We’ve found that those “pesky” complaints generated when a subscriber clicks the “This is Spam” button are actually a great source of feedback data. Scour them for clues around type of subscriber—demographics, vintage (when they signed up), activity, customer status—as well as source and type of message. Then, adjust your program to correct any practices that drive disproportionate complaints. Do the same analysis on what drives response.

We always find actionable results from even simple analysis. If know that one source of new subscribers is driving a disproportionate number of complaints, you can adjust the permission or data capture process, renegotiate your prices, or even drop the source altogether. If you know that subscribers are more likely to complain about one type of message than another, you can test frequency, cadence and the template.

Sometimes hard business decisions are required. We must balance the two—as yes, sometimes the answer to both the deliverability and response question is the same. Recently, one of our clients found that the promotions that generated the highest revenue also drove the most complaints. So we tested the timing of that promotion, sent it to only those subscribers who were active clickers, and also made the link to the preference center more prominent. We were able to boost response slightly, but more importantly found that complaints dropped below the ISP threshold.

Another client found that complainers were not active at all—in fact, many had not opened or clicked in months. That prompted a win-back campaign earlier in the lifecycle, in order to reduce the number of non-active subscribers and improve brand equity.

There is no great secret to great email marketing. It really is all about the subscriber. When we send relevant, interesting and engaging messages, we reach the inbox and drive more revenue, too. I know it’s hard to think about doing something additional (like data analysis) when so many of us are sprinting each week just to get the messages out the door. Let me assure you, our experience shows that even a little bit of data analysis will be well worth the effort.

Let me know if we can help or if you’d like to brainstorm on where to start.

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path

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

eROI: The Cradle and The Grave
Opt-In, Opt-Out & Feedback Loops

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

Some of those business decisions we make every day as email marketers are harder to gauge than others. Are our open rates good enough? Shall we send this fifth message this week? Should I send CTOs the same message as CFOs? Will our best buyers respond better to 15-off-75 or 10-off-50? All these are tough calls that we base on judgment, best practices and any benchmarks we can glean from vendors.

One of the trickiest is making the case for dropping non-responders from our files. Keeping them on is not expensive and seems to do no harm to active subscribers. It used to be a good idea to keep complaint rates down by flooding the denominator with non-responders—and most marketers felt that since these subscribers didn’t open or click, they wouldn’t complain either.

Not so any longer. It’s risky to keep non-responders on the file. First, there are a lot more of them than ever before. We see clients with anywhere from 25% to 65% of their file now “dead.” Second, it is a deliverability risk. Our client data shows these non-responders often do complain and there is a risk that very old records can become spam traps, significantly damaging your sender reputation.. Third, their strong numbers depress your response rates and may disguise more important trends among active buyers.

Our good client Andrew Magpantay, senior product manager at Reunion.com, coined a great expression when he spoke at our client seminar in Los Angeles last week. He said that reconnecting with non-responders on the file is like gathering up the “loose change.” Sure, there is some value there, and if you have a lot of it lying around it adds up to real dollars, but the risks are real, as well.

In addition to the deliverability hit, typically, there is no revenue gain from continuing to email folks who are no longer interested in your messages or who have been bored by them for so long it would take a miracle to get them to finally open another. Yet, we marketers are ever hopeful. We truly do believe that even though the subscriber has been ignoring our messages for a year, that tomorrow just might be the day! The reality is that very few, if any, will actually come around after such a long time.

At the same time, there is always some sort of “tail” for response from long inactive subscribers. Sometimes it’s enough loose change that it adds up! One of our clients, a retailer, did the analysis and found that buyers who were lapsed 15+ months actually purchased a half million dollars worth of product in the past year. (There are also about 5 million of them!) Another client’s “dead file”—non-responsive for 13+ months after receiving bi-monthly (2x a month) email messages for a year—earned a 2% purchase rate. That was small compared to the 15% purchase rate of other subscribers, but still meaningful. That’s real revenue and no one wants to leave revenue on the table. Andrew’s Reunion.com file of non-responders definitely earned some small response. But not a lot and nowhere near the response rates of the rest of the file.

The key is to make sure that you are doing the analysis and balancing the deliverability and cost risks. Maybe you can’t bear (or afford) to abandon all of the loose change. Consider just picking up the highest value segments, the ”quarters” perhaps, and leave the rest on the ground by cutting the records off after a win-back campaign. Try to re-engage through other channels—when they log into the website or call customer service, through your sales team or via postal mail. Match your non-responders to an email change of address service (full disclosure: Return Path runs the largest)—many subscribers may regularly check an alternate address. Be sure to welcome these returning subscribers back with a custom campaign.

The ISPs, especially MSN/Hotmail and Gmail, are getting smarter about using consumer “votes” for separating senders whose mail is welcome from those who keep mailing long after the subscriber has tuned the program out. So it no longer is always helpful to keep a large denominator of subscribers who are not responding (or complaining) to keep your complaint rate down.

Better, be sure to engage with subscribers before they become too far lost to you. At least every quarter develop a win-back campaign or an invite to visit the preference center and re-engage. This is the only way to prevent having the loose change become significant enough to pain you.

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path

There is a dirty little secret with email service providers (ESPs) and it’s about time it has been brought to the forefront of industry discussions. I learned about the intricacies of this secret while culling Gold Lasso customers that exceeded our spam complaint threshold. After politely showing a few of them the door, out of spite they revealed to me that they were simultaneously using the services of five other competitors unraveling a twisted web of ESP “switch-a-roonie” that promotes spam and hurts the industry. This dirty little secret is so obvious that I’m surprised it hasn’t been exposed by privacy and anti-spam advocates and used to smack the smug faces of ESP executives. Surprise! The dirty secret is that most ESPs have no economic incentive NOT to do business with customers who refuse to use good list practices. Let me say it this way: Email service providers make good money from bad customers who in some circles could be considered spammers.

You might be scratching your head thinking most ESPs have strict anti-spam policies and lobby hard to clean up the industry. For the most part this statement is correct; however, there are always a handful of bad customers that are tolerated because of the big checks they stroke. These customers come in the forms of traditional direct marketing agencies that have to blow their client’s budget, affiliate marketers, and idiots who have deep pockets but not a clue about how email marketing works. One thing these types of customers have in common is that they want or have to send large volumes of email and have either purchased an email list or have appended a purchased direct mail list.

Contrary to popular belief, most ESPs don’t give their high paying bad customers the boot. Most try to force them through a reformation process. However, if the customer continues to ignore best practices some ESPs will do one of the following: either isolate the customer on an IP block reserved for wrongdoers (a sort of purgatory) or mix their bad customer’s email across multiple IP addresses of customers with good sending practices increasing the bad customer’s chance of making it to the inbox.

In the first scenario, the ESP milks the customer as they are well aware their email will either wind up in an ISP black hole or get bounced faster than an Atari Breakout ball. The bad customer, fed up with bad deliverability, will feverishly switch to a new ESP as soon as their contract is up. In the second scenario, the ESP increases the deliverability risk of their good customers. The attitude is akin to “so what if some customers get 90% deliverability instead of 96%. What’s 6%?” Eventually this attitude catches up with reality and good customers start complaining. This is when the ESP gives the bad customer the boot as their foot is already in the door of another ESP. Contrary to what Ken Magill of Direct Magazine says—“a marketer can’t ride an ESP’s e-mail reputation, folks”—a marketer CAN ride the reputation of an ESP’s customers… for a while at least. In either case the ESP is doing a disservice to not only their customers (good and bad) but to the industry at large.

The time has come for ESPs to get together and create their own blacklist of customers who they have booted because they refused to clean up their act. This would prevent these bad customers from trying to hop ESPs causing headaches and silently undermining the industry. The secret is out! Let’s do something about it.

—Elie Ashery of Gold Lasso

-->Read other posts in The From Line Extended series.

You’ve worked hard to build your distribution lists, you’ve adhered to the best practices in the industry and you’ve done what was asked by mailbox providers but your mail still isn’t reaching the inbox. This is not an uncommon problem; the typical solution is to be put on a whitelist.

Blacklists, or block-lists, are routinely shared among mailbox providers in an effort to combat spam. Whitelists on the other hand are a guarded secret, holding the identification of those mailers that have received “special permission.” The special permissions may permit your mail to be delivered, may reduce or eliminate spam filtration on your mail or might simply be providing you with false hope.

Why would mailbox providers provide access to something that was apparently so sacred and so carefully guarded? Frankly, whitelists are intended to address the shortcomings of spam filtration technology. Acting in the best interests of their customers, mailbox providers will block spam to enhance the user experience. Unfortunately, the rules for catching spam also catch some legitimate mail thus a need for an exemption-based system.

Just because you’re on the whitelist doesn’t mean your mail is getting delivered. What type of whitelists are you on?

Location lists — Used to identify your mail server as a localized to a specific location. Some early spam rules treated mail from outside the continental U.S. as highly suspect and blocked in instances delivered in volume. Whitelists were used to exempt certain foreign IP addresses.

General identification — Used to assert an identity and attribute a reputation to it, typically uses IP addresses but could use other authentication technologies such as Sender ID Framework, Domain Keys or cryptographic tokens.

URL lists — Used to identify specific URLs in your message as legitimate and not spoof URLs or otherwise malicious.

Domain lists — Used to identify a mailer as a recognized legitimate mailer. Used widely early on but has declined significantly due to bogus DNS records.

Reputation/Accreditation lists — This list uses some form of authentication (generally the IP address) to identify the mailer and either asserts a reputation for the mailer or an indicator that the mailer has passed some form of accreditation. Mailbox providers may have an agreement in place with the list provider to provide some privilege.

Clearly, the trend is toward reputation or accreditation lists—and the best solutions incorporate both. Incorporating an authentication mechanism that is not spoofable with such systems is the best case scenario and forces marketers to be accountable for their online actions not just their brand reputation. What this means for marketers is that the whitelists they once relied upon for getting their email delivered are going to become less effective as mailbox providers transition to reputation-based systems.

More on what you can do to make sure your online reputation is consistent with your brand reputation in another post…

—Charles Stiles of Goodmail Systems

It sounds like I’m trying to curse in codespeak, but I’m not thinking the words you likely are (bad, email marketer, bad). However, I’m thinking “strategy” and “deliverability.” The Email Insider Summit validated something we email “thought leaders” have been predicting for a while—the importance of strategy is trumping the importance of deliverability as the topic on the forefront of emailers’ minds. Not that deliverability isn’t important anymore, only that it has been superseded by the need to create a comprehensive plan for the email channel that moves marketers beyond segmented campaigns into behavioral messaging. David Daniels’ “Leveraging the Power of Email into the 21st Century,” David Baker’s “The Democratization of Email” and the HP case study presented by Daryl Nielson and Jared Hansen all drive home the point that strategy is imperative to channel success and retaining internal resources required to optimize email for any organization.

—Tricia Robinson of StrongMail Systems

What is the value of trust? What even is trust?

More and more we are hearing about the importance of trust in email. I have been to maybe three conferences in the past few months, and sat in on at least as many industry association and alliance meetings, where the topic of consumer trust in email comes up.

Financial segment senders tend to understand the value of ensuring customers trust email messages. Phishing attacks have a definite cost associated with them. It is relatively easy to do an economic model on the expense incurred in terms of calls to the support center, issuing corrective measures, etc. We don’t have to work too hard to convince the 250 most phished brands to take measures like rolling out authentication protocols to make sure email messages can indeed be represented to consumers as genuinely from the sender the email purports to be from. The Financial Services Technology Consortium has been a real leader in this respect.

Real “trust,” though, includes a number of components. At a minimum, it includes authentication, but it also includes means of conveying to a consumer not only “who really sent this email” but also “what do we know about this sender.” In email “reputation” is a term of art that typically refers to things like consumer complaint rates, but in a larger context, reputation—like brand—goes to the values a consumer imputes about your company, and its email. Trust is like brand, in that sense: something that touches all aspects of your company’s image, and something you can never pay too little attention to.

Marketers typically look at things like open rates, click-throughs, conversions, and other economic measures of program performance. They don’t typically quantify the economic value of ensuring consumer trust. Is it possible to create a measure like “return on trust”? What is the real economic benefit to a sender of maintaining trust at the highest levels with consumers?

—Charles Stiles of Goodmail Systems

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

BlueHornet: HTML Rendering in Outlook 2007 - Top 10 Questions & Answers
How to code and design HTML email templates that render effectively in Outlook 2007.

Chad White: Retailers Gravitating toward Single Sender Addresses
Managing multiple sender addresses and getting them all whitelisted is proving tough.

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

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

I work at a five-person education nonprofit as the marcom/grant writer and we are SO having problems with some of our emails not being delivered to our subscribers within the school districts. Our webmaster thinks it’s because the district spam filters are out of our control. I know we paid extra a while ago for a fixed DNS to get around AOL problems. What can we do besides posting instructions as we’ve done at this website, http://clms.net/resources/leaguelinks.htm? —Katie Winchell, California League of Middle Schools

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Stephanie Miller: This is a difficult issue. District system admins set up filters to protect their subscribers from unwanted email, just as AOL and businesses do. That is a good thing! Unfortunately for you the sender, often these filters are stricter than the major ISPs so mail that makes it to AOL still gets blocked by the district system.

There are two recourses for you: First, identify the top 10 districts to your business and make phone calls to subscribers or contacts there and encourage them to ask their system administrator to allow your email messages. When you commit to a certain frequency and to using the same from address (and domain), they may be willing. Typically, it takes their subscribers (also your customers/subscribers) to ask on your behalf. This can be cumbersome, I know, but it does work. Second, you could make it clear at sign up that subscribers are more likely to actually receive your email if they use a personal address rather than their district address. Alerting them right up front will help ensure more of your file is deliverable.

Jeanniey Mullen: This issue is too important to not seek professional advice. I would recommend that you make the invest to check your sending IP’s reputation with a professional organization like Return Path or Pivotal Veracity. They can diagnose the issue for you.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we’ll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

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

Chad White: Reportlet - Retailers Say the Dirtiest Things
Using spammy words in subject lines won’t always get you blocked.

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

Both SubscriberMail and Blue Sky Factory recently released lists of words that shouldn’t be used in emails because they’re likely to trigger spam filters. But I see some of these words—like “free” and “discount”—used routinely in the subject lines of commercial email that I receive. If I have a good reputation do I need to worry about content filters? Am I staying away from these words unnecessarily? —S.G.

The Voices of Email had this advice:

J.F. Sullivan: The answer should be no. If you have a good reputation then you do not need to worry about content filters. The actual answer is another question, as in it depends on two things: What’s your definition of a good reputation, and which content filter are we talking about?

Everyone in the email marketing (and message security) ecosystem has a different view of what a good reputation actually means. For some it’s as simple as making sure they are not on a blocklist; for others it may be that they are in compliance with a specific Sender Authentication implementation. In order to answer “yes” to the question, it may be more useful to provide a checklist summary of what a good reputation constitutes. So, if you can say “yes” to the following reputation aspects:

1. You have a good public reputation (not on blocklists, or have upset any ISPs).
2. You have good legislative adherence (e.g., CAN-SPAM compliance).
3. You have good infrastructure (e.g., DNS, MX records and the like).
4. You have good identity (e.g., you have a correctly configured SenderID record).
5. You have best practices (e.g., list scrubbing, opt-in, etc.).

Rob Fitzgerald: You always need to be aware that filtering exists, but I don’t think you need to be ruled by that existence either. It’s interesting to lay out all the various releases, of all the various words that shouldn’t be used within in an email, and see how incredibly long that list is. Sometimes it makes me wonder how you can actually put a string of sentences together without actually using any of them. Practically speaking, you have to use some words that may be “known” filter words. I don’t think that should give you pause to run the campaign for fear of a lack of response. We’ve sent out many campaigns with the word “Free” on them that have performed very well.

I tend to look at it this way—it’s all about moderation. Put together a creative with a lot of words that trigger filtering and it could be adversely affected. Give that same creative a diet, and keep some of those same words included, but not all of them, and I think you’ll be OK.

Stephanie Miller: Despite the frequency that I receive this question, there is still no magical list of words to avoid, nor is the use of marketing terms like “free,” “discount,” “special offer” and “click here” an automatic block. Don’t misunderstand. Those words can get you blocked. However, judicious, responsible and clear use of them usually won’t.

Why? Because spam filters dynamically update to reflect current market conditions and spammer behavior. The only way to ensure your content does not depress inbox deliverability is to run every email through a series of popular message filters to determine your spam score before sending to your entire mailing list. You can do this through a service or on your own by setting up multiple accounts at different ISPs.

Here’s how to optimize your message for response and deliverability: Write the copy as a marketer. Sell. Build the relationship. Clarify the offer. Make the call to action very clear. Then, test it. If you fail the spam filters, adjust it. Before you hit send, even if you pass the filter test, be sure to give your message AND subject line a “smell test.” If your readers or subscribers will think it’s spammy, so will the receivers. If you are using all capped, repetitive words that filters watch like “FREE SHIPPING THAT’S FREE” or using strange punctuation like ***NOW ON SALE***, then you are likely to be blocked.

Chad White: Inspired by this question, I did a little real world research and found that major online retailers have used many of the “dirty” words on SubscriberMail’s list of words to avoid using in subject lines. How many have they used? They’ve used 27 of the 100 in the past two months alone. Some of the words—like “Free,” “FREE,” “Offer” and “Buy”—they used a LOT. So it’s clearly possible to use these no-no words in subject lines under the right conditions. Based on that I’d say that you should explore using them but test to make sure your emails are getting through.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we’ll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

-->Read other Reply to All posts

Bulldog Solutions hosted a live roundtable on Email Deliverability for BtoB Lead Generation earlier this week. We expected a great turnout for this Webinar—and we weren’t disappointed. More than 50% of registrants made time to attend the hourlong live event—an attendance rate that exceeds nearly every measure for online marketing we track in the Bulldog Index.

Our panel included two familiar EEC names: Stephanie Miller of Return Path, who is the EEC’s vice chair for member initiatives, and Michelle Eichner of Pivotal Veracity, who leads the EEC’s deliverability and rendering roundtable. That group produced the March report on email standards and bounce management that we referred to several times during the webinar. We also had Ryan Rutan, a senior programming analyst at National Instruments, who offered his perspective from an organization that’s confronted many of the issues marketers are facing. You can view a recording of the roundtable here.

Prior to the webinar we solicited questions from our registrants, a practice we typically employ to help us ensure the panel addresses the audience’s biggest pain points. As the EEC’s Jeanniey Mullen pointed out, the questions themselves are fantastic market research.

Here’s one observation I think we can all relate to. The questions showed us that marketers want a magic bullet. This is human nature and not surprising, but when the topic is complex, it’s not always easy to provide. While they’re certainly willing to put in the work on testing and research, and to consider variables such as industry and message, the fact remains we received many questions asking for answers on:
—The best time to send emails
—The most successful subject line
—The best word count for a promotional email
—A definitive answer on whether text or HTML is best

One attendee summed up the panelists’ responses with humor: “Great stuff. Very knowledgeable panel. Bottom line: It depends. Ha ha.”

During the webinar we promised attendees we’d answer some of the questions we didn’t get to address during the live event. We’ll use this blog and Bulldog’s sales and marketing blog, as well as our Marketing Watchdog Journal newsletter, to communicate when we have some Q&A written up for the audience to explore.

—Amy Bills

I see hundreds of advertising pieces in any given month that companies are looking to send out via email. They range from really slick, graphically dynamic pieces to straight-forward text information. Each has its purpose—and what that purpose is can sometimes be where the problems arise.

Email marketing is a very unique way to promote your brand or products to a consumer. When designing your email message, you have to keep that in mind as there are many issues with filtering, and various things that can cause a spam trigger. So the design always needs to focus on one critical item—what is the point of the message and how clearly defined and visible is the call-to-action?

We recently did some acquisition work for a large well-known company that sent over one of the slickest looking advertising pieces I have seen. Great images, great colors, lots of product shots—you could tell the agency put a lot of work into it. However, it was for those same reasons that the creative piece was not going to work.

First, you can’t send out, via email, a marketing piece that is one big image, or multiple images. That undeniably will lead to a lot of blocking/filtering issues.

Second, specifically identifying over 10 products in the advertising piece will lead to a little confusion or indifference on behalf of the consumer. For optimal results, there should be one call-to-action and focus on one product. I think consumers generally like the online shopping and checkout process to be easy. So focus on one thing, and put all your efforts into that one item.

And lastly, there was a phone number for the recipient to call in their order, but the company did not track where the calls came in from. So they couldn’t tie back the calls to the email campaign itself.

Ultimately this particular campaign didn’t perform as well as it should have.

On the other hand, we did another acquisition campaign for a very well-known cataloger. Their advertising piece was straight to the point. It had one very nice image, a little text, a clear reference to the apparel offer, and a well highlighted promotional offer for free shipping. Short, concise, to the point. It was one of the best performing campaigns we have run all year.

Some general HTML design guidelines and recommendations:

1. Use fonts that are universal on the internet such as Arial, Verdana, Tahoma and New Times Roman so the message doesn’t default to a different font if the user does not have one of these installed on their computer.

2. Use alt tags in the HTML code for each image used in the design.

3. Use headers, especially those that feature the brand/logo

4. Minimize the amount of graphics/images used. Don’t rely on them to be the main content of the message.

5. The subject line should be less than 49 characters, including spaces.

6. Do not use comments in the HTML code of your email as they flag spam triggers.

7. Keep the message size under 50KB for consumer emails and under 75KB for business.

8. Lastly, keep the width of the HTML message under 650 pixels so the design does not potentially get cut off in the preview panels for the recipients.

—Rob Fitzgerald

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

ExactTarget / eec Webinar slides: Accelerating Marketing ROI
How companies use permission-based email as the lynchpin of their integrated marketing strategy.

ThinData: The Marketer’s Guide to Successful Email Delivery
A best practices guide.

Chad White: Reportlet – The Most Popular Email Days of the Year for Retailers
Plus the day-of-the-week and month-of-the-year distribution trends for those volume spikes.

Chad White: Reportlet - Choosing the Best Day of the Week to Email
The days favored by retailers varies depending on their weekly frequency.

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

“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