As part of Cloudmark's ongoing ESP outreach program, where they work to help spread knowledge and understanding of best practices and bad practices, Jamie Tomasello of Cloudmark spoke to the ESPC (Email Sender and Provider Coalition) group on March 2nd, 2010. ExactTarget is an ESPC member, so I listened in.
Cloudmark is a really big spam filterer, protecting over one billion mailboxes across 190 countries. Successful delivery of email to the inbox depends on passing successfully through Cloudmark filters at a lot of different receiving sites that matter, both B2C and B2B. That makes it important to understand what Cloudmark considers to be good practices and bad practices, as these perceptions are likely to drive their filtering decisions and affect your ability to get mail delivered (or not).
Jamie explained that in the eyes of end recipients of email, the definition of spam is changing. It's not so much just "do you have permission or not" as much as it is now "is the mail desired and wanted." The underlying statement there is that unclear permission, third-party permission, co-registration, etc. are not best practices, and are likely to cause deliverablity woes. As she indicated, these are mailing practices that have been defended in the past, but they're no longer defensible. ISPs and end recipients only want to let desired mail through. Is your mail desired?
Here are just a few of the Cloudmark-preferred best practices that Jamie mentioned on the call.
A lot of what was discussed is stuff that savvy ESPs (and savvy marketers) should know already. But, it's never a bad idea to remind folks of what the rules are, as new people and new companies enter the email space every day. I'm very glad that Jamie and Cloudmark are helping to raise the level of understanding of best practices among email marketers and their email service providers.
Cloudmark is a really big spam filterer, protecting over one billion mailboxes across 190 countries. Successful delivery of email to the inbox depends on passing successfully through Cloudmark filters at a lot of different receiving sites that matter, both B2C and B2B. That makes it important to understand what Cloudmark considers to be good practices and bad practices, as these perceptions are likely to drive their filtering decisions and affect your ability to get mail delivered (or not).
Jamie explained that in the eyes of end recipients of email, the definition of spam is changing. It's not so much just "do you have permission or not" as much as it is now "is the mail desired and wanted." The underlying statement there is that unclear permission, third-party permission, co-registration, etc. are not best practices, and are likely to cause deliverablity woes. As she indicated, these are mailing practices that have been defended in the past, but they're no longer defensible. ISPs and end recipients only want to let desired mail through. Is your mail desired?
Here are just a few of the Cloudmark-preferred best practices that Jamie mentioned on the call.
- At a minimum, compliance with CAN-SPAM. (Keeping in mind that CAN-SPAM is a starting point, not the finish line.)
- Following MAAWG Senders Best Communication Practices document.
- Implementing confirmed opt-in, also known as double opt-in, obtaining explicit permission confirming that every recipient really wants to be on your email list.
- Segmenting or segregating marketing mail from transactional mail. Making sure you're not trying to dilute stats or get away with something by mixing mail streams. (Spam filterers are smart and will figure you out.)
- Using consistent branding in content, sending domains, call to action domains, and reverse DNS.
- Sending from dedicated IP addresses.
- Utilizing feedback loop data to identify and solve problems. (What intelligence can you gather from the recipient response to the campaign? Don't just listwash.)
A lot of what was discussed is stuff that savvy ESPs (and savvy marketers) should know already. But, it's never a bad idea to remind folks of what the rules are, as new people and new companies enter the email space every day. I'm very glad that Jamie and Cloudmark are helping to raise the level of understanding of best practices among email marketers and their email service providers.
I'm vegetarian. At this point, some of you will stop reading because you are baffled by people like me. No hamburgers? No hot dogs? No Beef Stroganauf (yeah I don't have any idea how to spell that)? Nope.
Just last week I unsubscribed from emails for a retail store I liked and had previously opted into receive email communications from. Why did I do this? Because they were sending me emails every single day, often with the same information, and I was frustrated that they were clogging my inbox. 
I had myself a little chuckle this week with the uproar around the White House asking people to email 'fishy' information regarding health care reform to a designated White House email address. The biggest question mark in this controversy circles around what the White House is going to do with the information they collect from this exercise -- which could potentially result in a list of email addresses or IP addresses of Americans expressing their opinion or providing information. 
Last week I talked about 
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