Improving email deliverability best practice

Deliverability is one of those areas of digital marketing where the details matter, so for this interview I turned to Tim Watson, Operations Director of Email Service Provider, SmartFOCUS Digital for the low-down on email deliverability best practice.

Typical deliverability problems

Q1. What are the main problems the email marketer needs to be aware which can lead to their email being blocked?

There are two main areas for B2C e-marketing:

• Emailing solution setup technical factors
• IP address reputation, content and HTML factors

The technical factors are controlled by the Email Service Provider or your IT department if you run your own mailing solution. The IP address reputation is under direct influence of the email marketer"€™s actions and should be of primary concern, after which content and HTML factors are next most important.

B2B e-marketing is not so dependent on IP address reputation, rather content and HTML factors play more of a role.

Email deliverability solutions

Q2. ...And what are the best solutions to these problems?

For the solution to technical factors pick an ESP with proven track record that understands and will manage these items for you:

• Forward DNS, A and MX records.
• Matching reverse DNS
• SPF (sender policy framework) and DKIM
• SMTP matching HELO
• Monitoring of abuse@ for all domains
• ISP and third party feedback such as SpamCop
• Whitelisting
• Frequent blocklist checking
• SURBL monitoring

Marketers don't need to understand the details, but that's a good checklist.

IP address reputation is really a case of your life in their hands. If users hit the "€™this is spam"€™ button on their email client your reputation is damaged and your future ability to deliver is put at risk. The prime tool to manage this are feedback loops.

Reputation issues are inevitably the result of poor targetting, lack of relevance and emailing too frequently. This means a great solution to creating a good reputation and hence great deliverability is to only send relevant emails. Well targetted emails are not only appreciated by users and give best results but also are easier to deliver.

Extra care is needed when using third party lists. Just having legally collected data is not enough to ensure you don"€™t hurt your reputation. Emails sent from third parties are very often viewed by users as spam. Users often don"€™t remember they agreed to selected partner or third party mailings, may be in the sign up process this was not clear enough or simply they don"€™t associate the email with the permission they gave. Particularly if the third party mailing makes no reference to the brand at time of opt-in.

Another way to help manage IP reputation is to use multiple IP address for different mailings and consider the pros and cons of using dedicated or shared IP addresses. Both have their strengths and your ESP should be have to give you guidance on the benefits of each and best approach.

Now let"€™s turn to HTML and content. To ensure your HTML is valid and email client compatibile use an HTML coder who is experienced in email HTML. General website coders are not normally aware of email client restrictions. It is unfortunate that even today email clients are very fussy about the HTML compared with web browsers.

New HTML should be tested in test email client accounts or use an inbox snapshot testing tool. These are available thorough the solution of many ESPs or via third party services.

Spam report feedback loop tracking

Q3. I find that many email marketers on my courses are unaware of the reports available from webmail providers like Hotmail of emails which have been reported as Spam.

Which webmail providers support feedback-loop tracking and what is best practice here?

The feedback loops for spam complaints is deliverability gold dust. AOL and Windows Live (Hotmail) have been providing this for sometime and after some delay Yahoo have finally fully launched their feedback loop facility. There is also a handful of primarily USA serving ISPs (Comcast, Excite, United Online, Road Runner and USA.Net) with feedback loops.

Best practice is to unsubscribe all email address from which a spam complaint is made. Some ESP solutions will do this automatically for you.

If spam complaint levels are consistently high then an analysis should be made of the complaint email address to look for common factors. For example, are they all old addresses, from a common data source, have been poorly engaged? If there are common factors then proactively unsubscribing other email addresses which share common factors before they complain is a good approach to improving deliverability. The final approach that can be taken is to construct a campaign to re-request email permission. If it"€™s not given then don"€™t email further. Whilst this does reduce list size, its only removing those who are likely to complain and don"€™t want to hear from you. Thus deliverability and list quality are improved.

Email deliverability tools

Q4. Which tools should you look for when selecting an email service provider which help with assessing and improving email deliverability?

Use a solution that provides spam complaint levels. Whilst high unsubscribe rates often go hand in hand with high complaints there is no substitute for having the real complaint figures.

Better solutions will give you the complaint level for each campaign. This is a big advantage. An overall average across campaigns will not allow you to zero in on your trouble areas. You will be left wondering which of your emails and what list data are causing problems. Reporting of the actual email addresses for complaints should be available to allow further issue analysis.

Look for solutions that offer inbox delivery confirmation checking, whereby campaign emails are automatically sent to seed addresses and confirmation is made that they arrive to the inbox. Some ESPs offer this but if not there are also third party solutions.

You or your ESP should also be using Windows Live (Hotmail) Smart Network Data Services (SNDS). This adds to the feedback loops and gives direct reporting of the IP reputation calculated by Hotmail and further data such as number of spamtrap hits. These are email addresses the ISPs leave on the internet but are not optin addresses. If they get emails from you to these addresses they conclude you are sending spam by definition.

The future of deliverability

Q5. I remember a few years back, that Bill Gates said we would see the end of spam in two years, but of course this didn"€™t transpire. What are the prospects for the future deliverability. Are we going to see more of the accreditation / authentication schemes? Are these popular, do you think they are worthwhile?

But then neither could Gates predict the release dates for any Windows version. To be fair to Bill, Hotmail (Microsoft) have taken steps to put his words into action. Authentication schemes such as SPF are a great step forwards. When all legitimate mail servers adopted this standard a big step forward to spam reduction will have been made. It is already used as a scoring factor by the major ISPs.

Thus the authentication schemes are important and should be used. The accreditation and email certification schemes are important for deliverability as you cannot normally use these schemes if you have a deliverability issue. Thus you are already by definition a good citizen and getting to the inbox to be allowed to join in. They do help however with trust and perceived authority of emails, resulting in increase in open and click rates.

The legal definition of spam has little to do with the ISPs and users definition of spam. If you act like a spammer in the eyes of users and ISPs then you will be treated like a spammer and safe arrival in the inbox will suffer.

Whilst deliverability does warrant much care and following the best practice is important it is given its unfair share of attention. The real money being left on the table is in message relevance and effectiveness optimisation. It is disappointing the amount of energy and even basic testing that is typically being put into these areas compared with the amount of concern displayed by marketers about deliverability.