The Great White-Listing Lie: Part 1

There was once a joke in the industry that some email marketing sales people, of certain companies, told their customers this: Their company had such good relationships with ISPs and free email services like Hotmail, that their white-listing team could ring up if customers get blocked; offer to take the opposing counterpart out for a coffee and hey presto, the customer would be immediately unblocked. You know the really funny thing is that for a moment, I actually did think that was true - the salesman believed it and certain customers did as well!

The thing is, white-listing - as many more savvy marketers are starting to realise - is only part of the story. There's a whole heap of things to understand and implement to ensure deliverability. Making sure your Email Service Provider (ESP) has all the necessary white-lists is only one tick in the box on the list of many things you need to do to ensure your message gets through. The most worrying thing is that many ESPs are not exactly honest, and due to the way they manage their email deliveries - with less than rigorous checks on client lists loaded and general poor email management - they are regularly blocked by key ISPs. This means that your emails are not delivered and you don't know about it!

In the following article, I'll cover the key areas that affect deliverability and make sense of where white-listing fits in. I’ll also talk about when you should be suspicious as to whether a list of ISP relationships has any merit whatsoever.

1. Reputation.

The first and most important area in deliverability is the reputation of your sending servers or those of your ESP.

Many think that the reputation or 'sending history' is associated with the sending domain name, but in most cases it isn't. As we know with 'phishing' attacks, sending addresses can be faked so reputation systems look at the root delivery address that can never be altered; the IP addresses of the delivery servers.

So, have you got a good reputation?

There are a number of services out on the internet that allow you to interrogate the IP addresses you are using to deliver your campaigns. If you don't know how to find your IP address that, you'll see it within the first four lines of the email header when you view the 'source' of the email campaign.

Services like Sender Score give a rating of between 1-100. For an incredibly simple rule of thumb, scores above 80 are good and anything below 30 indicates that the reputation of your sending servers could be pretty poor. If it's this bad it will instantly have an effect on your deliverability and it's highly likely your emails will be blocked across numerous ISPs.

So if the score is low, how on earth did it get into this state?

Well there are a myriad of possible reasons, but it all comes down to poor management of either the internal corporate system, or the ESP is providing the service through a shared set of delivery servers – hence using shared IP addresses. The latter is akin to giving the spare set of keys to your brand new car to your 17 year old brother who has just passed his test.

The trouble with shared systems is that numerous 'spam' complaints are registered across many customers. Most often don't have particularly good data policies - ie poor quality lists, so the reputation score drops and free email services like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and other ISPs eventually block the IP addresses. Funnily enough, some ESPs can experience intermittent success in getting through to certain ISPs with some email campaigns but not all. This is experienced when, down to sheer luck, your campaign goes out on a delivery server that hasn’t yet been blocked… Separate IP addresses are all well and good, but again these can be blocked.

Is there a better way?

Yes of course. You see, it's all in the management of the process.

White-listing teams really need to know what they are doing and should have numerous tools at their disposal. For example, MSN provides a web-based system called SNDS, once you have the sending IP addresses assigned to their feedback loop. It provides an incredibly useful 'traffic light' sequence across the IP addresses for Hotmail, showing green for very low spam complaints, amber for medium level complaints and red for high complaints. Red will be blocked if it hasn’t been already.

If the white-listing team have these tools at their disposal, customers can be alerted to reduce the frequency of their email campaigns, or can be questioned by account management teams about their high complaint levels. For example, the main question asked is ‘where did you get that data from?’

Next Steps?

So if reputation of the IP delivery addresses is critical, what else can be done to keep them clear? Pure decided to investigate this in detail about two years ago and came up with the concept of a 'Risk Analysis' system that would check every single delivery and stop email sends should they exceed basic tolerances set on hard-bounces, opt-outs, soft-bounces and blocks. This therefore keeps Pure whiter than white with the various ISPs.

2. Content

This is the second key area and looks at making sure the actual email is as perfect as it can be; in the eye of the spam filters. There are two main areas here: the quality of the HTML and the spam scoring of the email.

The first is easily addressed. Double-check that the HTML is perfect. It is so simple for designers to produce something that is fabulous and that works in every browser. Trouble is, email clients are not as clever as browsers and often can't recognise mistakes. Sourcing an HTML validator will spot simple errors like unclosed off tags. Lines of HTML code stretching beyond one thousand characters can cause problems in Microsoft exchange servers - incredibly simple issues like this can actually prevent delivery as the spam filters will pick the email up and spit it straight back; particularly with web-based email systems like Hotmail or Yahoo.

Ensuring your email has a low spam score is relatively easy these days. The ESP, if you are using one, should have a spam checker built in, so it is important that you double check your email before sending it. Typically, Spam Assassin is used and email campaigns will be checked live against Spam Assassin's database. This contains endless recordings of what constitutes spam and apportions various scores for each 'spam' trait.

For example, all upper case letters in the subject line will get a score of 1. Using spaced characters for impact will get another score, and so on. The spam checker should then make it as easy as possible to identify the issues with your email and allow you to change it so you fly though corporate spam filters with low scores.

So, we've covered only two of the key issues to ensure deliverability and I've probably made you question the stories on white-listing a little bit more. In the next part of this deliverability article, I'll go into detail on another four key areas: why it is so important to keep ensuring the trust of your recipients, why timing is more critical than ever and re-examine your data and the way your creative is produced to help you reach the holy grail of near-perfect deliverability.

by

Darren Fell

Founder and Major Accounts Director

Pure

www.pure360.com

To read the second installemnt of Darren's article, click here.