Opens, Deletes, and ISPs: an Email Deliverability Update

Internet service providers are changing the criteria by which they identify legitimate inbound email vs. spam: That much is clear. What’s less clear is how the individual ISPs are modifying their reputation scoring. At the Epsilon Email Institute’s recent Leadership Forum in New York, Quinn Jalli, vice president of deliverability and ISP relations for Epsilon, homed in on some specifics among the various ISPs:

· AOL began using customer engagement, in the form of the last time a consumer opened his inbox, as a determinant of spam back in 2007. Even today, Jalli said, “if you’re having problems with deliverability into AOL, it’s probably because you have a very inactive file among AOL users.”

· “If you’re in the junk mail folder in Yahoo!,” Jalli said, “you’re probably also in the junk folder of Hotmail and Gmail.” While Yahoo! continues to take complaint and bounce rates into account when scoring, it’s now using open and clickthrough rates—in other words, engagement metrics—as the primary criteria.

· Yahoo! was the last major ISP to block senders, which it didn’t start to do until 2008. Now, though, says Jalli, “if you end up in the spam folder at Yahoo!, it’s a good sign that you’re about to be blocked.” As a rule of thumb, if your Yahoo! open rate is less than 8%, you will likely find yourself blocked. Conversely, if your open rate is over 20%, Yahoo! may give less weight to your complaint rate when determining your reputation score.

· Microsoft’s SmartScreen filtering, in place at Hotmail, takes into account not only open and complaint rates but also time-to-read and how often messages are deleted without being read. Because of the specifics of its sender reputation model, “it takes longer to ramp up new domains” with Hotmail than other ISPs.

In short, Jalli said, “open and click rates are the best determinants” of whether an ISP has deemed your emails legitimate or spam, so it’s vitally important to track these by ISP over time.

To increase your overall open rates, consider adjusting the frequency of your emails based on the open and clickthrough rates of individual subscribers. Segment your database by engagement, and mail subscribers who open or clickthrough the majority of your emails more frequently than those who engage with your emails less regularly. “Focusing on your most-active consumers will elevate your open rates,” said Jalli. This is especially important as we enter the holiday season, which along with August has the highest email volume rates as well as the highest blocking rates among the ISPs.

“ISPs really want marketers to be better marketers,” Jalli added, “because if customers are engaging with their email more, they’re spending more time with their inbox, which is an opportunity for them to make more money.”