Email Equality

I have a friend that sells window treatments. The company he works for goes to people’s homes, show samples, take measurements, and then leave and put the orders through later. As part of this process, they tell their customers to expect an email order confirmation letting them know that the order has processed. According to my friend the company doesn’t send any types of email apart from these order confirmations, however they find themselves blocked or on blacklists.

Conventional wisdom seems to say that transactional messages are more highly relevant and therefore less likely to be complained about. Most experts, even MAAWG, often recommend that these transactional messages be placed on IP addresses dedicated only to those emails. Because they are highly relevant, it is thought that complaints are unlikely to occur, bounce rates will be low, there will be few trap hits, etc., but is that really the case? Also, given the sporadic sending patterns of transactional messages, what impact will that have on deliverability at the major ISPs that factor that into the deliverability secret sauce? I think that perhaps a better way of looking at this isn’t, "which of my emails is most important to be delivered," but rather, "every point of contact we have via email is an important opportunity to engage subscribers."

Segregating email is much like segregating people, separate but equal seldom exists. If you look at your email program and split it up so that certain types of email have better deliverability than others, you are inherently saying, "this type of email is bad and this one good," and quite possibly inherently excusing practices that can affect deliverability and even your relationship with your subscribers. If practices in one branch of your email program are being segregated because they would negatively impact deliverability to other parts of your program, maybe the answer is to fix the underlying problems with that part of the program rather than segregating your email.

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”

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.

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.

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.