by Tink Taylor, dotMailer

Before undertaking email marketing, you need to make a choice as to how you will send out and track your emails. Here, you have 3 main choices.

The DIY approach

Some marketers are tempted to try using PC tools such as Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail. This is not advisable for a host of reasons. These email tools lack design and personalisation features, and pose potential delivery issues as they offer no sender reputation (we’ll discuss reputation a bit later).

They provide very limited - if any - tracking or reporting facilities, and little or no bounce-back or ‘unsubscribe’ management (which can put you at risk of breaching the Data Protection Act and Regulations).

Bulk email software

A second option is to use bulk email software, downloaded to your own PC. Although it can provide more of the tools you need, such as design and personalisation tools along with some tracking and reporting, this option still poses deliverability problems.

To ensure your marketing emails are delivered and not blocked or filtered out, they need to be seen by the ISPs like Hotmail and AOL as being sent from a reputable and recognised email broadcaster. Sending from your own PC using bulk email software will not meet this requirement.

What’s more, sending your bulk email campaigns in this way can impact on your PC, server and internet access. You even face the risk of having your transactional and business emails blocked if one of your marketing emails triggers a black listing complaint.

Email Service Providers

To get the most from email marketing, your best choice is to use a reputable, hosted Email Service Provider (ESP) solution. A hosted provider will enable you to set up and send your own email campaigns, complete with data management, editing, tracking and reporting.

The emails will be sent from the ESP’s servers so you can take full advantage of their reputation as a sender and enjoy their high delivery rates. Plus, you’ll have your bounce-backs and unsubscribes managed for you, ensuring you are Data Protection Act (DPA) compliant and helping you avoid being black listed.

Prices for sending emails using an ESP will vary, depending on the level of service, functionality and reporting you want - and on the number of emails you are sending (the more you send, the lower the volume cost).

Deliverability

Spammers have made the world of email marketing an increasingly complicated place. Deliverability is a challenge for anyone using email marketing – i.e. satisfying the filters of ISPs and getting your email safely into your recipients’ inboxes, looking how you intended it to look.

Every marketer needs to know how to maximise their email delivery rate, because it's the first step in the critical path to getting good return on investment (ROI).

• Step 1. Delivery rate
• Step 2. Open rate
• Step 3. Click Through rate
• Step 4. Conversion rate
• Step 5. ROI

Spam, spam, spam

Unsolicited emails, i.e. those sent without the prior request or permission of the recipient, are known as spam. Often sent in huge numbers to randomly ‘harvested’ email addresses, spam is big, big business, making up between 85% and 95% of ALL worldwide email traffic!
No wonder then, that the email industry has made it a mission to block, filter-out and eliminate this enormous quantity of unwanted email traffic.

The two key factors that impact your deliverability

In reaction to the problem of unsolicited email, the industry has established two critical factors by which it judges an email and its sender. These are the factors by which ISPs decide whether to allow your marketing email to be delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

• Authentication: has the email actually been sent by who it appears to be from?
• Reputation: what are the standards of the sender’s email behaviour?

Authentication

There are three widely used protocols for authenticating the identity of a sender against the email being sent: Domain Keys, Sender ID and SPF (Sender Policy Framework).

Put simply, these authentication protocols enable ISPs to check that an email is being sent from a server that: A - is who it claims to be, and B - is authorised to send it.

Reputation

Spammers do not go about building relationships and good reputations with ISPs. They stay undercover, invisible, and keep moving.

So email marketers who make themselves known to the ISPs, build relationships and follow their rules and best practices to the letter, can bypass filters, become white listed and get fast-tracked into inboxes.

Authentication and reputation are two of the key areas where good ESPs can help you, by enabling you to take advantage of their volumes of send, best practice behaviour and established reputations with the ISPs.

There are further elements to mention, along with sender reputation: Feedback loops, Goodmail, White lists and Black lists.

Feedback loops

Choose an ESP that is signed up to ‘Feedback Loops’ on the major ISPs such as Hotmail. AOL and Yahoo. A ‘Feedback Loop’ allows the ISP to send an unsubscribe mail to your database when a recipient of your email hits the ‘Report Spam’ button. This in turn enables your ESP to unsubscribe/suppress the complaining recipients from future sends, avoiding repeat complaints and protecting your reputation.

Goodmail

Goodmail, along with Sender Score, impose strict standards and requirements on senders, in order to grant accreditation. Accredited senders can enjoy guaranteed delivery into inboxes, with functionality such as links and images turned on.

White lists

Reputable email senders can also become ‘white listed’ by ISPs. Various rules of behaviour may apply for getting onto an ISP’s white list.

Black Lists

Real-time black lists or ‘block lists’, such as SpamHaus, provide a database of IP addresses, servers and domains that have been reported and identified as spam by ISPs. All ISPs can check an email in real-time against this database and decide whether to accept or reject it.

Will you be judged on the content of your email?

Sender authentication and reputation are the overriding factors in the filtering and blocking used by ISPs. But they’re not the whole story. Email providers may also apply content filters to emails they have accepted.

These content filters will analyse your email’s content against a series of rules and give it a ‘spam score’ based on certain key elements. An email over a certain score may suffer the fate of being delivered into the Junk Mail inbox.

A good ESP can help you ensure your email design and content has a low spam score. Key elements to consider avoiding in your email design and content include: large graphics or a high proportion of graphics to plain English text; lots of different colours for text and links; an excessive number of links relative to the number of words; suspicious subject lines and ‘salesy’ web text words such as 'free'.