ISPs today block up to 90 percent of e-mail because the messages are suspected to be spam. What’s a marketer to do?
Answer: Stay on the good side of ISPs.
Easier said than done, right? ISPs are using increasingly sophisticated tools to weed out spam, sometimes taking along legitimate business e-mail as casualties. “False positive” filtering results in perfectly good e-mails ending up in the bulk folder, or worse yet, on black lists.
Developing a sound plan to move towards permission-based e-mail marketing is extremely important to the success of any company’s e-mail marketing effort. Also known as opt-in e-mail marketing, permission-based e-mail marketing entails sending e-mail only to those recipients who have agreed to hear from a specific company.
Permission is important to ISPs and other receiving systems. When permission is in place, subscribers are much less likely to complain that a message is spam, and the message is therefore less likely to be filtered to the junk folder or discarded. E-mail addresses gathered without the subscriber’s knowledge or specific approval, however, will never qualify as permission names and will generate higher levels of complaints that could jeopardize the deliverability of future e-mails.
Creating undeliverable e-mails results in loss of time, loss of money and missed opportunities for revenue and lead generation. How can you continue to build strong customer relationships despite an increase in filtering? How can you ensure that your e-mails are not erroneously blocked? Here are some tips:
1. Get and Confirm Permission—Receiving permission from your subscribers is the crux of a successful e-mail program. Capturing opt-in permission and confirming it with a follow-up e-mail is the best practice to ensure you only add recipients that really want your e-mail.
2. Send Highly Valuable and Relevant E-mails—As the inbox gets more crowded with spam, your subscribers will expect your e-mail to provide them with relevant content. To make sure your e-mails are always relevant, begin capturing data on your subscribers via surveys or during sign-up.
3. Set Content and Frequency Expectations —Nothing can trigger subscriber dissatisfaction like continued e-mails that don’t meet subscriber expectations in terms of content of frequency. One study shows that 65 percent of men and 56 percent of women define spam as “e-mail from a company that I have done business with that comes too often.”
4. Use a Recognizable, Short and Consistent “From Address”—Before even opening your e-mail, a user has to recognize you, your company and your publication, and remember that they requested your e-mail. If they don’t, they will accidentally report your e-mail as spam or delete it all together. The e-mail “from address” is the first thing e-mail recipients look at when deciding if they should open a message.
5. Use a Service Provider with a Good Reputation—The CAN-SPAM Act and the increase in ISP filtering make commercial e-mailing more difficult. Staying up-to-date on current legislation and policies of ISPs and anti-spam groups is difficult to do on your own. Reputable service providers, such as ExactTarget, dedicate significant resources to managing ISP relationships, monitoring e-mail delivery rates and evaluating current e-mail laws.
6. Ask to be Placed in the Address Book or Safe Senders List—AOL 9.0, Yahoo, Hotmail/MSN and Outlook 2003 all remove their e-mail filtering techniques when the sender’s e-mail address is in the recipient’s address book. Once your “from address” is in a subscriber’s address book, your e-mails will continue to reach the inbox with images and links intact.
7. Keep Your List Clean—Most ISPs use list quality filters to detect when a sender is attempting to deliver e-mail to a large number of invalid addresses. These messages “bounce” back to the originating server. Even a good, permission-based list will see bounces over time. An average e-mail list will lose 30 percent of its names each year due to subscribers changing e-mail addresses. To stay clean, monitor your bounces on a regular basis and remove bad addresses from your list.
8. Promptly Remove Unsubscribes and Respond to Complaints—Nothing will cause more problems for your deliverability than ignoring unsubscribes and complaints. You need to be diligent about removals and make it very easy for your subscribers to leave you. A profile management form allows subscribers to select the publications they want to receive or be removed from. This enables you to stay in compliance with the 10-day unsubscribe removal period mandated by CAN-SPAM, while still offering another option besides unsubscribing from all of your communications.
9. Use ISP Inbox Testing—Setting up an “ISP Test List” can be a fast and easy way to find out if your e-mail will pass through spam filters. You can do so by simply setting up e-mail accounts with the major ISPs, or by using a reputable deliverability monitoring service such as ExactTarget partner Pivotal Veracity. Before sending to your entire subscriber list, send to your “test list” and make sure your e-mail reaches the inbox of each ISP. If it lands in a bulk folder or is blocked all together, you are then able to investigate and make changes.
10. Avoid “Spammy” Words and Phrases—Systematically scanning e-mail subject lines and body content is the most widely used filtering method among ISPs, according to Jupiter Research. Avoid overly promotional words and phrases, multiple exclamation points, all capital letters and other text often used by spammers.
Chip House is vice president of privacy and deliverability for ExactTarget, a developer of on-demand outbound e-mail software solutions.
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