Download Deliverability Essentials

“Why should I get someone else to send my email campaign when my CRM/IT Team/web host/can do it?”
The most important reason to outsource the delivery of your email campaign is often not what people consider first –
Deliverability.
Whether it’s a campaign to 200 or 200,000 getting your email delivered is key to success or failure
And while there are many ways to getting your email delivered there are some important things you should know
about your options that may not be obvious at first glance.
It doesn’t matter how you have put together your campaign, prepared your offer, created your landing pages and
sanitized your database. If your campaign does not reach its intended audience on time and in perfect condition then
all that effort would have gone to waste.
Delivery is not just about bandwidth or software. There are many other factors involved in getting your campaign
delivered. The points below briefly outline the major points you will need to address when deploying your campaigns.
The most important one to remember above all however is reputation. Each one of the points below will have an
impact on your reputation, from the content of your campaign to the activities of other people on your network.
ISP’s
Your ISP doesn’t support bulk email broadcasts
Your ISP doesn’t want you sending bulk email. Although it may not be cause for concern immediately, at some stage
if you are sending through your own internet service provider, you may be blocked from sending. ISP’s work hard to
prevent Spam from reaching their clients and just as hard ensuring that their services are not used to generate
unwanted emails. If you are to be successful in maintaining your own broadcasting you will need to negotiate an
agreement with your ISP and provide proof that you are compliant with permission laws, privacy laws and Spam
legislation. Another alternative is to install a dedicated Mail Transfer Agent in a dedicated hosting facility. A Mail
Transfer Agent (MTA) is a server with software and hardware configured for bulk sending of email.
Your customers ISP’s
Your client’s ISP does not want Spam. The methods they employ and the degree to which they monitor and manage
inbound bulk email vary widely from ISP to ISP and change regularly. You will need to be able to monitor delivery to
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ISP’s, their responses and any blockages that may prevent your mail reaching your clients. In the event that an ISP
blocks one of your campaigns, you will need to be able to contact and negotiate a release of the email. Ideally
permanent agreements with major ISP’s should be negotiated but will still need monitoring.
CRM Programs
Your mail client (Outlook, Groupwise, Gmail etc) was not built as an email marketing tool
If you have tried to use your existing mail application such as Outlook to broadcast your campaigns you will be aware
of the restrictions this option imposes. Depending on your set up you may be restricted to sending only 200
messages at a time or confined to off peak times in your company to minimise bandwidth usage. Formatting,
personalisation, graphics and reporting are also severely limited with inbound mail clients.
Mail clients are designed to accept your mail and facilitate replies – not broadcast messages to thousands of people
which is why you will struggle with this approach.
CRM / ERP Solutions can handle some outbound email marketing (just not very well).
It’s true that some Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) will have some email broadcast and tracking
facility. Most, however will not. At best they may do an adequate job, at worst they may not support bulk email at all,
often restricting the volume, formatting and reporting available.
If the system is web based such as SalesForce.com bulk broadcasting will be restricted to prevent over stretching the
service providers’ infrastructure and preventing abuse. If the system is an internally hosted solution then all of the
other points listed here need to be addressed during implementation.
Rate of delivery
Being able to manage the speed of delivery can have an effect on your campaign results for two reasons. Firstly
getting your message delivered at a high speed will ensure it reaches your audience at the best possible time for
maximum open rates and responses. Secondly, being able to slow the rate down can help manage responses where
you may have limited resources. Speed can be a double-edged sword. Some email service providers will prevent
large volumes of high speed mail getting delivered unless they can verify its threat level or Spam rating. Ideally load
balancing across domains should be implemented.
Volume
Low volume senders – 200 to 2000 recipients
When sending low volume campaigns your main concern is your own ISP. Some ISP’s will limit send volumes to 50
or 100 per send meaning that you could be spending a good deal of time hitting the send button. By using an email
service you eliminate the volume limitations, but there is another advantage… A reputable email service provider
sends millions of emails and has built a positive reputation that a low volume sender could never hope to achieve.
Moderate volume senders – 2000 to 20000 recipients
The same issues apply as to low volume senders but now your clients ISP’s have you on the radar.
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High volume senders – 20000+ recipients
Bandwidth now becomes a factor. Most DSL connections are asymmetrical meaning that although your download
speeds are high your upload speed will be only a fraction of that. This usually means that your time of delivery and
speed of delivery are governed by internal traffic concerns. If bandwidth out is not an issue you need to be conscious
of volume at the receiving end. Many e-mail service providers will block large volumes of mail coming from an single
source. They see sudden high volumes coming from a single source as dangerous and may block or suspend the
delivery of these emails until they are satisfied they are legitimate. In most cases you will be unaware that this is
happening.
Authentication
Sender ID
The Sender ID Framework is an e-mail authentication technology protocol that helps address the problem of spoofing
and phishing by verifying the domain name from which e-mail messages are sent. Sender ID validates the origin of email messages by verifying the IP address of the sender against the alleged owner of the sending domain. Now
adopted by more than 10 million domains worldwide, Sender ID is providing brand owners, senders, and receiving
networks with significant business and technical value.
Domain Keys
Domain keys were implemented recently to provide email services providers a channel for managing delivery to some
major web based mail services such as Yahoo and Gmail. You will need to implement Domain keys in your own MTA
to ensure delivery to mail clients such as Yahoo and Gmail.
Wikipedia defines Domain keys as follows:
Overview
Domain Keys is a method of e-mail authentication. Unlike some other methods, it offers almost end-to-end integrity
from a signing to a verifying Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). In most cases the signing MTA acts on behalf of the sender,
and the verifying MTA on behalf of the receiver. Domain Keys is specified in Historic RFC 4870, which is obsolete by
Standards Track RFC 4871, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signatures.
Domain Keys is independent of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) routing aspects in that it operates on the RFC
2822 message — i.e., the transported mail data, header and body — not the SMTP envelope defined in RFC 2821.
Note that DomainKeys does not directly prevent abusive behavior; rather, it allows abuse to be tracked and detected
more easily. This ability to prevent some forgery also has benefits for recipients of e-mail as well as senders, and
"DomainKey awareness" is programmed into some e-mail software.
Since 2004, Yahoo! has signed all of its outgoing e-mail with DomainKeys and is verifying all incoming mail. As of
2005, Yahoo reports that the number of DomainKeys-verified e-mail messages they receive exceeds 300 million per
day.
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Google also uses DomainKeys to sign e-mail messages sent from users of its Gmail service, actually going live with it
about a month before Yahoo did.[1]
How it works
DomainKeys adds a header named "DomainKey-Signature" that contains a digital signature of the contents of the
mail message. The default parameters for the authentication mechanism are to use SHA-1 as the cryptographic hash
and RSA as the public key encryption scheme, and encode the encrypted hash using Base64.
The receiving SMTP server then uses the name of the domain from which the mail originated, the string
_domainkey, and a selector from the header to perform a DNS lookup. The returned data includes the domain's
public key. The receiver can then decrypt the hash value in the header field and at the same time recalculate the
hash value for the mail body that was received, from the point immediately following the "DomainKey-Signature:"
header. If the two values match, this cryptographically proves that the mail originated at the purported domain and
has not been tampered with in transit.
Mail Clients
Yahoo and Hotmail don’t like you
It’s nothing personal but major mail service providers want to protect their customers. Email is their life blood. But
getting your email message through is not always an easy task. You will need to monitor delivery to Yahoo and
Hotmail as sometimes – for reasons not always consistent – messages will be blocked, rejected or suspended. They
then need to be contacted for those messages to be released.
Outlook 2007
Sadly for email marketers Microsoft, in their divine wisdom (and something to do with an antitrust suit), decided that
instead of letting Internet explorer or any other web browser do the HTML rendering of email, Microsoft Word would
take its place. Your wonderfully crafted HTML is torn apart and spat out like a rag doll. Delivery to Outlook ’07 clients
now requires more rigorous testing and formatting for your message to present legibly.
Lotus Notes
… And you thought Outlook was bad, and yes your campaign can look good in Lotus Notes.
While Lotus Notes has advanced in recent years, its ability to render HTML is still severely limited. However its not all
bad news. Thorough testing and some design compromises will result in very presentable campaigns.
Mobile Versions
Are your email rendered for optimized presentation on mobile devices? Do you check all platforms including iPhone,
Windows Mobile and Android?
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Content
Code hygiene
Web editing applications such as Dreamweaver are fabulous tools for creating web sites. However the code
generated by these applications may mean you have rendering problems as mentioned above but there are two other
implications. The size of the email can be larger than necessary due to the about of HTML Code these applications
generate. And secondly the message may be blocked if the filter has trouble reading the HTML. Clean WC3
compliant html is needed to increase you delivery rate and improve compatibility with more mail clients.
Body Content
More and more people are using some sort of filtering on their email. Testing your content against a set of industry
standard filter applications such as Spam Assassin will allow you to get an insight into how filters may judge your
message.
Image to text ratio
The image to content ratio will affect the filtering results. Many filters will reject campaigns that are either
completely or mostly image. This is because Spammers will sometimes try and replace text with images if they think
the text will cause them to be blocked.
Web version
Providing a copy of the campaign as a web page will help improve the results of your campaign. Readers that may be
receiving the text version or have trouble with rendering in their mail browser will have the opportunity to click through
to a copy of the campaign on the web. This also means that a copy of your newsletter or campaign can be easily
posted on your own web site. Ideally this should be a fully personalised version for each subscriber so the field
mergers are maintained and unique clicks tracked to the individual user.
Text version
Despite nearly every mail client having the ability to render full HTML, some clients may wish to receive your
messages as text. This may be a personal preference, a bandwidth limitation or security precaution. Therefore a text
version of your campaign should accompany your HTML Version, preferably mime encoded.
Personalization
Personalisation can go beyond a simple “Dear firstname”, and it is important to be able to personalise both subject
line and content with any desired field. Personalization will improve open and response rates. It also strengthens the
perception of relationship strength reducing the chances of your ending up in the Spam box.
Technical and Compliance
Bounce management
How you manage bounces can have an impact on deliverability. Repeatedly sending to inactive email addresses will
alert ISP’s to potential Spam activity. Spammers generate “guess” addresses and hammer domain names in the
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hope that some get through. Keeping your mailing lists clean is not only good for delivery but also good for customer
relationship management.
Spam Act compliance
In Australia the Spam Act 2003 governs what does and does not constitute Spam, how to determine if you have
permission and how to manage opt out requests. There are heavy fines for offenders. You will need to familiarize
yourself with the legislation and ensure that all messages comply. For information on the Spam Act 2003 visit:
http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/consumer_info/frequently_asked_questions/spam_business_practical_guide.pdf
Abuse management
In the event that a subscriber rightly or wrongly claims to have been spammed, you will need policies in place to
address these complaints. An audit trail of the complainant and the ability to respond immediately and directly are you
best weapons in dealing with complaints such as these. Failure to address these swiftly and accurately may result in
the complaint escalating to litigation.
Shared vs. unique IP
To meet the requirements for good delivery, you will need to be able to broadcast from a fixed IP Address. So is it
better to have your own unique IP Address or share one with other broadcasters? There are cases to be made for
both methods, in the end the decision will depend on several factors. Your own unique IP means that your reputation
is not likely to be compromised by other people on the network who may have poor email practices. ISP’s will block
an IP address if they suspect it of being a source of spam. Conversely, sharing an IP address means that you can
ride on the positive reputation of your email service provider. By choosing a reputable service provider you have less
to do when it comes to managing ISP relationships.
Making it easy for local white listing
Including a “add to address book” link in your email campaign is a simple and highly effective way to ensure that at a
local level, individual clients can white list your address and ensure that your messages make their way into their
destination inbox.
Timing
Although timing may have little effect on actual delivery, choosing the time you send your campaign is critical to
optimise open rates and responses. Sending at 5pm on a Friday may suit your network load but if it means that the
message won’t be seen until Monday morning, then your message runs the very real risk of being missed.
‘From name’ and ‘reply address’
Once permission is gained your email needs to be identified when it arrives at the mail box. Your company or
personal name should identify you clearly as the legitimate source of the message and the reply address must be a
valid email address. ISP’s will reject a message if it comes from an invalid email address. Many campaign managers,
and indeed some email service providers, use either an invalid address or a ‘noreply@’ address. To me this is just
plain stupid. Firstly, it means that there is no sophisticated bounce management system in place and the ‘noreply@’
address is an attempt to manage responses. Secondly, people will reply no matter how clearly you think you have
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told them not to. And thirdly, just how much of your message do you want to dedicate to explaining that their reply to
this address will be ignored?
Embedded vs. Hosted Images
The increase in mail clients blocking images by default has led some marketers to try and circumvent the issue by
imbedding images in the HTML in place of hosting them. The advantage of embedded images is that (in theory) the
entire email including images is delivered intact without the receiver needing to download the images. The image is
instead encoded in a language that the users computer decodes and presents as an image.
The problem is that many modern mail clients will not decode the image. So all you will achieve is a larger email file
and still not have images displayed in some mail clients such as Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook. In other mail clients the
images will display but also appear as attachments thus alerting firewalls and preventing delivery altogether.
Sender Score vs Sender Base
Senderscore is the “free email reputation service from Return Path” Prior to Return Path’s purchase of the service
Senderscor.org provided free monitoring of email traffic and reports of reputation. However since the takeover the
free reports are limited to entice potential clients to sign up for Return Path’s full monitoring service. It is no longer an
independent reputation service sadly. Return Path also primarily serves high volume senders within North America so
you may not find the reports reflective of local conditions or volumes too low to be monitored.
Senderbase is provided by Ironport and now provides the kind of reputation reporting that Senderscore used to. It
also claims to monitor 10 times more than competing systems (meaning Senderscore as you can imagine.)
Swift Digital maintains a “good” reputation across all mail servers in our network..
Good = Little or no threat activity has been observed from your IP address or domain. Your email or Web traffic is not
likely to be filtered or blocked*
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Summary
No matter how well crafted your campaign, how stunning your design or how compelling your call to action, you will
reduce your success rate if you are unable to achieve maximum deliverability.
And as you can see, there are a large number of factors that determine whether or not your email campaign gets
delivered. So for successful campaigns deliverability is something of vital importance.
If your organisation has the dedicated resources to manage these complex factors then you have a major element
under control leaving you to concentrate on the rest of the campaign elements. However if your current resources are
limited in their ability to address these issues then it is worth considering outsourcing this vital element of you
marketing activities.
Swift Digital are email marketing experts with over ten years experience in the Australasian market.
Our aim is to help you get the best possible results from your email marketing activities.
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