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Different
ISP’s have different filters meaning getting your email
into the inbox at every ISP can be a nightmare and time consuming
exercise. For consumer marketers whose lists could be made
up almost entirely of a few ISP’s, checking these before
the send is essential.
At
Emailcenter we utilised our Inbox Seeding tool to test 128
different email creatives at the major ISP’s to see
how many were delivered into the inbox, junk mail folder or
completely rejected. We also tested the different levels of
filters at each ISP.
| ISP
/ Filter Level |
%
Delivered into Inbox |
| AOL |
|
Basic |
100% |
Normal |
100% |
Enhanced |
96.88% |
| GMail |
98.44% |
| Hotmail |
|
Low |
98.44% |
Enhanced |
73.44% |
| Lycos |
85.71% |
| Orange/Wanadoo |
92.19% |
| Tiscali |
100% |
| Virgin |
100% |
| Yahoo |
75.00% |
The
emails were all sent from IP addresses that were whitelisted
where applicable but had sender ID records set-up.
With
a number of ISP’s 100% deliverability was achieved.
This suggests that the filtering is minimal at best. Surprisingly
this included various filters at AOL where only the enhanced
junk settings caught 4 creatives in their junk folder.
Unsurprisingly
Hotmail & Yahoo were the next difficult to deliver to.
The Hotmail enhanced filter is the default setting for users
of their service.
What
actions does this suggest we take?
Sender
ID Records
Hotmail & Yahoo, the worst performers are the main users
of sender authentication technologies such as Sender ID. This
suggests that had Sender ID records been set-up there would
have been less likelihood of the email being classified as
spam.
Utilise
Inbox Seeding
The survey shows the benefit of inbox seeding tests. While
we can see some trends and guess which emails were going to
be classified as spam, some emails that contained no obvious
spammy techniques still got placed in the junk mail folder.
The impact this would have had on the performance of the campaigns
would have resulted in it not being worthwhile sending.
Don’t
rely on Spam Assassin tests
Most email providers will let you think that running a simple
spam assassin score and keeping it under 5 will save you from
all junk mail filters. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We also recorded the spam assassin score of every email that
got tested. While on occasions emails that got classified
as spam did have a high spam assassin score there was no consistent
trend. Indeed even emails that scored less than 1 in spam
assassin got placed in the junk mail folder.
Spam
assassin is used in a number of corporate filters and is the
only major spam filter that has published rules. None of the
major ISP’s utilise these rules so it is irrelevant
when thinking about delivering to the likes of Hotmail.
Remember
the basics!
It is noticeable that many marketers are not remembering the
basics about spammy techniques. Emails that got classified
as junk often used a from address such as sales@domain.com,
had capital letters in the subject line or phrases such as
‘Free offer” liberally throughout the email.
Limitations
of the survey
While this survey provides an excellent overview of each ISP
it is important to understand what other factors an ISP looks
at that cannot be replicated here. These are all things that
happen during the send of your campaign including:
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