Three Proactive Steps to Enhance Reputation
Email marketers can take a few proactive steps to help their reputation and positively affect their deliverability. While not an exhaustive list, the suggestions below will help most email marketers achieve a very high deliverability rate and keep their reputation positive.
#1. Keep Complaints Low
Email reputation is heavily based on user complaints. If email campaigns are generating a high level of complaints, you need to find out why and fix the problem immediately. Perhaps there is a permission problem or frequency issue as companies that send three or more emails per month may have a higher number of complaints. If you have complaints, you should measure them by acquisition source to help uncover some potential problem areas.
#2. Maintain Infrastructure Isolation and Transparency
If you use an in-house email marketing system, such as Listrak, or an outsourced hosting company, it is imperative that they separate their mailing footprint from other customers within the mailing infrastructure. This means that you must make sure that your mailings go out using a dedicated IP address or a pool of dedicated IP addresses. You must also make sure that any domain name in the header of the message is your domain name and that all tracking links use your domain name as well. Finally, you must make sure that images that are hosted anywhere other than your own websites use your domain name in the image links. This includes any image based tracking technology used by an ESP to track messages.
#3. Test, Measure, Improve
There is no excuse for any email marketer not to test their email campaigns. A critical first step of testing is to know what to test so it is imperative that you understand the composition of email list by domain. Once you understand what percentage of your list is composed by which ISP, you should then get an email account with the ISPs that account for the top 50% of the list composition. Most times these accounts will be free with the exception of ISPs such as Comcast, Earthlink, and Juno/NetZero. AOL is even offering free email accounts at this time.
To quickly spot abnormalities in email campaigns, you should measure performance metrics such as opens, clicks, and bounces by domain sorted by top percentage of list composition.
Finally, to improve performance, you should partner with a trusted source of information and infrastructure that can help you achieve deliverability goals. Email marketing technology is constantly updated, so it is important to have a trusted partner that will keep you up to date on all of the changes. This way, you will get the most from his or her email marketing investment.
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