There is a lot of hype and scare mongering regarding email deliverability. Every month there are more stories about how email marketing is about to die of death because of spam or how a particular ISP will stop all permission emails from being delivered. Here is an article that tells you the facts without the dramatic headlines.

1) Image blocking
This has had an effect on email marketing campaigns. Since Outlook 2003 was introduced open rates have fallen by around 10% on average. Open rates are linked to image blocking as an open is tracked by the downloading of an invisible GIF within the message – clearly if the image is blocked then the open cannot be tracked. Marketers should minimise the impact of image blocking by:

2) Paying AOL and Yahoo to send email
AOL have announced a partnership with Goodmail to charge marketers for guaranteed placement of email messages into the inbox. This charge will be between ¼p to ½p per message sent to AOL.

All that the Goodmail solution will offer is a GUARANTEED delivery in the same way Royal Mail can offer a recorded postal service. If you do not pay for this your email will still be accepted by AOL but it will go through the filters and there is a chance it may be incorrectly placed in the junk mail folder.

AOL are also not dispensing with their whitelist of IP addresses of senders they have identified as genuine permission email senders.

3) Using a spam content checker
Emailcenter provide an excellent free service for marketers whom wish to check their email against Spam Assassin rules. Spam Assassin is the most widely used spam filter available so it provides a good starting point in ensuring your email is not considered illegitimate. However this should not be relied upon for guaranteeing your email is delivered, particularly for B2C marketers. There is no better test than sending the email to the likes of Hotmail that use a wider range of filters which are constantly changing and seeing if it lands in the inbox or junk mail folder.

4) Legal vs. Ethical
We often get calls from people asking us if the list they have sourced can legally be used. While the law is important marketers should also consider the ethics behind the collation of the list. This is important for two main factors:
1) Genuine opt-in lists provide far superior results
2) Unsolicited lists, even if legal will land you in hot water with ISP’s

5) Personal whitelists
Many ISPs and email clients are introducing the concept of ensuring anyone on a recipients personal whitelist, address book or safelist will have their emails routed straight into the inbox with images and links being made active. This is why marketers should be making every effort to get their customers to add the address to their safelist.

6) “In-house delivery systems get classified as spam”
How often do you hear that from an email service provider? It is the biggest myth in the email marketing industry. As a supplier of both in-house and hosted solutions we feel we are very well placed to give the definitive answer on this. Some custom built in-house systems do have deliverability issues, mainly as a result of badly configured send engines overloading ISP’s or having spam like header information. However a purpose built in-house solution such as Maxemail has all of this set-up correctly anyway.

And if you want independent advice on whether an in-house or hosted solution provides better deliverability rates go to deliverability specialists Pivotal Verocity homepage and read their research reports on the subject. They will tell you in-house systems have a slight deliverability performance advantage over hosted solutions.

7) Bonded Sender – a waste of money?
Similar research by Pivotal Verocity also looked at deliverability rates into Hotmail for people on their Bonded Sender scheme. Bonded Sender is where marketers post a bond that gets deducted by $20 for every spam complaint received. The research found that people on this scheme received no deliverability benefits over those not on Bonded Sender when sending to Hotmail.

8) “A dedicated IP address is better than a shared IP address”
This is not necessarily the case. We recommend that high volume senders (250,000 + per month) have their own IP address but small volume mailers are better served on a shared IP address. It is easier to get email accepted by an ISP if they are aware of the IP address. However if very small volumes are being placed through that IP address then the IP address will be treated as a new IP address by the ISP. New ISP addresses are treated with suspicion on the basis that spammers frequently activate new IP addresses as their old ones get blocked.

9) Switching between IP addresses
One tactic that a well known UK email service provider advocates is switching between IP addresses. Again this is the wrong approach. It is much better to inform ISPs of the IP address the clients mailings are going through so it can be whitelisted. Switching IP addresses is only an option for spammers and where the company has questionable data.

10) Blacklists are temporary and unavoidable
No email service provider can guarantee your mailings will not be affected by a blacklist issue. There are blacklists that only require one spam complaint before you unfortunately become a member. These blacklists generally only last for a maximum of 48 hours and a reputable email service provider will be monitoring all blacklists and ensuring speedy removal should your IP address get added.