How to Find an E-Mail Service Provider
(DirectTips) Every firm sending e-mail newsletters and marketing messages wants to make them more deliverable—to get them into the recipient’s mailbox, yes, but just as importantly to get them past the spam filters and junk folders now in use by many Internet service providers (ISPs) and into that all-important inbox.
For that reason, growing numbers of Web marketers are outsourcing the management of their e-mail channels to e-mail service providers (ESPs), companies that do nothing but handle e-mail. These companies, it is hoped, have the technical savvy and the trusted relationships with ISPs that will reduce the chances that those e-mail offers will die unopened.
But the issue is more complex than that, and e-zine publishers need to ask their prospective ESPs some hard questions to make sure they’re getting the deliverability expertise they need. That’s a message that Deirdre Baird, CEO of delivery auditing and optimization company Pivotal Veracity, has spent time and energy spreading. Her main point: It’s not enough to outsource your e-mail transmission to a professional. You also need access to the right tools to make sure those messages are making it past all the barriers—tools that ESPs may not provide.
A recent test by Pivotal Veracity found that e-mail from a roster of almost 100 well-known organizations—such as the American Red Cross, IBM, Nokia, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—got misclassified by receiving ISPs as spam 54 times. It was an admittedly unscientific test, but it shows that such false positives are a major challenge for mailers. “Achieving higher inbox delivery rates is the most important factor impacting e-mail performance today,” she says.
But the delivery rates quotes by most ESPs are misleading, according to Baird. “After your mail reaches the ISP, it can deliver it to the inbox, delete it without notification so that no ‘bounce’ notice is sent, or redirect it to the spam folder. ESPs typically offer a ‘mailed minus bounces’ rate, which does not equal inbox delivery.” Some ESPs offer statistics on messages mailed, bounced, opened and clicked at the campaign, domain or ISP level. These are still no substitute for true inbox and spam filter placement rates, since low clicks could be the result of spam filtering but also of improper rendering or poor creative.
The big reason ESPs offer bounces, opens and clicks as delivery metrics is that those things can be measured easily using current e-mail deployment technology, while inbox or spam folder placement can’t, Baird says. Those can only be tracked using seeded e-mail addresses and special technology for pulling and identifying final placement of messages.
“Unless you’re paying for inbox and spam folder tracking and have access to the reports, you should assume these things are not being tracked,” she says. “That means your ESP does not know any more than you do whether your e-mail message is winding up in the spam folder or being deleted without notification.” And in the case of e-mail campaigns, what neither you nor your ESP know may hurt your campaign. It certainly cuts your chances of improving your inbox delivery.
Baird offers five steps to making sure your ESP can help you get your e-mail message safely past the filters and in front of your prospect’s eyes:
* Insist on independent inbox and spam folder tracking. These services should be key criteria in selecting an ESP, according to Baird. You should be able to access these reports online at any time, and make sure there are a minimum of 10 addresses seeded at each ISP and that those ISPs covered are a good sampling of your customer base, she says. It’s preferable that the ESP outsource this tracking rather than doing it in-house, to avoid a “fox guarding the hen house” situation. “Delivery problems can be your fault or the ESP’s,” she says. “Providing independently verified data is not only more accurate, but it’s a good sign your would-be ESP has nothing to hide.” Be prepared to pay more for these services.
She notes that if an ESP doesn’t provide inbox delivery tracking as part of its service portfolio, a mailer can always go outside the ESP and hire a firm such as Pivotal Veracity, one of several independent delivery auditors.
* Check to see what other mailers the ESP you’re considering services, and think about spending more for a dedicated IP address for your mail. Every major ISP uses some form of IP-based spam filtering and keeps an ever-changing “blacklist” of IP addresses that have been caught sending what it considers spam. If your mail is coming from the same IP address as other mailers and one of those gets labeled a spammer, you will undoubtedly get tarred with that same brush, Baird points out. Most ESPs charge extra for a dedicated IP address, but it can make all the difference to the success of a campaign.
Even with your own IP address, you can suffer delivery consequences if your ESP numbers risky or suspect mailers among its other clients, since ISPs often block entire ranges of IP addresses. Your chosen ESP should serve only mailers who can show Can Spam compliance. It should deny use of its mail servers to mailers who deal in “riskier” messages, including e-mail appends, list acquisition or rental mailings, and e-mail change of address mailings. According to Baird, these often produce high numbers of complaints from recipients and high bounce rates—which can result in high spam filtering rates for those messages and any others sent from those mail servers. Again, your reputation depends in part on the other clients your ESP serves.
“Mailers should try to write these two requirements—Can Spam compliant clients and no questionable mailings—into their ESP contracts,” Baird says. “And they should have the right to cancel those contracts if the ESP’s policies change later.”
*Check into an ESP’s bounce management policies and capabilities. Some proportion of every e-mail campaign will bounce, either “soft” (for transitory reasons like an “out-of-office” reply) or “hard” (permanently undeliverable.) But a hard bounce doesn’t mean that the address is invalid; there are over 40 factors that can lead to a hard bounce, including a too-large message, invalid SMTP commands, and to many recipients. The problem is that ISPs don’t always use the extended codes that give the reason for the bounce, so mailers—and their ESPs—are left to figure out for themselves whether an address should be mailed again later, as they do with soft bounces. Baird says it’s crucial to know how your candidate ESP categorizes bounces from each ISP you will mail too, and what their bounce policies are. An ESP that marks an address as invalid after one hard bounce will produce a low bounce rate, Baird points out. “But it will probably also throw out more valid e-mail addresses than you want it to,” she says.
*Find out what spam filters the ESP uses for checking deliverability and how they check your HTML code for correctness. Holding your message up to the most common spam filters is a main reason you’re hiring an ESP, after all, so you want to make sure they do the job as you require. Many ESPs run their spam tests with Spam Assassin, a freely available open source application. Unfortunately, the biggest ISPs don’t use Spam Assassin precisely because it’s easily available—to spammers, too. “A perfect score on Spam Assassin isn’t likely to have any impact on your ability to deliver via the major ISPs,” Baird says. “All it does is provide you with a false sense of security.” Look instead for an ESP with the tools to test your content across a wide range of filters.
When it comes to testing your code, find an ESP with tools that test HTML for compliance with the accepted standards of the Worldwide Web Consortium. And those tools should tell you explicitly what’s wrong with your code, not simply show pictures of how your HTML e-mail will look at various ISPs. The look of your message will vary not only by ISP but by the recipient’s browser, and no picture-based code tool covers all those variables.
*Finally, look for an ESP with a full set of delivery features and services: blacklist monitoring, whitelisting, feedback loop set-up, abuse board monitoring, ISP relations and mediation, and support for coming authentication standards. Get the necessary details on each of these services: pricing, sample reports, case studies, etc.
“There’s no such thing as a silver bullet for inbox delivery,” Baird says. “No single solution or provider will be able to guarantee you perfect results. But the right ESP with the right tools and the will to collaborate on optimization will help you improve your ability to reach your customers effectively.”
