E-mail Audits Reveal the Infuriating Realities of E-mail Campaign Delivery

Because we're a research firm with a division focusing entirely on e-mail marketing tactics and data, you would think we'd be incredibly good at managing our own e-mail newsletter delivery.

The sad truth is you'd be wrong.

I was the first journalist to write about the nasty problem of e-mail filters way back in 2001, when I noticed Yahoo! was shunting some perfectly good permission-based e-mail into junk mail folders instead of delivering them to the inbox. Since that time, we've done more than 50 research projects, interviews, and benchmark data reports on the subject.

The news has remained the same: Roughly 20% of e-mail newsletters and sales alerts sent by America's marketers are not getting through to the consumers who opted in to get them. A plethora of spam filters including ISP filters, corporate IT department filters, MS Outlook filters, and end-user filters may mistakenly stop a sizable portion of your mail from getting through to the very people who asked for it.

If this were the U.S. Post Office, marketers across America would be up in arms. So why aren't chief marketing officers visibly upset about e-mail deliverability? Yes, e-mail is cheaper to send, so less cash is wasted up front, but let's face it: E-mail responses are often critical to your bottom line these days. Every filtered message means fewer responses. Hundreds of millions of potential revenue dollars are being blocked by so-called spam filter false positives.

I suspect the main reason CMOs aren't up in arms is the same reason I wasn't… until a few months ago. I, probably like you, figured e-mail delivery was not really a problem for our own campaigns. Sure, spammers and inexperienced marketers who don't know how to avoid obvious filter pitfalls were being filtered. But not me!

Then our research team decided to conduct a study of independent e-mail deliverability audit services. The results were shocking.

As you may know, the delivery reports that most marketers' e-mail software or e-mail service providers call "delivery reports" actually aren't. These reports usually measure only how much mail was sent minus hard bounces such as bad addresses. They generally don't tell you anything about filters.

That's why there's a growing number (we counted nine services so far) of companies that will measure your results independent of the e-mail broadcasting services. (You can see a list of these companies names on a page I'll hotlink to at the end of this column.)

When we were researching these nine companies, I thought, "Well heck, let's have some fun and run reports on our own e-mail newsletter delivery using them." I figured our e-mail team is a pretty smart bunch, so we wouldn't be filtered much.

Boy, was I wrong! The resulting reports, one from each of the nine services, showed we had spotty delivery utterly typical of our type of permission-based service. Some days 97% or more of the mail went through. Other days the amount delivered plummeted down to 50%-70% depending on what system measured it.

Deliverability differed widely not only due to what the message content was but also depending on what e-mail system we were sending to. For example, one message got delivered perfectly–100% of all good addresses–everywhere, except for Hotmail and MSN email users who got nothing from us that day. On another day, everything was nearly perfect except for Go.com and RoadRunner e-mail users.

We even discovered that the IP address we used to power personal company e-mail (individual e-mail messages sent by staffers to colleagues in the outside world) was blacklisted by a few organizations because a past non-Sherpa user of that IP address had done something spammy way back in the 1990s. (This explains why my personal e-mail doesn't always get through.)

All of this amounted to a wakeup call for both me and our inhouse e-mail team. We wound up signing on with two of the services we profiled and will continue to monitor things.

Plus I've issued a company-wide directive: Don't rely on e-mail alone as a single messaging channel if your message is critical. If you're one of our researchers or reporters, and you're sending a must-respond-to e-mail message to an individual, you have to pick up the phone (yup, the old-fashioned phone) and at least leave a voice mail. If you're one of our marketers, you have to decide which names on any campaign are "must reach" names and invest in an additional channel, generally postal mail, to back up the e-mail.

While I still consider e-mail newsletters and marketing just about the best things since sliced bread, I never assume all my e-mail got through. Not anymore.

Anne Holland is president of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing case studies and benchmark data for its 173,000 marketing and advertising executive subscribers. For a copy of MarketingSherpa's Buyer's Guide to Independent E-mail Deliverability (Audit) Firms, click here.

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