How Reputation Impacts Deliverability
By Ross Kramer, CEO of Listrak
March 7, 2007
Most marketers engaged in email marketing do not realize the important role that their reputation plays, not only on their deliverability, but also on the overall return of their marketing investment. Monitoring your company’s email marketing reputation and the reputation of your Email Service Provider (ESP) is vital to your business.
There are several things you should do to ensure your company’s reputation remains positive to subscribers. This document covers how to determine a baseline for measuring your reputation, how to fix potential problems, and what you can do to keep your reputation separate from the reputation of your ESP.
Why Should I Care about my Reputation?
The amount of unsolicited email that ISPs and corporate mail server administrators receive has forced them to adopt creative methods to reduce or halt spam delivery. While content filtering works to block spam, it also falsely labels many emails as spam and blocks them from being delivered to the recipient. As a way to combat this, users have been forced to abandon content blocking in favor of reputation based systems which have a much lower propensity to block conversational email. However, doing so may wreak havoc on email marketing campaigns.
Last year, email receivers broadly adopted various reputation based systems that helped them determine whether the mail they were receiving was coming from a source that they, or more appropriately their email clients, deemed positive or negative. These reputation systems were not built around published protocols such as SPF or DomainKeys. Rather, they were built upon home-grown technology centered on a “This is Spam” reporting device. AOL was the first major email receiver to implement such a device and the virtual overnight success of the program prompted others, such as Yahoo, MSN/Hotmail, and Gmail, to follow suit.
Today, the majority of addresses on email marketers’ lists originate from ISPs that have active reputation systems in place. Unfortunately, each one of these ISPs sets its own rules governing email traffic and enforcing policies that protect its users from the barrage of unsolicited spam. While the rules vary from one provider to the next, there are a few things that savvy email marketers can do to ensure that their emails get delivered to the inbox and not accidentally filtered into the junk mail folder.
Many email marketers that use an ESP mistakenly think that reputation and deliverability are the sole responsibility of the provider. While the ESP has a knowledgeable staff and the high tech systems in place to help manage deliverability issues, there are many things that the sender must do to protect the reputation of his or her company. Email marketers must make the investment in their own deliverability by understanding and properly managing their reputation in order to have the best deliverability possible.
Listrak clients have seen deliverability rates increase up to 20% by simply paying attention to the problem and following some of the simple steps outlined in this document.
First Name:
Last Name:
Email:
Phone:
Company Name:
L_Submission_ResourceSource:
Campaign:
L_Submission_Newsletter:
L_Submission_ResourceID:
L_Submission_ResourceTitle:
L_Submission_TrackingID:
L_Submission_TrackingLabel:
L_Submission_CampaignGroupID:
L_Submission_CampaignGroup:
L_Keyword:
L_Source: