Based on what I saw at the ClickZ Specifics: Email Marketing conference yesterday, deliverability remains the hot topic. They had a packed session dedicated to the topic and it also came up during the closing 5 Experts/5 Minutes session, where five experts were given 60 seconds each to answer a question from the audience. Here is some of the wisdom that I jotted down:

Regarding first steps…
Stefan Pollard of EmailLabs said to start by knowing your metrics—your delivery rate, bounce management, spam complaints, etc. You can make improvements if you don’t know where your program stands currently.

Deidre Baird of Pivotal Veracity said that you should get on ISPs’ whitelists (which is free) and take advantage of spam compliant feedback loops.

Regarding list rental/buying…
Baird also said to avoid spamtraps by not buying lists and harvesting addresses from the web. Only use opt ins, she said.

Jordan Ayan of SubscriberMail said flatly, “Don’t ever buy a list.”

Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ said that they were very close to advising readers to never rent or buy lists, but that they hadn’t quite reached that point yet.

Regarding offline sign-ups with incentives…
If you’re offering incentives in order to collect email addresses offline, be sure to “deliver the incentive to the email address,” said Austin Bliss of FreshAddress. The customer is more likely to give you their real address and to write legibly if the incentive is being delivered this way.

Lieb told a story of a major apparel retailer that gave in-store customers a 20% off coupon in exchange for their email address. Well, people wrote down bogus addresses in order to get the discount and those addresses lead to the retailer being blacklisted. Ouch!

Pollard recommended using double opt-in for offline sources of acquisition.

Regarding B2B filtering…
“B2B filtering is more whimsical than B2C,” said Bliss.

Baird said that companies rely much more on spam lists like Spamhaus and SpamCop.

Regarding authentication…
People were universally proponents of authentication (DKIM and Sender ID), which makes it clear that you are who you say you are, thereby fighting spoofing. But they also all said that it currently doesn’t lead to better deliverability, as very few ISPs give authentication serious weigh yet when deciding which emails to filter. However, some of the experts thought this would be given more weight in the future.

Regarding cleaning up old, dirty lists…
Pollard told marketers to look at the date of subscription—the older the date, the more likely you should just cut them. He also advised people to remove role addresses like sales@domain.com.

Al DiGuido of Zustek said you should cut people who haven’t opened an email in the past 6-12 months.

But Ayan said not to assume that your emails are going unread because the subscriber could have images turned off. He said it’s best if you send a series of emails asking if they want to continue receiving email.

—Chad White

In his recent article in the New Yorker , Michael Specter discusses the history of spam and some of the technologies that have sprung up to guard against it, as well as new tactics spammers are using to get around it. One uber-mathematic spammer determined there were “600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra…” That is a great example of the tenacity of the spam community. They won’t give up, even if they have to increase their spam from billions to trillions a day to get just a few responses. The word that comes to mind for me is sustainability. How does a legitimate email marketer survive and sustain response rates when other forces are conspiring to de-legitimize email?

The truth is there are several ways to define your email campaign such that it is viewed differently than the filth.

Sustainability in an environmental sense hits me every day as I get my coffee at a local coffee shop. I try to bring my own cup rather than rely on another tree-diminishing, chlorine-whitened paper cup. Java Jacks, the local shop just around the corner from my house, posted a sign that says something like “Thanks for using your own cup – just our tiny shop used over 100,000 paper cups last year…help us reverse that trend.” That shop has to be just a tiny fraction of the paper cups used by Starbucks in a year. My point is that it took that sign at Java Jacks for me to really think about the impact even my few cups a week could have over a lifetime. Even my tree-hugging tendencies had been numbed by the simple ease and anonymity of choosing a paper cup.

Spammers have created that same numbness with much of the populace with email. Legitimate marketers have the opportunity (and I argue responsibility) to reverse rather than add to the trend and impression that all email is spam. Marketers that continue to slam away at inboxes with little analysis of what is happening at the other end risk looking more like a spammer than a sustainable business.

Here are a few ways to do so:

• Spammers rely on volume to get their sale. Legitimate marketers need to rely on permission and relevance. Via customer-selected opt-in preferences, behavioral observance and data analysis, marketers can achieve a solid ROI independent of volume of email sent.

• Purge old and inactive names. Spammers mail everyone. A marketer mails only those that are likely to respond. Mailing deeper cheapens your brand and sullies your reputation.

• Authenticate your email. Where spam = fraud, legitimate mail builds on the brand your company has built offline. Don’t let fraudulent phishing scams destroy customer perception of your email. By authenticating with SPF, Sender ID and DKIM, you’ll decrease the chance your customers will get ripped off by the latest scam pretending to be you.

I wish there was a way to prevent spammers from going to business school. Actually, they have always been savvier marketers than many in the industry. The problem is, they’re trying to sucker consumers rather than engage them in a dialogue. In fact, one piece of fraudulent email, recently received by a colleague of mine went as far as posing as a friendly customer service representative. Great, now phishers know more about relevance and communicating “person-to-person” than many legitimate companies! This is the latest in what is becoming a major threat to consumers and financial companies everywhere.

The phishing email began:

Hi, my name is Corrine Montaguesizin* and I am with the Fraud Dept of Huge Bank* in New York. We ask you to check your online account status and announce any change of the data or any other unusual problem and contact the bank in regards to recent activity on your accounts. As soon as possible, please access your online account following the link below:

Check your online account

* names changed to protect the innocent

If you’re a marketer working for a bank or any company that possesses private information about your customers, be extremely careful about the type of data you ask for via email. If it has to go via email, by all means authenticate using Domain Keys, Sender ID and SPF. Ultimately, this is both about company-reputation preservation as well as consumer protection. Help your customers NOT get suckered.

—Chip House

“Content is no longer king,” Craig Spiezle, director of online safety strategies and technologies at Microsoft, told Email Insider Summit attendees last week. “If you don’t have email authentication, your emails are going to be throttled.”

Spiezle then told the audience about a large flower retailer that used a new domain to send out its Mother’s Day campaign this year, sending millions of emails from a domain with no reputation. “Did we deliver those emails [to our Hotmail users]?” he said. “No we did not.” And now they have a warehouse of wilting flowers, said Spiezle in a matter-of-fact tone that said, It serves them right for what they did.

Deliverability was a big topic at the Summit, which is unfortunate. Content is the rightful king. Content is strategic, while deliverability is simply tactical. A focus on deliverability is a distraction and takes us farther away from C-suite conversations we want to have about email by turning email into an IT discussion.

Spiezle, who presented email authentication as the golden path to deliverability, said that 43% of legitimate email volume is certified by Sender ID, and he later told me that adoption is north of 85% among volumne email marketers and that 9 million domains have been authenticated. And among the major online retailers that I track via RetailEmail.Blogspot, Sender ID adoptin is at 59% while DomainKeys adoption is at 48% (read reportlet on DomainKeys adoption among retailers). So authentication is rapidly approaching the point where if you don’t have it then you’ll be in the minority.

While authentication adoption is growing, some audience members were angry, saying that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and AOL make permission-based marketers jump through too many hoops, have different standards and don’t allow marketers to transfer their reputation from one IP address or domain to another. Spiezle said that they were working on this last point, saying that “reputation should be portable.”

However, Spiezle and Miles Libbey, office of postmaster at Yahoo Mail, who also spoke at the conference, really had no satisfactory answer for their varying standards. Spiezle said that Microsoft will protect its customers and Yahoo will protect its customers. There’s clearly an opportunity for collaboration to create a single standard that would make it easier for legitimate marketers to send their email and customers to receive it.

At the end of the conference, Bill McCloskey, CEO of Email Data Source, astutely remarked that while everyone claims to be protecting the customer, that’s not what’s really happening. That certainly wasn’t the case in Spiezle’s flower retailer example, said McCloskey, who said that his first thought after hearing the story was that there were a lot of mothers that didn’t get flowers this year.

That’s what’s wrong with the current state of deliverability—it doesn’t always serve the customer’s best interests. Even though these customers opted in and wanted to receive these emails, they were blocked. If the ISPs truly care about their customers, then they’ll work with legitimate marketers to simplify the rules so that their mutual customers can be better served. Then we can get back to talking about content, customer-centricity, user-friendliness and other more strategic issues that can take email to a higher plane.

—Chad White

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

AOTA: Fortune 500 Companies Demonstrate Commitment to Online Safety
Fortune 500 companies who are authenticating and those who are not.

eMarketer: Legion of Influencers Use Email
Is the current definition of "influencer" too narrow?

Chad White: What Large Retailers Are Doing Right - and Wrong
A look at how 40 major retailers used send-to-a-friend functionality in their email programs.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.