You Need to Give a Damn About Your Bad E-mail Reputation

Nearly 20% of the e-mails that marketers send today are blocked by mail providers due to issues with the sender’s reputation. So we at ExactTarget asked leading experts at Yahoo, Earthlink, McAfee, ReturnPath, and other e-mail organizations what advice they would give to executives to improve their sending reputation and deliverability. Following the advice of these experts will not only improve your ability to hit the inbox, but it could also revolutionize how your brand is perceived in the marketplace.
 
Here’s a quick look at some of what our experts had to say:

* Subscribers are in control of your reputation. Nearly every Internet service provider out there today allows individual e-mail recipients to report messages as spam. With large ISPs receiving billions of unwanted e-mails a day, spam complaints from their users are one of the key inputs when making the decision to put messages in the inbox or the spam folder.
 
“The first thing you must understand is that your e-mail recipients have the power,” Geralmy Swint, senior network abuse engineer at ISP Earthlink, noted. “Understanding this will empower you to make more recipient-friendly decisions while being incredibly effective in your communication. It’s also important to know that ISPs do listen to their customers regarding spam complaints—customers act as the eyes and ears of the ISPs, and we trust them to be that for us. Their expectation is that the click of a button will keep them from receiving unwanted mail.”

A single spam report doesn’t mean you’re a spammer, but it’s important to remember that “better” senders are reported less often for spam. If your mail gets more spam reports than the next guy’s, you might be doing something wrong.

* Get permission. Since the subscriber is in control of your reputation, you should honor his wishes first and foremost. Our research shows that consumers have a very low tolerance for unsolicited e-mail and for e-mail they asked for but no longer want. A clear opt-in is a critical first step to ensuring that consumers accept your mail. Second, and just as important, is honoring their wishes for content and frequency. If you’re not sending compelling content or if you’re sending too frequently, you can quickly find yourself on the subscriber’s naughty list.
 
According to Sam Masiello, director of messaging security research at security technology firm McAfee, “Over 55% of the spam submissions received by customers of the McAfee Email Protection Service are e-mails that the end user has opted in to receive. This means that over half of the e-mails that are reported as spam contain content that the user asked for but decided for some reason they no longer wanted. These spam complaints have a huge effect on your reputation as a marketer and are also a factor in whether or not your future e-mail deliverability is affected.”

* The measures you take to increase return on investment via e-mail will also improve your reputation. This is beautiful in its simplicity. ISPs have begun to monitor e-mail opens and clicks to see which messages its users find compelling and which they don’t. In addition to the explicit “we don’t like this” message that subscribers send the ISP and the sender by clicking the spam button, they can also “vote” by ignoring messages that marketers send. So if you continue to send to subscribers who aren’t engaged in your program, it will hurt your reputation and could render future e-mails to the spam folder.
 
Although marketers should already be optimizing their programs based on consumer actions and engagement, the stats reveal that many are not. In analyzing the subscriber list of a retailer that was suffering from below-average response rates, we found nearly 40% of its e-mail subscribers were unengaged, meaning they had not opened or clicked on a message in the previous 90 days. Another 30%-45% had taken just a few actions within the previous 90 days. Continually mailing these nonresponsive segments negatively affected this sender’s reputation at a major ISP, causing the ISP to send most of its messages to the spam folder. One the retailer removed the unengaged segment of names from future mailings, its overall sender reputation rose, which eventually led to the mail being directed to the inbox once again.
 
When it comes to getting e-mail into the inbox, marketers may unknowingly be their own worst enemy. It isn’t a game of you vs. the ISP. It is really you vs. you. So contemplate the golden rule of e-mail before your next send: Send e-mail to others only as you would e-mail yourself.
 
Your ROI will thank you.
 
Chip House is the vice president of industry and relationship marketing at e-mail marketing services provider ExactTarget.