Marketers that fail to get to grips with Internet Service Providers’ (ISP) new spam-blocking filters are at serious risk of failing to deliver emails to the inboxes of consumers and potentially losing business for clients, according to Guy Hanson of the Direct Marketing Association’s Email Marketing Council (EMC).
Speaking at the publication launch of the DMA’s new white paper on email deliverability on 24th April, Hanson said: “Marketers need to understand how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and spam filters are significantly changing the way they monitor and process commercial email or face the real danger of delivering ineffective email marketing campaigns. Failing to reach the inbox ultimately means losing sales.”
The white paper reveals that ISPs and spam filters are shifting away from penalising ‘bad’ email and moving towards rewarding ‘good’ email instead.
To do this, engagement metrics are being used to provide a view of whether subscribers are interacting positively or negatively with their marketing emails.
ISPs have been attempting to deal with rising spam volumes by using increasingly aggressive tactics to identify and block unwanted commercial email. However, with the percentage of so-called ‘false positives’ generated by this approach reaching unacceptable levels, ISPs have introduced a new set of behavioural metrics to improve the way they identify and eliminate spam to prevent blocking legitimate commercial email activity.
Subscribers who don’t delete without reading, who nominate emails as “Not spam”, and who retrieve emails that have been mistakenly routed to the spam folder, are all demonstrating positive interactions with their marketing emails, with senders of these emails being rewarded with preferential placement in the inbox.
The study shows that sender reputation remains the cornerstone of email deliverability, and the primary factors that influence reputation metrics (infrastructure, data quality, and complaints) represent the key metrics that email marketers need to have their fingers on.
Now, however, the subscriber behaviours that are being observed are playing a role in determining the visibility that the senders’ emails enjoy.
Hanson, Director, Response Consulting at Return Path – the white paper’s sponsor – added: “The email landscape has altered dramatically over the last few years, with ISPs having to devise increasingly more intelligent systems to filter ‘good’ emails effectively. This white paper highlights that engagement metrics and sender reputation are key to successful email deliverability. Marketers must understand the changing focus of ISPs and how good email marketing practices are recognised and rewarded.”
To download a full copy of the DMA Email Deliverability Review White Paper sponsored by Return Path, click here.
