HOW TO: Maintain Your Email Reputation

By Jim Kinkade

Deliverability is the key measurement of email marketing success. Without it, no other measurement can be made. If your online behavior sends your email reputation down the tubes, it will impact deliverability. Here are three elements that should be monitored closely that can negatively affect your email reputation, and thus your deliverability.

Spam complaint rate. This is the percentage of people that complain to their mail service provider (ISP, ESP, IT department) about an email message being spam. It doesn't matter if they originally signed themselves up to receive the email message, have a business relationship with you, or received the email from a friend; the first instinct for many people when they see a message they don't like or want anymore is to label it as spam. Your goal is to get keep this complaint rate under 1%.

Some keys to keeping the complaint rate low:

• Confirm subscriptions
• Ask subscribers to whitelist the From email address when signing up
• Remind subscribers that they did indeed sign up, and offer them an easy way to unsubscribe
• Identify yourself clearly in the message
• Sign up to all available feedback loops.

In the mind of most email recipients, spam equals unwanted messages and it's easy for them to hit the "mark as spam" button. If the message is marked as spam, the ISP will automatically tally that against your sender reputation regardless of whether it is legitimate email or truly unacceptable. Many ISPs offer a feedback loop where you can track the number of complaints your email message receives. AOL and MSN are examples of ISPs that manage essential feedback loops.

Failed email attempts. This is the percentage of emails that do not exist on the recipient servers. The addresses may no longer exist, or are considered dead by the ISP. If a large percentage of the emails fail, then the sending server is flagged and may be blacklisted. You can verify recipient interest by using click through and opened email tracking. If they are no longer responding or reading your email message, remove them from the list.

Keys to keeping failed email addresses to a minimum:

• Do not send to addresses that bounced or failed previously
• Do not send to unconfirmed email addresses
• Monitor the responsiveness of the recipients.

Failed email addresses are also known as bounces. A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure. If an address hard bounces,it should be removed from the list immediately and never sent to again. A soft bounce is a little more forgiving, but if an address continually soft bounces, it is best to just let it go. Remote servers track how many failed emails are attempted to their domain. If you reach a certain percentage, delivery can be temporarily or permanently blocked.

It is important to monitor recipient responsiveness because old email addresses that are no longer used can be turned into spam traps. This can be especially troublesome if one of them happens to be on your list.

Blacklist monitoring. After receiving complaints and evaluating the number of failed email attempts, many ISPs will report the sender's IP address to a black hole list. ISPs and business networks often help in the fight against spam by sharing black hole lists. Unlike federal law, if you end up on a black hole list, you are guilty until proven innocent. Plenty of time and energy can be spent proving to the list managers that you are a legitimate email marketer.

Unfortunately, you can also be guilty by association. If your Internet neighbor engages in spam, he could ruin email sending for the whole block. It is imperative to monitor the common black lists to ensure that your IP block is not listed. If you do appear on one or more black hole lists, it is imperative to get off the list as soon as possible.

Many black hole lists also put out spam traps to snare unscrupulous email harvesters. Spam traps are email addresses sitting in the clear on the Internet. These emails are bait for email harvesters and need to be avoided at all costs. The best way to avoid them is to send only to subscribers who confirm their subscriptions.

Conclusion
Like politics, even the appearance of impropriety can sully your reputation. Due to the vigilante nature of spam policing, anybody engaging in email marketing is at risk for receiving a tarnished email reputation. Carefully maintain your email reputation by using only email marketing best practices. -- Arial Software

Return to Articles