E-MAIL WASN'T SUPPOSED to be this complicated.
With four authentication standards to understand, multiple accreditation sources to choose from and seemingly endless reasons for getting e-mail blocked by inbox providers, marketers can be excused if they're feeling a little confused about how to get their e-mail delivered these days.
Moreover, marketers that consider themselves “legitimate” or non-spammers also can be excused if they feel like they're stuck jumping through hoops while spammers and other e-mailers who push the limits of acceptable e-mail practices have an easier time of it.
Indeed, in many ways, current conditions “really do favor companies that are willing to skate along the edge of best practices, ethics and even legality, and do all sorts of things to fly under the radar,” says Matthew Moog, president/CEO of marketing services firm Q Interactive. “More legitimate marketers like ourselves don't rotate domain names, we don't have a bunch of different IP addresses that we send from, we don't change the ‘from’ lines. Spammers are doing all those things.”
And still, Q Interactive sometimes finds its e-mails getting blocked.
Consumers on Q Interactive's 7 million-name list “opt in in the clearest, most conspicuous and affirmative way possible,” Moog says. “They fill out a four-page registration form telling us about themselves and what kind of e-mail they'd like to receive, and then when we start sending them e-mail, the ISP decides they shouldn't get it — for all sorts of different reasons. It's challenging.”
But while negotiating with inbox providers can be difficult and frustrating, the ISPs are being as open as they safely can be and the steps they're taking are having a positive effect on the market, experts say.
“Marketers certainly are required to do a fair amount of stuff to get their e-mail delivered today. Is it more than it used to be? I don't know,” says George Bilbrey, general manager of e-mail service provider Return Path's deliverability assurance solutions unit. “If anything, things have become more transparent over the last two or three years. The ISPs in particular have done a much better job of providing feedback loops, where before you were just guessing [at why some e-mail was getting blocked].”
There's also evidence that ISPs are making progress in the war against spammers while non-spamming commercial e-mailers are getting a remarkable percentage of their messages into recipients' inboxes.
The average delivery rate for all the IP addresses Return Path tracks that send e-mail is less than 20%, Bilbrey says. Meanwhile, the commercial e-mailers Return Path monitors are seeing somewhere around 90% of their e-mail reach their intended recipients.
“Most of those IPs getting that 20% rate are the spammers,” he says. “Those are the people who are using compromised hosts and botnets (networks of hijacked computers), and they're not getting their e-mail delivered.”
In any case, Bilbrey says there are five areas an e-mailer must concentrate on to ensure high deliverability:
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Limit the amount of e-mail going to unknown users.
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Steer clear of spam traps (e-mail addresses specifically set up to catch spam).
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Keep a well-configured infrastructure, or authenticate your IP addresses and make sure your mail servers are secure.
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Avoid using content that triggers spam filters.
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Most of all, keep user complaints to a minimum.
“If you focus on those areas, your deliverability will be good,” Bilbrey says.
Though inbox providers are notoriously unclear when it comes to what constitutes an acceptable recipient complaint rate — after all, even the cleanest mailers draw at least some complaints — marketers that use e-mail must be sensitive to recipients' preferences.
Yahoo!, AOL and MSN reps have said repeatedly that too many user complaints are the No. 1 reason mailings get blocked.
However, the types of e-mails that result in complaints aren't necessarily obvious, claims Q Interactive's Moog.
For example, of all the e-mails his company sends, the one that draws the most complaints welcomes people who've opted into the company's list and filled out the registration form.
“But it's also our highest response e-mail,” he says. “There's an absolute correlation: The campaigns with the highest open and response rates also have the highest complaint rates. It makes no sense.”
And at the risk of using a marketing cliché, the key to limiting complaints apparently lies in letting consumers decide how much e-mail they should get.
“You have to give consumers a lot of control and constantly remind them that they can regulate the volume and the kinds of e-mails they receive from you,” says Moog. “We're working on [enabling] them to give us feedback about what they do and don't like about the e-mails we send them.”
Q Interactive gets an astonishing 99% of its e-mail delivered, according to Moog. How? Besides adhering to ISPs' wishes, the company also removes addresses of people from its list who have characteristics that mark complainers — even though they asked to receive e-mail.
And how does Q Interactive identify potential complainers? Moog isn't saying.
“I don't want to give that away to the rest of the market. It's part of the secret sauce.”
However, he adds, the characteristics are not remotely intuitive. “It's completely nonsensical,” he says. Q Interactive employs 10 full-time statisticians who, among other things, create models predicting who the complainers will be, says Moog.
Still, Moog doesn't blame inbox providers for the difficulties navigating today's e-mail market.
“I think the unsolicited e-mail problem has gotten so far out of control that ISPs had to take measures they knew would drag a bunch of [non-spamming] companies into their nets,” says Moog. “Generally they felt like they had no choice.”
Marketers also must continue to adopt e-mail authentication standards — where companies identify servers authorized to send e-mail on their behalf — so they can help ISPs tighten the noose on spammers and make the market safer for legitimate mail, according to the experts.
“It's nearly impossible to identify or catch up with a spammer,” says Keith Wardell, president of e-mail marketing services firm Exmplar. “Therefore, the only method that's going to work is [to identify] legitimate mailers and start to exclude everybody else. The controversy right now is over how we identify good guys and what it should cost.”
Moog adds that ISPs have good reason to be evasive about their spam-filtering criteria: “If they say what they're doing, then spammers will figure out a way to get around it.”
Moog also believes the marketplace is headed in the right direction. “I think it will shake out at some point. The question is [when], and what price legitimate marketers will have to pay.”
