Sometimes I marvel at the fact that though email has been around for over 30 years, there is still so much confusion surrounding the basics of email delivery. Many in our industry don’t help the matter at all because they prefer to create fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) around email delivery because they feel that obfuscation will serve them well and buy them customers. The outcome is confusion and distrust. Stephanie Miller hit this issue head on in her article: “Delivered: Does Not Mean In the Inbox.”
Email delivery is managed by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that has been around, essentially in its current form, for years and years. However, the delivery ecosystem around SMTP has been evolving rapidly, nearly daily in fact, in can differ widely from ISP to ISP. Each ISP leverages a unique set of both proprietary and public filtering technology, private and public blacklists, as well as their own bounce codes, bounce descriptions, whitelists, user complaint tools, complaint feedback loops, and postmaster policies. One thing is for sure, SMTP only tells you if the ISP accepted the email. It doesn’t tell you “where” it was placed. If it was placed in the spam box (most often called spam folder or bulk folder) it likely won’t get read. The logic determining in which box your email is placed is largely subject to the interplay of technologies and policies unique to the ISP and email software in use. So, whether or not your email makes it to the inbox or the spam box will depend on its ability to make it through all of these obstacles. As in an obstacle course, however, often only the fit make it through. To ensure your email is “fit” for the inbox, you need to be aware of which muscles you need to train.
Reputation is King. ISPs still focus on IP address reputation primarily when determining what mail to deliver and what mail to put in the spam folder or block. Since roughly 90% of the email ISPs is spam, they assume mail from a new IP address is spam until you prove otherwise. The only way to do that is to ensure your email is wanted by your recipients. That means using only permission-based list growth methods. It also means that all roads lead back to reputation. Here are some rules to help keep your reputation fit:
1. Once a bad reputation is established, it is difficult to hide from. In fact, trying to evade the filtering intelligence of most ISPs can get you in even more hot water and lengthen your stay in the spam folder.
2. Mind your branding. Ensure you are sending your email from the same brand that your subscribers opted in “to.” Sending from a different “from name” or email address will confuse the recipient, lead to complaints, and compromise your reputation.
3. Mind your frequency. Oversending will cause users to ignore you or complain about your email. Complaints destroy reputation, and work against your goals of hitting the inbox.
4. Mind your list. Monitor engagement. A retail customer of ours recently found themselves in the spam folder at a major ISP. The reason? There list was getting older, and fewer people were opening and clicking on the email than the number of recipients complaining. Some ISPs use “recipient engagement” as one of the pieces of their delivery/filtering algorithms. Find ways to modify frequency or content to re-engage names that haven’t opened or clicked in 90+ days. We helped them get back in the inbox by reducing their list to only the newest and most responsive recipients, and have since built their list back up by gradually introducing older, yet responsive names.
5. Monitor and optimize always. The ever-changing environment of delivery mandates it.
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