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.