Maximizing the deliverability of your email marketing
November 3rd, 2009 by Darryl
Getting the highest percentage of your messages to your subscribers’ Inbox is one of the primary goals from an email marketing perspective. At the same time, it is also the main hurdle to overcome. Innumerable little things can effect whether or not your communications end up in the inbox, or in the junk mail folder of your recipients. The job is made even more difficult as different Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email clients have very different rules, filters, procedures and policies on bulk email.
The success of any campaign is influenced by all areas of the process, requiring the close co-operation of everyone from the IT/Server guys to the designers and database handlers.
One of the main contributing factors to the failure of a campaign can be the number of hard bounces and complaint rates. AOL, one of the world’s largest ISPs, recommends maintaining a <0.1% complaint rate. That’s a threshold of 1 in every 1,000 emails that you send out. That may sound harsh, but by adhering to some rules it’s entirely possible.
Even if you beat the spam filter there is no guarantee that your mail will ever be read. Finicky recipients who are unhappy at having received your mail may just click that “Report as spam” button. On local email clients the effect is minimal, but on web-based services like Hotmail or Google Mail, this can have a serious knock on effect for other recipients on the same service as these are tracked, recorded and taken into consideration in future (as if you didn’t have enough to worry about already).
Over the next few weeks I will cover some of the specific problems that the aspiring email marketer would encounter during the course of a campaign, from set up through to the post-send fallout. For this first part we will look at where it all begins: your server and domain.
Server and Domain
Server and domain processes and configuration will mainly be of use to if you are running marketing software on your own server.
There are a few things to consider when taking the step to set up your own email-marketing server, starting with the IP address. Having a static IP address to send email from your server is a great way to build your reputation as a trusted sender. The closer you keep to rules, the better your reputation. The better your reputation, the better your deliverability. It’s as simple as that.
In addition to your IP address, there are a couple of processes and frameworks that can be utilized to help your emails along the way.
The first, and probably most popular of these, is an Open Source project called the Sender Policy Framework (SPF). SPF allows the owner of a domain to specify their mail sending policy. The information is published to their Domain Name Server (DNS) in the form of an SPF Record which contains specific instructions for the receiving server, telling it which mail servers can send outgoing mail on it’s behalf.
When the inbound server receives the mail, the SPF Record is checked against the senders mail server for consistency. This speeds up the process of receiving and decreases the load on the server, allowing more mail to be processed in a shorter amount of time. If the records match, it is put through a less stringent spam-check process and then passed onto the recipient. Conversely, if the records do not match and the email is being sent from an unauthorized source, it will be put through a more rigorous checking process and will more than likely be trashed.
Another similar process is the Sender ID framework, a project initially spearheaded by Microsoft. While similar in action to SPF, the fundamental difference was that Sender ID could verify the IP address of the server that has sent the mail, compares it to the Sender ID record, and then deals with it appropriately. (Currently, both frameworks now support this.)
The final authorization process is known as Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), which uses public-key cryptography to digitally sign all emails. The inbound server then checks this public-key for verification. This process is of particular importance when sending email to GMail accounts, and is recommended if a large amount of GMail addresses are present in your recipient database. To use Domain keys, a third party software package or proxy must be implemented on your mail server.
All of the above methods do require either a working knowledge of DNS records or server changes, and care should always be taken when making changes to such settings – as it’s very easy to break something if you don’t know what you’re doing (best to get a professional to do it for you). It’s also worth noting that currently, not all domain registrars support SPF or Sender ID but they are quickly gaining in popularity and in the future the option to have them will surely be offered as default. If you are not sure if your domain supports it, check with your registrar’s technical support.
That’s it from me this week. Check back soon where I will cover off how to keep your database clean, relevant and minty fresh!
