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Email Delivery, VerticalResponse, and You
Table of Contents
Introduction.................................................3
The Email “Gates”........................................4
The Mailbox Provider..............................4
The Private Domain................................6
The Spam Filter......................................7
What Does VerticalResponse Do to Ensure
Excellent Email Delivery?..............................9
What Can You Do to Help Ensure Excellent
Email Delivery?...........................................11
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Email Delivery, VerticalResponse, and You
Delivering email seems pretty straightforward,
right? You upload a mailing list, create an
email, hit send, and then mighty wizards
transport that email to your recipients
through the use of handcrafted cables and
powerful laser beams. What more could you
possibly need to know about this process?
As it turns out, loads more.
There are a number of factors
that determine whether an
email gets a response from its
recipients. Let’s start by looking
at the journey an email takes to
reach its intended recipient. In
order for an email to be properly
delivered, it must pass through
one or more “gates,” each of
which has the power to deny that
email passage and stop it from
continuing on its way.
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The Email “Gates”
Gate #1: The Mailbox Provider
Getting through this gate is all about your reputation with each mailbox
provider. Your reputation is determined by a number of factors:
1. Do your emails
get complaints?
Your recipients can complain about
your email in a number of ways, like
clicking the “Report Spam” button in their
mailbox, by complaining to a blacklist,
or by complaining directly to the abuse
desk of your email service provider (like
VerticalResponse). A complaint rate as
low as 0.3%, or sometimes even lower,
can have a negative impact on your
reputation and hurt your email delivery.
2. Does your email hit spam trap addresses?
Sending email to a spam trap will lower your reputation, as your mail is
lumped with all other spammers that are also hitting these traps. What are
spam traps? They’re either email addresses that are never used, email
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Email Delivery, VerticalResponse, and You
addresses that have been deactivated after a long period of inactivity, or
addresses that have been placed on websites in order to tempt spammers
to harvest them (nothing a spammer likes more than a big, juicy email
address innocently sitting around on a webpage, waiting to be plucked),
which makes it easier to find and stop email sent by spammers. Mailing
lists that are purchased or rented often contain these spam traps.
3. How high are your invalid address rates?
Having a lot of invalid or deactivated
email addresses on your list can be a
sign to mailbox providers that you have
poor mailing practices or are using
purchased or scraped lists. Does this
mean there’s a problem if you see a
high bounce rate following a single
email campaign? Not necessarily. If you
regularly get high bounce rates (10%
or higher), then your reputation is more
likely to suffer and you will encounter
problems getting good addresses
delivered.
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Gate #2: The Private Domain
Private domains are domains that belong
to organizations. Some can be large
corporate domains like VerticalResponse
or Salesforce, or even small businesses
that host their own email system.
Many email administrators employ
blacklists in order to keep spam out of
their networks, so one of the best ways to
ensure delivery to a private domain is to
stay off of commonly used blacklists.
What’s a blacklist exactly?
A blacklist is a database of IP Addresses or domains that may have been
used to send spam. These lists are used by recipient servers to reject mail
coming from the listed IP Addresses or domains.
There are hundreds of publicly available blacklists. Some of them are
large, effective and very popular (like Spamhaus and SpamCop) and
some of them are small, use questionable methods to create listings,
and aren’t used often. Each blacklist provider has their own methodology
for determining which IP Addresses should be listed and which listed IP
Addresses can be removed if requested.
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In addition to these publicly available blacklists, some companies use their
own private, internal blacklists that are only put to use for their domains.
These are not public, so the only way to know you’re listed is to send mail
to the domain and see if you receive a bounce error saying you’re listed. If
KEEP OFF BLACKLISTS
you are listed, you can try to track down the administrator for the domain
and request removal.
The best way to stay off of blacklists is to only
mail people who’ve specifically requested your
email. As luck would have it, this is exactly what
VerticalResponse requires of our clients.
Gate #3:
The Spam Filter
Even if your IP Address has a good
reputation and you haven’t been
receiving complaints, there is one
final gate through which your email
must pass: the spam filter. Email
providers like Yahoo! or Gmail
have their own filters and individual
corporations usually use an outside
filter (like Postini or SpamAssassin).
Each one is different in its own way,
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but there are still some general issues to keep in mind to avoid seeing your
mail filtered to the spam folder:
1. Reputation
Spam filters provided by mailbox
providers consider reputation when
determining whether your email should
be filtered, blocked, or delivered to
the inbox. Your reputation may be
good enough to have your message
received, but it may still be filtered if
R EPUTATION
your content resembles spam
2. Content
This one is obvious and is all about making sure your email doesn’t look
like spam. At one point, not looking like spam mostly just meant not using
“gotcha” words and phrases like
“Free Loan Just for You!” or “Open
This Right Now!” or “$5000 dollars
TE
CON NT
free inside for you, my best friend!”
Now it can also mean not sending
image only/image heavy emails (as
50% of spam is image only at this
point) and making sure your HTML
IS KING
code is properly formatted and clean.
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What Does VerticalResponse Do to
Ensure Excellent Delivery?
We’re Anti-Spam
Everyone says they’re anti-spam, but
we really mean it. We respond to and
investigate any complaint that comes
in to our abuse desk, quickly deal with
clients who receive complaints (before
delivery problems start), and we even
look over the emails our clients send
N
SPAM
to make sure nothing suspicious or
fraudulent makes it out the door. This keeps complaints to a minimum,
which is a big part of maintaining a strong reputation for our IP Addresses.
We Automate Bounce/
Unsubscribe Processing
By automating the bounce and
unsubscribe process, we ensure
users can’t abuse our IP Addresses by
ignoring bounces and unsubscribes.
This also helps us keep an excellent
sender reputation.
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We Use Feedback Loops
We have feedback loops set-up with every ISP that is known to offer one.
This means if someone clicks “Report Spam” at Yahoo!, they trust us
to take action on the complaint and we’ll automatically unsubscribe that
address from the client’s list.
We Use Authentication Protocols
We authenticate client email through the use of the three authentication
protocols: SPF (Sender Policy Framework), Sender-ID and DomainKeys.
With SPF and Sender-ID, we have
published records that state our mail
domains are allowed to send email on
behalf of our own IP Addresses. With
DomainKeys, we sign each email with
a key that the recipient server can
then use to verify that we actually sent
the email. These are a very important
part of maintaining a good sending
infrastructure.
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What Can You Do to Help Ensure
Excellent Delivery?
Keep Your List Healthy
Be sure everyone on your email list has specifically requested to hear from
your company. Make sure you’re not mailing previously unsubscribed or
bounced addresses.
Also, remember that permission is not forever. If someone gave you their
business card at a trade show two years ago, it’s not a good idea to send
them their first email now. Don’t wait more than a month or so to mail new
contacts, otherwise large segments of your list will begin to forget their
interaction with your company. This will lead to a lower open rate and will
cause some people to report your email as spam.
Treat Subscribers with Respect
Don’t email subscribers too often and clutter their inbox with mail they
don’t want. Set expectations at the time of
sign up: “This is what we’re going to send
you. And we’re going to send it to you this
often.” Also try to maintain a relationship
with your subscribers. Don’t mail them
sporadically, like once or twice a year and
expect them to take action with your emails.
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Design with Delivery in Mind
Don’t just use one big image as your email message and think you’re
good to go. Make sure your email is easy-to-read (consider paragraph
length and fonts), that images are being used to enhance the HTML/text
content (not as the sole content), and that the email is something that the
subscriber would expect to receive based on what you told them when
they signed up.
For more info on how to create an email that
gets to your readers, check out our guide,
To the Inbox and Beyond – The Ultimate
Guide to Email Delivery.
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