Email marketers are always on the lookout for the next best thing. We always want to be recognized as “thinking outside the box.” This kind of entrepreneurial spirit is what we’re all about as we go off into the digital world. Some recent studies have suggested that around 95% of all email is really SPAM. At first glance, this can be a pretty scary number to us as senders. The reality is that this is a great opportunity for email marketers to take control of an opportunity. This means that you only have to compete with the 5% of messages that are legitimate. How do we take advantage of the lack of effective email marketing? I suggest we get back to basics and explore a different way of thinking about email marketing. Are you ready for a mind-twisting thought? Thinking "inside the box" is the new "thinking outside the box."

What exactly do I mean by this statement? I want each of you to take an honest and simple look at your email programs. First, ask yourself some foundational questions:
What am I trying to accomplish with email?
Who is my audience?
Why do my customers sign-up for email?
If I was a customer, what would be my expectation of the email I was going to receive?
Do I educate my customers on the benefits of my email program?
Do I have a frequency plan?
Are my messages relevant to each recipient?
Do I have a goal in mind each time I send an email?
What is my bounce rate?
What is my complaint rate?
Do I historically track my stats for comparison?
Am I testing with regularity?

These questions are the basic building blocks for any successful email program. These are also questions whose answers can pretty easily be pushed aside to be answered another day. Revenue pressures, the need to increase engagement and subscribers, perceived deliverability issues, and executive pressures are all factors that can cause us to get off track from time to time. A common misconception goes something like this. I send to 10,000 addresses today and sell 100 widgets. If I send to 20,000 addresses tomorrow, I will sell 200 widgets. This type of flawed logic gets us away from our basic questions and mission. Email marketing is about the recipient, not the sender. If you build a relationship with the recipient and give them something of value, the relationship will pay dividends.

When we hear about the “end” of email as a medium, it is that 95% of unwanted email that drives the perception. Now more than ever, it is time to focus on what your customers and prospects want to see. Bring your thinking back into the box of good marketing plans and communications, and see your results soar.

- Kevin Senne, Premiere Global Services

There’s plenty of information on the Internet about how to manage bounces, but not much about why it’s so important to do so. And if you don’t know the why, will you follow the how?

Although email marketing has countless moving parts to it, one part is key: Deliverability. This can’t be overstated. Email marketers live and die by their delivery rates. You have to do everything you can to maximize your deliverability. Your deliverability is affected by your reputation, and your reputation can be tarnished by a high bounce rate. If you’re at all concerned about your delivery rate, and you should be, take a look at your bounces and how they’re impacting your reputation.

A bounce means your email didn’t get delivered. That’s easy enough to track as far as knowing how many of your emails made it to the inbox. But you need to know why an email bounced and you need to have a plan for managing bounces so you can reduce their occurrence, and therefore work to protect your reputation.

First, understand the difference between a soft bounce and a hard bounce. Think of a soft bounce as temporary: an employee is on vacation and her mailbox is full, meaning there’s no room for your email. Think of a hard bounce as permanent: the employee left her job and the email address is no longer valid.

You’ll get a message from the ISP when your email isn’t delivered telling you why. That will tell you whether it was a hard or soft bounce. Look to those messages to figure out why your emails didn’t go through.

A soft bounce, being temporary, means the email address is still valid and you can try resending your email again another time. That’s a name that stays on your hard-earned in-house list. But a hard bounce might not mean one less name to market to. While there are sometimes ‘false positives’ with hard bounces, most ESPs typically automatically block hard bounces. A hard bounce might occur because the domain name doesn't exist, the recipient is unknown, or there's some type of network problem on the recipient's end. In this last case, there might be a temporary issue that will be resolved so if you’re confident the email is valid, you might want to consider emailing it one more time.

On the other hand, if the email address is a bad, you have to remove the name from your list a.s.a.p. otherwise too many bad addresses could result in an ISP blocking or even blacklisting your IP address. You will always have bounces. The trick is to minimize them and delete the bad emails right away.

Now that you know the “why” behind managing bounces, you’re ready to search the Internet for all the advice on “how”!

- Marco Marini, ClickMail Marketing

I’m on the road lately and find that some marketers I meet are surprised to learn how much marketing there is in email deliverability. In fact, the marketing piece—all the things you do as a marketer to ensure a great subscriber experience like great content, relevant promotions, strong calls to action, effective design, frequency, permission, privacy, triggered messages, transactions—is often more essential to great deliverability than the technical aspects like infrastructure, reverse DNS and authentication. Of course, you need both to reach the inbox.

Here’s why the marketing plays such a key role—because complaints are such a key factor in determining your deliverability. ISPs view complaints as a proxy for how relevant and welcome your subscribers find your messages. Relevant messages have low complaint scores, the key factor in Sender Reputation and good deliverability. Irrelevant or too frequent messages have a lot of complaints—lots of subscribers clicking the “This is spam” button. No matter how good your infrastructure, privacy policy or even the practices of your email delivery vendor, if you want to consistently reach the inbox—and earn a response—you need to keep complaints at a minimum, and apply both marketing and technical brains to creating great subscriber experiences.

So it’s just as true that the IT folks can’t blame us marketers and we can’t blame them (or our ESPs). The great, important weight of deliverability is a shared responsibility—and opportunity!

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path

There is a dizzying array of information, discussions and banter regarding the importance of sender reputation, however very little substance about how the process technically works. Even more surprising is the continuous debate among ESPs as to whether its better to have a client on a shared IP address verses a unique IP address. Please tell me how a sender establishes a good reputation using a shared IP address? I still haven’t figured out the risk logic to this yet.

What’s most shocking is that very few ESPs offer their clients custom DNS. What is custom DNS, you ask? It’s when you have the ability to send email from your own domain name such as weeklyspecial@click.mystore.com instead of your ESP’s mail server domain such as weeklyspecial@mx345.myesp.com. This involves pointing certain DNS records to the unique IP address your ESP provides. The IP has to be unique since reverse DNS needs to be configured as well and only one reverse DNS is permitted per IP address. Instead, many ESPs allow their clients to “spoof” a sender email address, violating many ISPs acceptable use policies (however rarely enforced).

The importance of custom DNS stems from the fact that it’s the last link in ensuring your email sending reputation and one that is rarely implemented. In fact, if you don’t have a custom DNS and a unique IP address, you will not be able to participate in sender verification, white listing and reputation management programs. Also, many corporate phishing filters block links in messages that point to other domains other than the receiving authenticated domain—meaning that if you send an email from mx345.myesp.com and have a link in your message that is pointing to yourwebsite.com you have a higher probability of it being filtered in a corporate network environment.

So what’s a concerned marketer to do? The first step is to get a unique IP address. If you send a significant volume of email and your ESP doesn’t offer a unique IP address then its time to consider a new ESP. The second step is to ask your ESP to help you with your custom DNS. They should provide you with a string of DNS entries that include authentication. If your lists are relatively clean and branding is important, choose a derivative of your corporate domain name such as email.yourdomain.com or click.yourdomain.com. If your list gathering practices are even slightly questionable then you should purchase a domain specifically for email marketing. If your ESP tries to charge you an arm and a leg for this service kick them in the shins and demand that they do it for free. It should take an experienced network admin no more than 15 minutes to get your account configured correctly.

Custom DNS is the only way to go with email marketing. The setup process will take a little extra effort, however it will pay dividends with email reputation management, branding and overall trust with your recipients.

—Elie Ashery of Gold Lasso

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The answer…
55% --> The sender name. The reputation of the sender is key.
45% --> The subject line. Subscribers want to know what the email is about before they open it.

Are you surprised by the results? Share your comments below.

Also, visit the eec homepage to answer the latest Two-Click Survey question:
Help us redesign our site. Should the width of pages on the eec site be increased, decreased or stay the same (960 pixels wide)?

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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

Before DMA07, we solicited questions from our members and subscribers, promising to post them in our booth at the show and recruit email experts in attendance to answer those questions. We got some great questions and tons of great answers:

1. How important is it for email creative to match the same look and feel as the order page/landing page?

Marc Pitre, Wampower.com: It’s critical to keep the branding consistent between emails and landing pages. Both the creative and the message itself must be consistent to be impactful to the end viewer. It’s too easy to dilute your message, so keep it consistent.

Andrew Osterday, Premiere Global Services: Landing pages are often ignored or an afterthought, but can have a strong impact on conversion. The flow from email to landing page should be seamless in both messaging and look and feel. Consider custom landing pages rather than linking to the site.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: Very. Especially in promotional messages and prospecting. Be sure that the offer in the email is front and center—don’t make me scroll. Using a custom landing page can improve conversion rates up to 50%. Definitely worth the investment in optimizing landing pages—they are the fulfillment of the promise created in your email message and it should be a seamless experience.

Michael Fishers, Alterian: It is very important—lack of matching in look and feel produces confusion, feels uncoordinated and impacts response accordingly.

Joel Book, ExactTarget: Providing creative continuity between the email and the associated landing page is vital for driving response and conversion. According to Forrester Research, “92% of business decision-makers go online to research products and services before buying offline.” By using email to deliver relevant offers to customers, marketers are accelerating the buying process. The key is to make it easy for the customer to buy—having consistent look and feel for email and landing page achieves this objective.

2. Do the same elements found in traditional printed letters (salutation, closing, signature, p.s.) work for emails?

Melinda Krueger, Krueger Direct: Yes, to the extent that they reflect a personal, one-to-one approach to communication. Corporate “billboards” are easy to ignore; personal correspondence is not. Consider the “voice” and use the personal pronoun!

Elie Ashery, Gold Lasso: Yes, depending on personalized and relevant the message is. Personalization doesn’t necessarily mean name, but rather actual content.

3. What do you consider best practice when it comes to accessing and changing email preferences? On one hand, it has to be easy for subscribers to go and edit their subscriptions. On the other hand, no one else than the subscriber should have access to change the subscriber’s information. Do you recommend a login, a verification email with required action before changes take effect, a notification email notifying the subscriber that changes have been made, etc…?

Loren McDonald, J.L. Halsey: The simplest means is to include a link in the subscriber’s email so that only they can click through to the preference center/update profile page. For sites that link registration (e.g., an ecommerce site), you can link the two processes. A notification email that confirms the changes is always a good idea.

Jeanniey Mullen, Email Experience Council and OgilvyOne: The preference center is a critical element of a successful email program. It can increase the life and engagement of your consumer. Keeping access to preference centers secure is critical but so is keeping access simple. Most companies offer encoded links to preference centers that allow you to bypass the logon elements. If you are using a secure center, password retrieval features are key.

Joel Book, ExactTarget: The key to using a preference center to gather customer needs and interests is to ask for only that data which is needed to deliver relevant and timely information through email. It is critical that you explain why you are asking for this information, how it will be used, and how the customer can update his/her profile. Remember, you are building trust.

Melinda Krueger, Krueger Direct: Consider a 1-2 punch. First capture the impulse to subscribe, then, as an optional second step, ask for more information. Consider offering an incentive (tied closely to your email value proposition) and explain that you are asking to avoid sending irrelevant emails.

4. Is there a proven happy medium between images and text in an email? Do too many or not enough images reduce response?

Elie Ashery, Gold Lasso: Email marketers today need to design their emails with the assumption that their recipients’ have their email clients set with the images turned off. This means that the recipients should be understand the gist of the message without its images. Images should be used to enhance text, not replace it.

Chad White, Email Experience Council: The “happy medium” is per industry and depends on both your content and the reader in which the person will be viewing the email. For example, a B2B email that’s likely to be read on a Blackberry should be all or mostly text. But retail emails where product images are so vital should be mostly HTML.

5. How can you tell if an email is being read in a preview pane only then deleted?

David Daniels, JupiterResearch: If someone clicks in a preview pane, can you hear them? It is all about behavior. If there are no clicks, there’s no engagement, so attempt tactics for reactivation (survey, sweepstakes, etc.). The only real way to determine if an email has been read is by clicks.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: Great question! Technically, there is probably not a way to get 100% pure data unless you put a “pixel” that is triggered by the scroll. However, you could track performance by proxy in one of two ways: (1) by putting a “morse type” link at the top (visible even when images are suppressed) that promotes the offer and “opens” the email, or (2) by analyzing clicks on text links below the fold which are not visible when images are suppressed. Frankly, I’m not sure why this measure is valuable if your preview pane is optimized, it will drive engagement, not a deletion.

Loren McDonald, J.L. Halsey: Open rates are tacked via a tracking 1-pixel image. So if images are enabled and a reader “views” the email (whether it is opened or not) it will count as an open. If images are blocked and the email is viewed in the preview pane (or fully opened), it will not count as an open. As a result, click-through rates are a much better gauge of email activity.

6. Can a newsletter sell or is it better for branding?

Jordan Ayan, SubscriberMail: Email marketing is about building relationships. If you approach it as a sales medium, you are looking at it from the wrong perspective. Can you sell with email? Absolutely, but for long-term success, you have to focus on delivering relevant content that highlights your brand and keeps recipients wanting more. Then they will give you permission to sell them electronically.

Kara Trivunovic, Premiere Global Services: A newsletter can sell if it is done right. The newsletter should be editorial in nature, with a majority of the content being relevant, value-add information. If sales copy is going to be included, it should be done as a soft sell, wrapped in editorial when possible.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: Yes! Optimize to do both: (1) Educate customers about the full benefits of the products. (2) Engage subscribers to interact with your company, website, sales team, blog etc. (3) Lead prospects down the sales cycle by educating and asking questions.

7. Is it practical/realistic to budget for file growth from viral marketing? Can we count this as a tactic, or is it just "either."

Michael Salin, M.J. Salin & Associates: Yes! Emerging marketing genre are heavily based in viral practices…word of mouth, social networking. You should test and quantify viral programs – consumer talking to a consumer is the highest/strongest marketing communiqué. Quantify the send and free creative is a way to promote the idea.

Chad White, Email Experience Council: You can definitely budget for viral growth. In general, you can expect pass-along rates of 1%-2%, but it depends on the prominence of your send-to-a-friend links and how often you encourage readers to forward your emails. For instance, some retailers have “friends and family” event emails where part of the messaging encourages recipients to forward the discount offer to others. Doing emails like that will boost your pass-along rate.

8. If no legitimate ESP will allow the use of purchased lists in their system, how do data brokers and email appenders who focus on this market stay in business?

Craig Swerdloff, Postmaster Direct: Our experience has been that top-tier ESPs will send for lists that offer list rental, assuming certain requirements are met. They include explicit permission from recipients, proper list hygiene, good reputation scores, and compliant/unknown user rates within allowable thresholds.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: The owner of the data sends the message on your behalf—so the initial mailing is from the data source inviting the subscriber to opt-in for email from you. Many marketers who send mail in-house, use internal append very successfully. There are best practices to ensuring your sender reputation is protected.

Loren McDonald, J.L. Halsey: List brokers manage the email databases for companies whose list members have agreed to receive third-party offers. The emails are sent “from” the list owner to the list member. Once the subscriber opts in to specific a marketer’s program, they have given permission to the marketer. At that point, ESPs will allow the company to send to the subscriber.

9. What is the single most popular offer that drives people to register and share their information? We are desperately trying to collect emails from our customers and it's been very challenging.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: As is true in all direct marketing, offer something perceived value for free. But the question should really be around how you can construct a powerful email experience that will entice and engage your prospects. While many will sign up for something that is free, your response and ROI will only come when the email program itself has consistent value.

10. What is the right frequency for retail email programs? It seems like many retailers are at 2x+ per week. Does not mailing at that frequency hurt my chances?

Austin Bliss, FreshAddress: Unfortunately, there is no “right” frequency. You should send on a schedule that provides value to your recipients—e.g. if you have daily sales, you can send daily. But if you have nothing to say 2 times a week, you shouldn’t mail at that rate because you will have incurred complaints/unsubscribes.

Chad White, Email Experience Council: There are lots of factors to consider here, including the frequency at which your products tend to be purchased, the content of your email (both promotional and service-oriented content), the length of your email, etc. For example, Blue Nile emails once a month, recognizing that jewelry is not a frequent purchase. Home Depot, on the other hand, sends once a week, targeting subscribers’ weekend projects. And then there’s Neiman Marcus, which emails 7+ times a week, engaging its fashion hungry subscribers with info on new products, store events, discounts and video and article content.

11. If you send five or more emails to the same recipient and they aren't opened, does your domain/IP get reclassified as spam by the ISP? This obviously isn't standard across all ISP's. If this is in practice by some, which ones are they?

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: List quality is definitely a factor in sender reputation. Having a large number of non-responders on your file could reduce your “score” among ISPs/receivers. ISPs generally don’t publish the “rules” that they use, as publishing them would expose them to abuse by spammers.

HAVE SOME INSIGHT TO ADD? Please comment below, just be sure to include the number of the question that you're answering.

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.

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Fellow eec blogger Chip House recently blogged some good points on email marketing sustainability in response Michael Specter’s recent article, “Damn Spam” in the New Yorker .

As Chip notes, Specter’s piece is a fascinating piece of historical reporting on the origin of spam. Too bad Specter misses the whole point of how the spam problem is being tackled today—and how, I believe, it will eventually be solved.

It’s really challenging, both from an intellectual as well as corporate resources standpoint—for receivers of all stripes—ISPs, universities, corporations, etc- to keep up with the spammers. Spam evolves. Specter reports, “Indeed, most anti-spam techniques so far have been like pesticides that do nothing other than create a more resistant strain of bugs.”

Return Path responded to the article by correcting Specter’s suggestion that using reputation analysis (i.e., Is this sender good or bad?) is susceptible to gaming by spammers in the same way that content filters (i.e., does this email look or read like spam?) are today. We also blogged about it here.

Our response was written by Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg and GM of Deliverability Solutions George Bilbrey. Since they are a lot smarter than I am, I quote their letter in part:

“In fact, reputation metrics, if used well, are impossible to fake for more than 24 hours. A server that sends email that garners lots of complaints from recipients cannot make those complaints disappear. A server that has a spammy configuration (like open proxies or open relays) can’t fake those technical settings. Spammers can, and do, switch servers and IP addresses, but these “no reputation” IPs are viewed with suspicion by receivers until they accumulate enough data on them to develop a reputation.

Even if they spend time up front establishing a good reputation by using good sending practices, no true spammer can ever get or keep a good reputation—a standard that is increasingly becoming the only path to inbox placement. But, legitimate email marketers—retailers, publishers, non-profits and others—can establish good reputations that make sure that consumers get the email they sign up for and want to receive. Reputation systems offer the best of both worlds—a decrease in unwanted email and a decrease in false positives. For this reason, more and more internet service providers and corporate email administrators are moving to reputation systems to stem the spam tide. While spam may never completely end, the improvement of these systems will surely have many spammers looking for a new line of work.”

—Stephanie Miller

One thing I’ve learned in life is that your reputation follows you. Once tarnished, it is difficult to repair. United Airlines is one business that has destroyed what was once a great reputation (yes, at one time it was wonderful to fly with them).

USA Today recently ran an article about the decline in service quality in the airline industry. The article recounts story after story of small missteps that have built into a major reputation crisis for the industry. I was interviewed for the article:

“There were days in the not-too-distant past when United’s service was fantastic, especially if you were an elite flier,” says Jordan Ayan, CEO of a Chicago high-tech firm.

A million-mile United flier, he used to buy Christmas gifts for his favorite United agents at Chicago O’Hare. “Boy, have times changed.”

The basics are simple: keep your list clean, don’t pre-check opt-in boxes, honor unsubscribes, don’t email too often, remove bounces and comply with CAN-SPAM. It’s like anything that impacts reputation in a relationship, put yourself on the other side, and if a practice is distasteful to you, don’t do it. If United’s executives had done this, we might all have cleaner planes, nicer agents, on-time flights and a better time traveling.

—Jordan Ayan

Sometimes you just want that extra bit of security. You want to own the “real deal.” Depending on who you are, you might seek this out in different ways, such as buying a 4WD, off-road-ready vehicle even though you live in Manhattan, or a having a watch rated to depths of 50 feet, even though you don’t scuba dive. What matters though is that should you want to drive through a muddy mountain pass or scuba with the watch on, you could! Most of us, however, never get to see our fanciest gadgets in action, so we really don’t know if they work!

Thus far, most email reputation systems have been a bit like this, haven’t they? Though they’re rated to provide better deliverability, to qualify for the program you already have to have pretty darn good permission policies and list hygiene practices, and in turn pretty good deliverability.

Last week, the folks at Return Path upgraded their Sender Score Certified system to “go off-road.” Along with the changes at Windows Live Mail (image suppression, increased use of throttling and bulk-foldering for new IP’s, etc.), Sender Score Certified now provides some additional tangible benefits that marketers can see and feel.

Return Path also reported that those qualifying for Sender Score Certified will have their images enabled by “default” at Windows Live Mail/Hotmail and will enjoy more lenient daily throttling limits. Plus, certified senders will also have an “unsubscribe” button enabled by Windows Live Mail/Hotmail, providing the opt-out button that marketers have been yapping about for ages. The ESPC study from earlier this year shows that consumers are likely to use it, too. Per that study, 90% of respondents said they would use such a button “if it existed.” Guess what folks, now it does. Want to reduce your complaints at Microsoft properties? Sender Score Certified is looking like a better way now than ever.

—Chip House