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Email Deliverability: Six Steps to Maintain a Positive Reputation in 2010

By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing for Listrak
November 12, 2009

Symantec's October 2009 State of Spamⁱ report found that spam volumes made up a staggering 87 percent of of all email messages sent in October 2009, a dramatic increase from 2008. That same month it reported that an average of 1.9 percent of all spam messages contained malware. With hundreds of billions of emails being sent daily it is becoming increasingly difficult for ISPs to always discern which messages are legitimate, which ones are spam, and which ones are outright dangerous for users' computers and identities.

 

Figure 1 - Factors used by ISPs to measure reputation.
Mouse over each category for a brief description.

The number one concern for ISPs is to protect their users. They do so by measuring the email senders' reputations to determine if the messages should be delivered to the inbox or junk mail folder or if they should be filtered or blocked altogether. Each ISP has its own metrics in place, but the chart on the right shows the major factors that make up a sender's reputation.

User complaints remain one of the most telling and easiest to monitor factors in measuring reputation. Although the term "spam" refers to unsolicited commercial email messages, many people think of it as any unwanted message regardless if they requested to receive emails from the sender or not. When the emails are no longer relevant, subscribers hit the "report spam" button as a means of unsubscribing from the email list. This has changed the way ISPs think of spam.

Many ISPs have added a new metric to the reputation measurement - level of subscriber interaction and engagement. ISPs can tell who opens and clicks on a message and who ignores or deletes it. More importantly, they monitor how many subscribers click "this is not spam" if the message is delivered to the junk mail folder instead of the inbox. Monitoring subscriber engagement lets the ISP know which senders are delivering relevant content that subscribers want and which ones, like spammers, are continuing to blast out message after message even if no previous action has been taken.

It's important to remember that deliverability is something you control - your sending practices will make or break your reputation. You cannot buy a positive reputation or buy your way out of a negative one.

In 2010, subscriber engagement will play a major factor in email deliverability. If you're already following email best practices these steps are quick and easy to implement and they will make a positive impact on your ROI and bottom line.