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Table of Contents

Introduction.................................................3

The Email “Gates”........................................4

The Mailbox Provider..............................4

The Private Domain................................6

The Spam Filter......................................7

What Does VerticalResponse Do to Ensure Excellent Email Delivery?..............................9

What Can You Do to Help Ensure Excellent Email Delivery?...........................................11

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Delivering email seems pretty straightforward, right? You upload a mailing list, create an email, hit send, and then mighty wizards transport that email to your recipients through the use of handcrafted cables and powerful laser beams. What more could you possibly need to know about this process? As it turns out, loads more. There are a number of factors that determine whether an email gets a response from its recipients. Let’s start by looking at the journey an email takes to reach its intended recipient. In order for an email to be properly delivered, it must pass through one or more “gates,” each of which has the power to deny that email passage and stop it from continuing on its way.

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The Email “Gates” Gate #1: The Mailbox ProviderGetting through this gate is all about your reputation with each mailbox provider. Your reputation is determined by a number of factors:

1. Do your emails get complaints? Your recipients can complain about your email in a number of ways, like clicking the “Report Spam” button in their mailbox, by complaining to a blacklist, or by complaining directly to the abuse desk of your email service provider (like VerticalResponse). A complaint rate as low as 0.3%, or sometimes even lower, can have a negative impact on your reputation and hurt your email delivery.

2. Does your email hit spam trap addresses? Sending email to a spam trap will lower your reputation, as your mail is lumped with all other spammers that are also hitting these traps. What are spam traps? They’re either email addresses that are never used, email

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addresses that have been deactivated after a long period of inactivity, or addresses that have been placed on websites in order to tempt spammers to harvest them (nothing a spammer likes more than a big, juicy email address innocently sitting around on a webpage, waiting to be plucked), which makes it easier to find and stop email sent by spammers. Mailing lists that are purchased or rented often contain these spam traps.

3. How high are your invalid address rates? Having a lot of invalid or deactivated email addresses on your list can be a sign to mailbox providers that you have poor mailing practices or are using purchased or scraped lists. Does this mean there’s a problem if you see a high bounce rate following a single email campaign? Not necessarily. If you regularly get high bounce rates (10% or higher), then your reputation is more likely to suffer and you will encounter problems getting good addresses delivered.

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Gate #2: The Private DomainPrivate domains are domains that belong to organizations. Some can be large corporate domains like VerticalResponse or Salesforce, or even small businesses that host their own email system.

Many email administrators employ blacklists in order to keep spam out of their networks, so one of the best ways to ensure delivery to a private domain is to stay off of commonly used blacklists.

What’s a blacklist exactly? A blacklist is a database of IP Addresses or domains that may have been used to send spam. These lists are used by recipient servers to reject mail coming from the listed IP Addresses or domains.

There are hundreds of publicly available blacklists. Some of them are large, effective and very popular (like Spamhaus and SpamCop) and some of them are small, use questionable methods to create listings, and aren’t used often. Each blacklist provider has their own methodology for determining which IP Addresses should be listed and which listed IP Addresses can be removed if requested.

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In addition to these publicly available blacklists, some companies use their own private, internal blacklists that are only put to use for their domains. These are not public, so the only way to know you’re listed is to send mail to the domain and see if you receive a bounce error saying you’re listed. If you are listed, you can try to track down the administrator for the domain and request removal.

The best way to stay off of blacklists is to only mail people who’ve specifically requested your email. As luck would have it, this is exactly what VerticalResponse requires of our clients.

Gate #3: The Spam FilterEven if your IP Address has a good reputation and you haven’t been receiving complaints, there is one final gate through which your email must pass: the spam filter. Email providers like Yahoo! or Gmail have their own filters and individual corporations usually use an outside filter (like Postini or SpamAssassin). Each one is different in its own way,

KEEP OFF BLACKLISTS

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but there are still some general issues to keep in mind to avoid seeing your mail filtered to the spam folder:

1. Reputation Spam filters provided by mailbox providers consider reputation when determining whether your email should be filtered, blocked, or delivered to the inbox. Your reputation may be good enough to have your message received, but it may still be filtered if your content resembles spam

2. Content This one is obvious and is all about making sure your email doesn’t look like spam. At one point, not looking like spam mostly just meant not using “gotcha” words and phrases like “Free Loan Just for You!” or “Open This Right Now!” or “$5000 dollars free inside for you, my best friend!” Now it can also mean not sending image only/image heavy emails (as 50% of spam is image only at this point) and making sure your HTML code is properly formatted and clean.

IS KING

CONTENT

REPUTATION

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What Does VerticalResponse Do to Ensure Excellent Delivery?We’re Anti-Spam Everyone says they’re anti-spam, but we really mean it. We respond to and investigate any complaint that comes in to our abuse desk, quickly deal with clients who receive complaints (before delivery problems start), and we even look over the emails our clients send to make sure nothing suspicious or fraudulent makes it out the door. This keeps complaints to a minimum, which is a big part of maintaining a strong reputation for our IP Addresses.

We Automate Bounce/ Unsubscribe ProcessingBy automating the bounce and unsubscribe process, we ensure users can’t abuse our IP Addresses by ignoring bounces and unsubscribes. This also helps us keep an excellent sender reputation.

NSPAM

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We Use Feedback Loops We have feedback loops set-up with every ISP that is known to offer one. This means if someone clicks “Report Spam” at Yahoo!, they trust us to take action on the complaint and we’ll automatically unsubscribe that address from the client’s list.

We Use Authentication Protocols We authenticate client email through the use of the three authentication protocols: SPF (Sender Policy Framework), Sender-ID and DomainKeys. With SPF and Sender-ID, we have published records that state our mail domains are allowed to send email on behalf of our own IP Addresses. With DomainKeys, we sign each email with a key that the recipient server can then use to verify that we actually sent the email. These are a very important part of maintaining a good sending infrastructure.

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What Can You Do to Help Ensure Excellent Delivery?Keep Your List Healthy Be sure everyone on your email list has specifically requested to hear from your company. Make sure you’re not mailing previously unsubscribed or bounced addresses.

Also, remember that permission is not forever. If someone gave you their business card at a trade show two years ago, it’s not a good idea to send them their first email now. Don’t wait more than a month or so to mail new contacts, otherwise large segments of your list will begin to forget their interaction with your company. This will lead to a lower open rate and will cause some people to report your email as spam.

Treat Subscribers with Respect Don’t email subscribers too often and clutter their inbox with mail they don’t want. Set expectations at the time of sign up: “This is what we’re going to send you. And we’re going to send it to you this often.” Also try to maintain a relationship with your subscribers. Don’t mail them sporadically, like once or twice a year and expect them to take action with your emails.

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Design with Delivery in Mind Don’t just use one big image as your email message and think you’re good to go. Make sure your email is easy-to-read (consider paragraph length and fonts), that images are being used to enhance the HTML/text content (not as the sole content), and that the email is something that the subscriber would expect to receive based on what you told them when they signed up.

For more info on how to create an email that gets to your readers, check out our guide, To the Inbox and Beyond – The Ultimate Guide to Email Delivery.