Check out the benefits of subscribing Best Practices : Email Deliverability ISPs Need To Overhaul Spam Reporting System: Survey author: Tanya Irwin source: MediaPost date : 3/24/2008 THE DEFINITION OF SPAM HAS changed from the permission-based regulatory definition of "unsolicited commercial email" to a subjective, perception-based definition centered on consumer dissatisfaction, according to a recent survey. Jointly conducted by Chicago-based Q Interactive and Warren, R.I.-based MarketingSherpa, the survey's goal was to reveal consumers' perceptions of what they consider to be spam, why they report emails as spam and what they think happens when the "report spam" button is clicked. An overwhelming number of consumers misuse and misunderstand the definition of spam, ultimately hurting legitimate marketers--but also consumers themselves who are seeking the messages they want, but instead are automatically being unsubscribed, said Arend Henderson, Q Interactive's chief analytics officer. When ‘Best’ Practices Become ISP Law author: Loren McDonald source: MediaPost date : 12/6/2007 While reviewing Gmail's guidelines for bulk email senders, I noticed a startling development: Best practices for email sending that my colleagues and I have advocated for years have now become requirements or "highly recommended" (hint, hint). A quick tour through the bulk-email or postmaster pages at other major ISPs and email providers shows that they, too, have moved beyond technical requirements to specify procedures such as getting explicit permission before sending email, sender authentication and list hygiene. It confirms my stance that for U.S. senders, just meeting CAN-SPAM regulations for commercial email, such as a working unsubscribe, a street address, and permanent removal within 10 days, is no longer enough. Hotmail's antispam measures snuff out legit emails, too author: Dan Goodin source: The Register date : 5/1/2007 Hotmail users and email server admins, beware: you may be unknowingly caught in the crossfire of Microsoft's war on spam. Unintended casualties include legitimate emails from domains with well-established reputations, which are systematically blocked with absolutely no notice and little recourse. The chief culprit is the inaptly named SmartScreen, a proprietary spam control technology the software Goliath rolled out to great fanfare several years ago. While the filtering mechanism appears to be making some headway in eradicating Viagra come-ons and nasty phishing attempts, the victory comes at a price: an untold number of legitimate emails are blocked with no warning to either sender or intended recipient. Image-Blocking Scorecard, Part 2 author: Jeanne Jennings source: Clickz date : 1/29/2007 In part one, I began my analysis of 30 email messages, 14 business-to-business (B2B) and 16 business-to-consumer (B2C), that appeared in my inbox with images suppressed. We initially looked at methodology, scope of blocking, and the use of alt tags. Today, we'll look at five other factors that can make or break your message's effectiveness when images are blocked. Image-Blocking Scorecard, Part 1 author: Jeanne Jennings source: Clickz date : 12/18/2006 It's been over two years since email marketers began worrying about blocked images in their messages. So where are we today? I got to experience firsthand how effectively email marketers have risen to this challenge when I got a new computer and upgraded (finally!) to Outlook 2003. Although I'd transferred my contacts list, I still found images in most email blocked by default. The good news: it was much easier than I had expected to get Outlook to show me what I was missing, although it did take two or more clicks. The bad news: email marketers haven't adjusted their creative to address this two-year-old challenge. A Solution to Blocked HTML? Well, Sort of author: Ken Magill source: Direct Magazine date : 10/17/2006 Keith McCracken, president of Vismail America, claimed in an email to us that he has the solution to broken and blocked HTML images. "Our email marketing technology called Vismail permits marketers to email the customers, include up to a 60 second video and rich graphics, all without graphics stripping, video streaming or buffering," the email said. "Thanks to clever compression techniques, the email is always delivered intact, there is no attachment and yet the video and graphics are viewable instantly, repeatedly, forwardable and may be stored indefinitely." In Vismail emails, the video portion begins playing when the recipient rolls their cursor over a specified part of the screen. A solution to HTML blocking? Well, kind of. Gmail Not In Scope? Excuse Me? author: Sulemaan Ahmed source: One Degree date : 8/7/2006 I subscribe to a great e-newsletter a friend of mine produces. The other day it landed in my gmail inbox but appeared totally out of whack. Trying to decipher it was like a scene out of the DeVinci Code. So I told my friend and he forwarded my email to his agency and asked if they tested email formatting in Gmail. The response was “Gmail accounts are not generally included in the scope of our projects.” Excuse me? That’s pretty shortsighted in my view. If there are already thousands of Gmail users in only a couple of years, what happens when more email users shift to Gmail over time? What if Google moves from Beta, eliminates the invite-only option and makes Gmail public? The floodgates could easily burst open. Cracks are already appearing… Spam Complaints: ISPs Aren't the Enemy author: Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald source: Clickz date : 5/10/2006 ISPs don't care whether your email message is transactional or double opt-in or sent to a list full of addresses harvested from the Web. If the message generates a lot of complaints, the ISP will filter it to the bulk folder, block you completely, or do whatever else is necessary to protect its users from you. The "Report Spam" button that has so many marketers spooked doesn't do that much damage by itself. If 1 or 2 or 10 users out of the 5,000 or 50,000 on your mailing list click the spam button in their email clients, your message won't automatically be blocked or filtered. ISPs know users often hit the "Report Spam" button by accident when they just wanted to delete a message or mistakenly thought hitting the spam button would unsubscribe them. However, if a significant number (typically 1 to 3 percent) of your subscribers click the spam button, the ISP will take action. Most likely, you need to address one or more of these areas when dealing with a high complaint rate in a permission environment: The Tide Is Turning for Authentication author: Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald source: Clickz date : 4/26/2006 After sitting through the Email Authentication Summit and reviewing our recent deliverability survey results, we can see the email industry is moving steadily toward authentication for both commercial senders, ISPs, and corporate recipients. That means if you aren't like the 24.2 percent of the marketers in our survey who said they've already adopted one of the two leading authentication protocols, your email may languish in the bulk folder. The Email Senders and Providers Coalition (ESPC) and IronPort released studies recently showing adoption is spreading among both commercial email senders and ISPs, and corporate receivers. This is significant, because it creates what IronPort called the "critical mass needed to propel the standards forward": Designing B2B Email for Deliverability author: Karen Gedney source: Clickz date : 4/19/2006 Many marketers overlook the effect design can have on the deliverability of their email messages. So today, I thought I'd pass along some email design tips sent to me by Melissa Richards, director of marketing at Bronto Software. Because design isn't my area, I also asked Allister Klingensmith, the designer at Leibowitz Communications who created my e-newsletter, to review Bronto's recommendations to call out the ones he thought were most important. Stupid Activist Watch: MoveOn.org Should Live up to its Name author: Staff source: Direct Magazine date : 4/18/2006 Some in the trade press along with left wing activist group MoveOn.org have gone positively cuckoo over a statement Goodmail CEO Richard Gingras made to California legislators in a hearing concerning AOL’s implementation of CertifiedEmail: "To suggest that the introduction of CertifiedEmail is going to prevent spammers from sending spam or phishers from trying to phish -- we have not said it, nor would any expert say it,” Gingras reportedly said to California State Sen. Dean Florez. MoveOn.org’s Adam Green reportedly told ClickZ blogger Kate Kaye that the statement is proof that AOL has been lying about its plans. “Goodmail was forced to admit publicly that AOL’s pay-to-send system would do nothing to prevent spam,” Green wrote. “Goodmail’s admission debunked one of the prime lies that AOL has been telling the media and the public for the last month, and blew a hole right through AOL’s credibility and every single promise they’ve made to the public in this debate. Their days of saying ‘trust us, we won’t hurt email’ are over – their trust is gone.” After Email Authentication author: Kevin Newcomb source: Clickz date : 4/17/2006 The embrace of email authentication by commercial senders, one of the key issues facing the email industry, is coming along nicely. The adoption level grew by 60 percent last year and is at a point where most large commercial senders are using one or both of the two dominant frameworks. According to data from the Email Senders & Providers Coalition (ESPC), more than 35 percent of all mail now sent is being authenticated. The logical question many email stakeholders are now asking is, what comes next? At the second annual Email Authentication Summit this week in Chicago, many of them will take up that question, discussing what will drive further adoption, issues of enforcement, and how to layer on reputation services once a sender's identity is known. Deliverability: A Challenge for 8 of 10 Marketers author: Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald source: Clickz date : 4/12/2006 Our recent survey on marketers' experiences with deliverability turned up a big contradiction and a surprising black hole of knowledge about what really is more likely to get email blocked or filtered. The contradiction: Eight of 10 email marketers say getting email messages delivered is a challenge for their organizations. However, only 1 in 10 rank improving deliverability as a top priority. The black hole: Marketers apparently don't realize how much spam complaints can influence message blocking and filtering. Nearly 90 percent of respondents track hard bounces and unsubscribes in each delivery, but only 58 percent monitor spam complaints. Also, 53 percent say their email content and coding or permission practices have the greatest influence, but only 13 percent cited spam complaints. Some highlights from the survey, which assessed emailers' attitudes toward deliverability issues and their experiences: 11 Tips to Make Life Easier for Your Subscribers author: Loren McDonald source: EmailLabs date : 4/7/2006 Your subscribers have a lot of email competing for their attention in the inbox. In order to stand out among all the clutter, you must make it as easy as possible for them to find and interact with you. People will almost always gravitate toward things that are easy to do and abandon things that are difficult. Making it easy for the customer is the hallmark of products and services such as Google AdWords, iTunes and Intuit’s Turbo Tax. Like everything else, making things easy for your subscribers and customers is, well, easy to say but harder to practice. Also, what's easy for you might not be for customers, especially new ones. See you how stack up against these five factors that promote easy interaction. Give yourself a point for each one you do already: Email Deliverability's Future: Total Transparency author: Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald source: Clickz date : 3/29/2006 What's been the greatest boost to email deliverability since the Internet bubble burst in 2000? The growing transparency throughout the email industry. It's helped dispel much of the uncertainty that plagued e-mail marketing in the early days. We previously illustrated how email marketing and e-newsletter publishing have evolved from batch-and-blast simplicity to a more complex, trustworthy marketing channel. These six developments illustrate how transparency contributed to that evolution. Dyson, MoveOn.org Brawl Over Goodmail author: Staff source: Direct Magazine date : 3/21/2006 Technology investor Esther Dyson is reportedly furious with the folks over at DearAOL.com for selectively quoting an op-ed she wrote in the March 17 New York Times supporting AOL’s deal with Goodmail Systems. Led by liberal activist group MoveOn.org, the DearAOL.com coalition is trying to stop AOL from implementing Goodmail’s system under which commercial emailers can pay to have their email practices certified as non-spam, and their email guaranteed to be delivered with links and graphics intact. DearAOL.com contends the system will create a two-tiered Internet under which those who pay will get their email delivered while those who don’t will be left out in the cold. CA Senator Drafting Anti-AOL-Goodmail Law author: Staff source: Direct Magazine date : 3/21/2006 California State Sen. Dean Florez announced last week he is drafting legislation against AOL’s implementation of the Goodmail CertifiedEmail program. The move follows protests by liberal activist group MoveOn.org and others that AOL’s plan has the potential to result in a two-tiered email system. The groups contend that marketers who pay will get their email delivered while organizations that don’t will risk having their email blocked as spam. “It seems to me that AOL is setting a horrible precedent here,” said Florez, a Democrat. “The whole idea of Net neutrality gets wiped away, and we are left with an Internet of haves and have-nots.” Mapping the Email Deliverability Chain author: Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald source: Clickz date : 3/15/2006 Years ago, the email delivery chain had just a few links. You loaded your email and hit "send." After a couple handoffs, the message arrived in your recipient's inbox the way you sent it. Today, that chain has many more links. Some block your email, others help it along. Deliverability has become a big issue for many email senders. It even spawned this column. How concerned are you? Are you trying to improve your email program's delivery rates, or are you happy with current results? We're developing an industry-wide study on email deliverability, and we want your views. Please answer our quick survey. Meanwhile, here's how the delivery chain has lengthened over the years, along with the trouble each new link can cause. Mapping the Email Deliverability Chain author: Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald source: Clickz date : 3/15/2006 Years ago, the email delivery chain had just a few links. You loaded your email and hit "send." After a couple handoffs, the message arrived in your recipient's inbox the way you sent it. Today, that chain has many more links. Some block your email, others help it along. Deliverability has become a big issue for many email senders. It even spawned this column. How concerned are you? Are you trying to improve your email program's delivery rates, or are you happy with current results? We're developing an industry-wide study on email deliverability, and we want your views. Please answer our quick survey. Meanwhile, here's how the delivery chain has lengthened over the years, along with the trouble each new link can cause. Goodmail Allows Double the Complaints of AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist author: Ken Magill source: Direct Magazine date : 3/14/2006 Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail program allows senders to have more than twice the rate of spam complaints as its enhanced whitelist, according to documents obtained by Magilla Marketing. The news seems to bolster claims by AOL’s critics that marketers who pay Goodmail won’t have to behave as well as those who don’t. AOL maintains two whitelists, or lists of senders that meet certain good behavior criteria, such as low complaint rates, and as a result, have an easier time getting their email delivered with graphics and links intact. What AOL's Whitelist Means to Marketers author: Matt Blumberg source: iMedia Connection date : 3/8/2006 It's official. AOL will keep its organic Enhanced Whitelist, clarifying that it is not planning on replacing it with Goodmail's email stamp program. That program will now be one way, not the only way, to reach AOL inboxes. When AOL announced its initial plans this month, many of us in the industry were troubled because of the impact on marketers and publishers. The industry fervor that resulted sparked rethinking by AOL, and that bodes well for the email industry. Here's why: Goodmail Rejecting Three Quarters of Applicants author: Ken Magill source: Direct Magazine date : 3/7/2006 Goodmail has rejected more than three quarters of the companies that have applied for its Certified Email program, according to the company’s chief executive, Richard Gingras. Gingras said most of the rejections are because the applicants’ spam-complaint rates are too high. He declined to specify what constitutes too high a complaint rate. “Our criteria are very rigorous and the fact of the matter is that a lot of folks out there just don’t qualify,” he said. “Most senders say they’re on AOL’s enhanced whitelist and they’re not.” Hotmail False Positives Nearly Triple: Lyris author: Ken Magill source: Direct Magazine date : 3/7/2006 What’s up at Hotmail? False-positive spam filtering at Microsoft’s email inbox service nearly tripled in 2005 from 5.3% in the first quarter to 15.7% in the fourth quarter, according to email service provider Lyris Technologies. The news comes as almost every other provider is getting better at avoiding filtering email people want. Average deliverability of email in the U.S. increased by 1% from 91% to 92% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2005, according to email service provider Lyris. AOL's Push to Reduce Spam Lands Goodmail in Hot Seat author: Jon Swartz source: USA Today date : 3/5/2006 Why does CEO Richard Gingras [of Goodmail] feel like he's caught in the eye of an email hurricane? "I'm not too thrilled about the recent attention," he says. It's the fallout from being the technology provider in a scrum between AOL, the No. 1 Internet service provider, which plans to charge businesses for commercial email, and a coalition of 50 companies claiming the plan is email taxation. The squabble has obscured what many email experts, such as Eric Allman, chief science officer at email security firm Sendmail, say is a sensible, effective technology to blunt spam. Beyond Deliverability author: Pamela Parker source: Clickz date : 2/10/2006 Email marketers, I urge you to imagine a world in which you didn't have to concern yourself with deliverability. No spam filters stand in between you and your target audience. You can know, with considerably certainty, that the emails you send will actually reach their destination. Even better, imagine that recipients could be confident that emails that appear to be from you actually are. Yes, this is the controversial potential future that has set tongues wagging up and down the email industry. Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you know I'm talking about AOL's plan to implement Goodmail's CertifiedEmail. Why AOL White Lists Matter In Canada author: Stefan Eyram source: One Degree date : 2/6/2006 In essence, AOL has two different white lists and their enhanced version has much more stringent conditions to qualify but also provides greater benefit to the sender. To get your marketing email delivered to a recipient inbox you need to know that AOL uses tough measures to screen and filter senders, IP addresses, content and more. If you want to get good deliverability rates it is imperative to work with an email service provider (ESP) that has white list relationships with the major ISPs (AOL, etc.) and web mail providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.). This will provide an email sender with a some “benefit of the doubt” when it comes to getting email through. Enhanced white lists, like AOL’s, take it a step further and pretty much ensure all your email gets into the right inbox. In the case of AOL and their AOL 9.0, where images are turned off by default (like with Google’s Gmail), the enhanced white list relationship means that you also have images turned on automatically. For consumer-focused email marketers in the US this is very important. As a Canadian email marketer how does this affect you? Delivery Woes? Try This Five-Step Program author: Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald source: Clickz date : 2/1/2006 Even emailers with the best intentions get junked, blocked, or filtered on sight. How can you get out of your deliverability funk? If you want to get back on your feet and do email right, follow this five-step strategy. 1. Establish a Delivery Benchmark 2. Identify Where Your Subscriptions Come From 3. Examine List Hygiene 4. Review Your Content 5. Fix Your IP Addresses Email Booming Despite Deliverability Headaches author: Stefan Eyram source: One Degree date : 9/20/2005 With all my recommendations about deliverability being important, it is equally important to remind marketers that email is still a booming trend. In July Jay Aber, President of 24/7 Canada, penned an article on the CMA website, If deliverability is such a big issue, why is e-mail booming?, that quotes BBM research indicating email still ranks at the top of the list when it comes to online activities by those aged 18+. We also learn that Canadians prefer communicating via e-mail more than by any other methods. Maybe the fact that more spam is being caught means people are receiving less unsolicited email and therefore enjoying the “good” email they receive. Quick Tips for Improving Email Deliverability author: Staff source: Multichannel Merchant Magazine date : 9/12/2005 With all the talk about the numerous sender authentication protocols, it’s easy to overlook some basic actions that can help improve your email deliverability. A new white paper from e-mail services provider Silverpop, “Deliverability: What the Pros Already Know,” calls attention to some of these basics: Does Sending Domain Impact Deliverability? author: Chip House source: Chip's Deliverability Tips date : 8/25/2005 Email recipients put more weight on who the email is from than any other item when choosing which emails to open, which to delete and which to complain about. Our “from address” testing shows an increase in open rates and click-through rates when the from name, from address and subject line are appropriately branded. It also shows a reduction in spam complaints. An Email Service Provider (ESP) should provide you a choice of how your from address is managed. Possible options for XYZ Brand include: An E-Zine Deliverability Checklist author: Matt Blumberg, Michael Mayor, Tami Monahan Forman & Stephanie A. Miller source: Chief Marketer date : 8/17/2005 Having trouble getting your ezines delivered? Return Path has come up with a checklist of potential problems and solutions. For more on how to avoid being blocked by the ISPs, click here. Coldwater's e-deliverability boost author: Mark Del Franco source: Multichannel Merchant Magazine date : 5/15/2005 Women's apparel merchant Coldwater Creek sends the 2.5 million customers on its email file roughly two emails a month. But a year ago nearly 30% of those emails were getting blocked by Internet service providers (ISPs). “We see a direct correlation with our online sales and email campaigns,” says Christine Laczai, vice president of e-commerce for the Sandpoint, ID-based cataloger/retailer. “If 30% of our email isn't getting delivered, we could see a 30% variance in revenue.” Deliverability Biggest Challenge for Canadian Email Marketers author: Stefan Eyram source: One Degree date : 5/10/2005 Today I read another article on email deliverability. This one has a more Canadian slant. Basically the Direct Marketing News article “Deliverability is biggest challenge facing legitimate email marketers in Canada” suggests up to 50% of all marketing emails never get through. They use a good postal email analogy that simply underscores what deliverability is. I dispute the generalization of the 50% figure when you are using reputable email service providers (ESPs) that have proper relationships with major Internet Service Providers. However, I will agree it is possible to have 50% of your email blocked. What can you do? Deliverability: AOL Treats Emergency Email As Spam author: Stefan Eyram source: One Degree date : 5/3/2005 Email is a great way to communciate. That was what the Indian River County, FL emergency coordinator thought. Until he found the county’s emergency email announcements flagged as spam by AOL (AOL Treats Fla. Emergency E-Mails As Spam). The emergency coordinator was, and is, right. Email is a great way to commnunicate, especially when you have information that has to reach a lot of people very quickly. But sending a lot of email, whether it is to the county’s 4,200 subscribers or to a large corporation’s database of over 1 million recipients, requires some planning to ensure the messages get through. What lesson did he learn? Deliverability #1 Email Marketing Headache author: Enid Burns source: Clickz date : 4/25/2005 Deliverability is the number one challenge facing email marketers. Seventy-two percent of respondents to a survey conducted by SKYLIST cited deliverability as a persistent problem in a survey of marketing professionals conducted by email service provider. In second place is analyzing campaign results. Fourty-four percent by email marketers cited it as a problem in the survey. The majority of respondents surveyed have lists comprising between one and five million subscribers. Just over half of them (54 percent) email on a daily basis. Results show 62 percent of respondents' mailings are promotional offers, while 54 percent of activity is B2C activity and 46 percent send newsletters. While the majority of respondents said they would be very likely to use personalized content more extensively, most personalization currently only reaches greeting or name level. Fifty-eight percent of companies in the survey reach that level. Some 31 percent of marketers personalize the subject line. Further personalization drops precipitously from there. Home | Company | Account | Sitemap | Events | Resources | Email Marketing Best Practices © 2002-2006 Email Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved