart spam are constantly redefining standards and creating obstacles for email marketers. The legal landscape is one other area that has been changing. Today, 9/5/2007, is the day that the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act goes into effect in New Zealand. Asia has seen some new laws recently as well. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan have all been updating their spam laws or introducing new ones.

The New Zealand law seems to bump up the legal processing requirement for unsubscribe requests to 5 days. There are also indications that in B2B someone within an organization may not be able to give permission to send email to others within the same organization. The Hong Kong laws have some language implications as well that should be looked at indicating that you may need to provide a version in Chinese characters or update your opt-in to indicate that subscribers are signing up for a publication in English. If you send email internationally it would be a good idea to have your legal team take a look at these laws and make certain that you are in compliance. Below are some links that provide more information on these laws:

New Zealand Unsolicited Messages Act 2007 -

Department of Internal Affairs

The Mobilize Mail blog

Hong Kong Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance -

Office of Telecommunications Authority

Singapore Spam Control Bill -

Singapore Spam Control Resource Center

Other resources -

http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/iland/2007/07/anti-spam-legislation-in-asia.html

Mean What You Say

While speaking with clients there is a lot of terminology (see bold items) that seems to be thrown out to describe things other than the email industry meaning. It is important to make sure when discussing deliverability strategies and problems all parties are speaking the same language. I’m going to try to help remove any confusion surrounding some of those terms here.

One area that seems problematic are bounces. The generic term bounce refers to any message that didn’t reach its intended party due to any error from the receiving server. Some of these errors are permanent errors (hard bounces) such as “unknown user” while others are transient errors (soft bounces) like “mailbox full”. Companies often set these addresses to a held status when they reach certain bounce thresholds. When you then look at your deliverability rate, you are looking at the number of subscribers not in held status who did not bounce. Also commonly used (and likely a better and more telling metric) is to calculate deliverability rate based on delivered to inbox rather than merely did not bounce, but neither should include addresses that are flagged as held prior to the send and not actually sent an email. It should be noted that it is possible to have a large held file and very good deliverability.

Another greatly misunderstood item is the confirmation mail. A confirmation mail has only one definition in the world of email. It is an email sent in response to a potential subscriber having opted in to receive your emails which requires the user to take an action (usually follow a link) to remain a subscriber. There is no other definition of this term. Probes (emails sent to test deliverability to an email address typically sent after a certain number of bounces) can be sent to addresses that are suspected to be deliverable, but you do not want to reconfirm and often are either in danger of being held or already have been held. Both of these are types of transactional mail, email sent in response to a business request (invoices, renewal notices, delivery notices, etc.)

There are a few different kinds of blacklists (aka blocklists), lists of domain names or IP addresses that meet a set of criteria specific to that list and are often used in filtering email. A DNSBL is a blacklist that lists IP addresses (the numeric address that represents where your email is coming from in a format similar to 199.1.145.68). An RHSBL is a blacklist that lists domain names (the alpha-numeric address that represents where your mail is coming from in a format similar to bmail1.digital.halldata.com). The third type of blacklist is a URIBL/SURBL. These list domain names of links contained within the emails you send.

The industry does have other words that it is trying to change, remove, or create. Today an article was posted on Email Insider blog talking about the dangers of continuing to use such terms as blast, broadcast, and bulk in the current industry environment. It was arguing that mailers continuing to use these terms (and the practices associated with them) were hurting not only themselves, but the entire email industry. Recently there was an article in the Email Experience Council blog recommending that the hyphen be removed from the term e-mail. New terms are springing up as well. For instance bacn has been getting a lot of press lately. Bacn is basically being used to describe mails that are not quite spam and not quite personal email. By consistently using terms we can have an impact on the perception of email both within the industry and from the outside.

What your subscribers are telling you

When sending out your emails, it is important to realize that you aren’t the only person judging the success of your campaign. The ISPs and recipients are also making their own judgment calls. Some of the feedback that your recipients give you is positive in the form of clicks and opens. There are other types of feedback though, and these come in the form of unsubscribes, complaints, and bounces. Most of the major ISPs have feedback loops available for senders to monitor these other types of feedback.

Feedback loops are essentially a mechanism that ISPs use to let senders know when a subscriber has complained. They come in a variety of formats. Some contain no more information than the email address of the complainer, others contain the entire mail with complete header information, and still others scrub any identifying information from the headers of emails to ensure that you don’t engage in list washing. Hallmark Data Systems works to ensure that all available feedback loops are in place on your IPs. We have established feedback loops with AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail/MSN, usa.net, Excite, and United Online.

Every list is going to have a few complaints. Some people complain merely as a means of unsubscribing, but most are actually using it as a means to let you know that something has happened that they don’t like. They could be telling you that the unsubscribe mechanism is too difficult to use or broken. According to a recent Return Path study 33% of users try to use the unsubscribe link first and 12% only complain as a last resort of unsuccessful unsubscribe attempts. They could also be telling you that they are receiving more email than they expected. It should be clear when subscribers opt in that they know how often they will be hearing from you.

It's a good idea to look at patterns in your complaints, since this can provide valuable information. Complaints can spawn from poor acquisition practices, irrelevant content, difficult, strict, or broken unsub mechanisms, or sending emails too frequently. It is important to track down the sources of complaints. Complaints leave a bad taste in the mouth of the complainer (and in the ear of anyone they tell) that tarnishes your brand, as well as diminish the size and effectiveness of your list. Also, when your complaint rates are elevated, your emails are more likely to be blocked. By looking for patterns in your complainers, you gain insight into the sources of those complaints and ultimately can stop the complaints before they start. Any data points that see high percentages of complainers, whether it is specific content, address acquisition source, frequency, etc., can tell you about potential problems you may need to address. If it is a problem with frequency or acquisition source, it may be as simple as a need to update the opt in language to set subscriber expectations. Hallmark Data Systems can make reports available to our clients that address many of these issues as well as others. For further information about these or other reports please contact your account manager.

Get off to a good start

Many spam messages come from IPs that have never sent email before. Machines become infected with viruses and start sending emails. It should come as no surprise that when senders change their IP addresses, ISPs and inbox providers look at these new IP addresses with suspicion. Some major ISPs throttle the amount of mail that they accept from fresh IP addresses and others filter them more harshly until they can establish a good reputation. When changing an ESP or simply adding more IP addresses to your mail server there are a few things one should keep in mind.

1) Let your readers know

In the world of B2B email, many of your recipients are in corporate domains. By adding some simple text to your email, you can ask your recipients to have any corporate white listings updated to reflect your new sending IP. If they haven’t asked their networking team to white list your domain in the past, this is a good opportunity to give them a reminder that they might want to white list you so that they won’t miss any of your content. It is also possible that these new IP addresses will suddenly be sending to domains that were blocking you before. This reminder allows your readers to help make certain that they continue receiving your emails and serves as a reminder that they may have signed up in the past and hadn’t been receiving your emails from some time. This message should be added to emails both before and after the move to maximize their impact. Because the recipient may not have been receiving your emails it is important to put in each email the date that they signed up for your list as well as which list it was.

2) Start small

Sending large volumes from a fresh IP space is a surefire way to hit blocks. You should slowly ramp up your email program so that throttles won’t keep your mail out. It should probably take you a few weeks to a couple of months to send the same volumes that you did before, especially if you are moving from an IP space that was severely blocked. Especially in these early stages you should aggressively scrub any hard bounces and spam complainers so that the rates quickly reduce. Also pay close attention to spam trap hits. If the lists haven’t been scrubbed vigorously you may need to reconfirm at least portions of your list. By starting small, you can target which lists have the problems and minimize the negative impact that these new sends may create.

3) Put your best foot forward

Before sending email you should always be cognizant of the fact that what you are sending can have a positive or negative impact on both your IP reputation and your brand reputation. This is especially important in the first few months of sending. Relevant content sent at the frequency your subscribers want will help keep spam complaints down. Your readers are your first line of defense when it comes to deliverability. If they want your content and aren’t complaining about it, then the servers that host them will be more likely to work with you to make sure that your subscribers get the message. If you do happen to set off sirens by sending from a new IP it is also important that the emails being seen by the network administrators and anti-spam teams see emails arriving that don’t look anything like spam.

All of these things combined will have positive effects on your reputation in the long term. By keeping complaint rates and unknown user rates low you increase the chance of white listing your domains at the major ISPs. You stand a chance of keeping corporate white lists that are already in place, and potentially gaining some new white listings at corporations that may have blocked you before. Most importantly though, they will help keep your mails from getting blocked right out of the gate.

White on White: A review of Silverpop's latest white paper on white listing

Over the last few months I have been talking with some of our clients about white listing. Silverpop, an email service provider, released a whitepaper today entitled Unlocking the Secret World of White Listing. This document outlines what senders need to know about white listing and verifies many of the points that I have been making to our clients.

When ISPs are considering white listing you they are looking at a variety of items. Bounce rates, complaint rates, volume, and authentication/reputation are all considered when applying for a white list, and ISPs look at your previous sending patterns to determine what they expect those to be.

A few highlights from the whitepaper (which I encourage everyone to read):

“Keep in mind that the topic of complaints is very sensitive for ISPs. After all, those unhappy people are their customers.”

“Some ISPs keep records of addresses that have bounced, and if you continue to send to addresses they’ve told you are no good, you not only risk any chance of being white listed but also endanger the future deliverability of your messages.”

At the end of the day, this is why it is imperative to adhere to best practices when sending. For a comprehensive listing of what ISPs expect senders to adhere to, please read MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices - Version 1.1.

Well Done Is Better Than Well Said

The primary driver of deliverability in today’s environment isn’t content, blacklistings, or even as simple as spam complaints. The most important aspect of deliverability is reputation. Senders can have good reputations or bad reputations and the impact of either can be rather severe in terms of deliverability. This reputation isn’t based on your company name, business model, customer base, or anything outside what you are sending to email subscribers. The old adage of actions speak louder than words couldn’t be more true when it comes to this.

What is reputation –

Reputation in terms of deliverability is made up of many metrics, and the way that it is determined varies widely, however the general composition seems to have a few consistent players. ISPs and some corporate domains maintain a repository of all of the mails that you send and a lot of data that they see about those mailings and tie those back to the specific IP that is sending that mail:

Spam complaints – Spam complaint rates typically are the biggest determining factor when it comes to your reputation. The definition of spam is very fluid, but the most important one is what it means to the people that control whether or not your mails reach their destination. To the people that control the flow of your mail, spam is being defined as any mail that a recipient doesn’t want. It doesn’t matter to them if it was asked for or not (although opt-in information can help get blocks removed in these scenarios). High complaint rates lead to a bad reputation while low complaint rates will lead to a high reputation.

Unknown user rates – These are percentages of bad addresses that you send to servers. If you don’t work at actively scrubbing bounced addresses from your list or reactivate held addresses when changing email service providers, you are likely to have high unknown user rates. This basically tips off the ISP or corporate domain that your list may consist of people that didn’t ask for your mails and very much resembles spammer behavior.

Spam traps – There are 2 types of spam trap addresses. There are addresses that are planted on websites and have never subscribed to anything nor are they active email addresses. The other type of spam trap is an address that was formerly a valid address that has since been abandoned. When ISPs see email being sent to spam trap addresses it is considered spam de facto. The type of trap, number of hits, and type of mail being sent to the trap all influence the impact that these have on reputation.

Sending infrastructure – This consists of all of the technical aspects of email. rDNS must match forward DNS. Are you using authentication and is it properly set up? Always abide by the preferred connection settings of the receiving mail server. These are a few of the items looked at under this category. At Hallmark Data Systems, we ensure that all of these things are in place for every client.

Sending permanence – This is essentially how your emails are sent. How often do you send and to how many people? It is also about how consistent your emailing patterns are. They are basically comparing your sending strategies to those of spammers.

How reputation impacts deliverability –

This varies widely from domain to domain, but the consistent factor is if your reputation is lower than they accept, your mails will most likely be filtered or blocked. Each domain weights the categories differently, and some domains consider items not listed here while others don’t monitor all of the ones listed. According to a study recent Return Path study, only 17% of emails are filtered due to content. At Return Path's Email Marketers Leadership Forum in Chicago, George Bilbrey from Return Path said for B2B it is closer to 25%, but still most mails are filtered based on reputation, not content.

For a basic idea of what your reputation might look like your best bet is to track the feedback you get when you send a mailing. Know what percentage of your list hard bounces and complains. Bear in mind that ISPs calculate these metrics largely on the basis of inbox delivery and ignore both bounces and items in the spam/junk folder, so any metrics you see are generally lower than what they are calculating.

What's in it for me?

Every email campaign is launched after answering the question, “What's in it for me?” The revenue benefits for the campaign, business relationships established, and simple needs to meet quota are all thoughts that pass through the mind of senders. All of this causes us to send emails from time to time that cause low open rates, high rates of unsubscribes, or worse spam complaints. The question that you should ask yourself before you hit the send button is "What's in it for the subscriber?" At the end of the day it is the recipient of your email that determines if it was successful. If you can't define what benefit your subscribers have in receiving your email, then you shouldn't send it. If your email is sent with careful thought of who the audience is, it will be well received, have higher open rates, encourage continued reading of your publications, and encourage passing the message on to potential subscribers. The fundamental idea here is relevancy.

The definition that email senders have of spam doesn’t match the definition your subscribers have. Where you see a “mark as spam” button, what your subscriber sees is a “Mark as irrelevant” button, at least according to David Greer of Campaign Monitor. ISPs would seem to share this view:

Yahoo! Mail - Miles Libbey: Anti-spam product manager

Operationally, we define spam as whatever consumers don't want in their inbox.

AOL - Charles Stiles: AOL Postmaster

"I don't care if they've triple opted-in and gave you their credit card number," said Stiles, drawing chuckles, but making his point loud and clear: Relevance rules, and catering to end user preferences is his top priority.

Microsoft/Hotmail - Craig Spiezle: Online safety evangelist

We need to think really a step beyond opt-in and focus on the consumer's expectations, relevancy, and frequency.

Gmail - Brad Taylor: Google Engineer

Sometimes people are afraid to report a message because they aren't sure if it is "really" spam or not. Our opinion is that if you didn't ask for it and you don't want it, it's spam to you, and it should be reported.

If your email has high complaint rates, you will be blocked because it is viewed as unwanted email. If you send to old addresses and hit spam traps, you are sending emails to people that haven't even asked for it. The primary concern for the receiving server is to protect their users from unwanted mail. Of course you are thinking, "they signed up for my mailing list, so my mail isn't unwanted". ISPs and the anti-spam community at large (which includes the network administrators that put corporate blocks in place) no longer consider permission to be permanent. If a subscriber has lost interest in your emails, got transferred to a different division in the company, retired, or simply didn't approve of an email that you sent to them, in the eyes of the ISPs and corporate net admins you no longer have permission to send emails to those subscribers. Trying to hold onto these addresses through difficult unsubscribe mechanisms, poor list hygiene standards, and other means merely exacerbates the problem and will eventually lead to blocking and blacklisting.

Every email that you send is a chance to see what your audience finds relevant. Open rates, unsub rates, click rates, and complaint rates all offer information on what content your subscribers find relevant, and equally important, what they find irrelevant. Relevancy requires vigilance to determine what you should be sending, to whom, and how often. If a particular email causes high complaint and unsubscribe rates, then you should think twice about sending similar content.

In the Beginning

I think it fitting to begin a blog on this topic by talking about how the process of getting the message to your subscribers starts, permission. There are various forms of permission:

Opt-out - A recipient is subscribed until they take an action to no longer receive emails
Passive opt-in - A pre-checked box is supplied on a form and must be deselected not to receive emails
Active opt-in - A recipient must check a box on a form to begin receiving emails
Confirmed opt-in (aka double opt-in) - A recipient opts in for emails and then is sent an email to the subscribing address which requires an action on behalf of the recipient (generally clicking a link) for that subscriber to begin receiving emails

There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these practices. Opt-out is certainly a good way to grow a list and what publisher of online content wouldn't be attracted to this benefit, however it is quite treacherous in terms of deliverability. Opt-out lists are prone to high rates of spam complaints, have higher bounce rates, and increase the likelihood of blacklisting and hitting blocks on ISPs. Worse than the fact that they have these symptoms, once you are blacklisted and/or blocked, it is far more difficult to have these lifted. Additionally, many new international spam laws might not allow this form of permission such as laws recently enacted in Hong Kong and New Zealand. If you send emails internationally, you should not consider opt-out as sufficient permission to send emails.

Opt-in whether active or passive is certainly a better option in terms of deliverability. It implies that you warned subscribers up front that they would be receiving emails from you and were given the opportunity to opt-out. Because the emails were requested, complaint rates are lower and are more likely accurate addresses. This means that blocks and blacklistings are less likely to be imposed. Further, when your mails are blocked being able to verify that the addresses opted in makes it more likely that those blocks will be lifted.

Confirmed opt-in requires the most investment of time and interest in subscribing which causes lower complaint rates, significantly lower bounce rates, and ensures an active and receptive audience is receiving your emails. Because it requires the most action for subscription, it also has the lowest growth rate, however the emails you send are not likely to be blocked or blacklisted and when blocks are imposed it is significantly easier to have them lifted. The anti-spam community certainly encourages this practice and such corporate email providers as Outblaze require it for whitelisting and may require it to have blocks lifted. This is the best way to ensure that your message gets through to those that want to receive it and doesn't to those that don't. Everyone should at least test this method as it is impossible to know the impact it will have until you do. It increases the likelihood of establishing whitelists, ensures that blocks can be lifted, and puts your message into the hands of subscribers most likely to open your emails and are responsive to your advertisers.

Gone are the days when a quick phone call or even a contact with whom you have established a relationship can ensure that your emails get delivered. Deliverability is handled on the front lines by algorithms that don't care as much about what you are sending as how you are sending it and how it is being received by subscribers. Complaint rates, unknown user rates, authentication, and reputation are all factors that the ISPs and corporate domains can see for themselves. Spam, in the eyes of the gatekeepers to receiving servers, is basically any unwanted mail, and behaviors that are consistent with spammers such as high complaint rates and unknown user rates immediately alert them that your emails are unwanted. It doesn't matter if you are B2B or B2C, the same hurdles are in place for both. Escalation and contacts at the ISPs can certainly help when you encounter problems, but only if you are following their recommended practices, since their first responsibility is to protect their users from the frustration of unwanted email. The first step to better deliverability is, in short, obtaining and keeping the recipient's permission through best practices, and that is why we begin here.

Introduction

Welcome to the deliverability blog of Tim England, Supervisor of ISP Relations at Hallmark Data Systems. Hallmark serves the B2B magazine community in a variety of services, most recently as an email service provider (ESP). The purpose of this blog is to function as an area for me to provide timely insight into deliverability issues as they arise and advise clients of new features and problems that we have in our systems. My hope is that this blog will also be useful to those who are not our clients and offer valuable insight in deliverability as it relates to the B2B industry in terms of best practices, ISP and corporate filtering, strategy, and industry buzz.

The title, Get the Message, is basically what deliverability is all about, getting the message to your subscribers. You can have terrific content and a thriving print program, but if your subscribers don't get the message, then your efforts have been wasted. Email is a powerful media to use to get the message across, but there are many spots along the way it can get lost. Content filtering, blacklisting, poor list hygiene, and high complaint rates are just a few of the areas that will be touched on over time.