The Art of Deliverability

So you want to know about deliverability...

Well, you have come to the right place.

Delivery of emails is all about getting your message into the subscribers’ inboxes. There are many things which will try to stop you and that’s the challenge of deliverability. In an attempt to keep things from getting too technical, the main causes of deliverability issues are;

• The email design/content (“this is spam”).
• Your contact lists and data.
• Email Authentication.
• The sender reputation.
• A clever SMTP MTA (program that does the sending).

CommuniGator obviously have an excellent reputation, we authenticate all emails and we have the biggest brained SMTP program - taking these excellent words used in a music contract - “throughout the universe in perpetuity”. But seriously, CommuniGator are already setup to give your emails the best chance to get delivered. This is what we do for you...

• Full email authentication – All emails from CommuniGator are fully authenticated with the use of DKIM, SenderID, Domain Keys SPF, rDNS.
• Sending IP Addresses – CommuniGator uses a large number of IP addresses which are broken up into different groups. These groups are a dynamically changing entity in themselves, so the group you are on is not the same as the one perhaps last week.
• ISP feedback loops – We have feedback loops setup with the major ISPs out there so anyone clicking “this is spam” or similar, are fed back to us and reported in the system as a complaint. We have feedback loops setup with AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, RoadRunner, Comcast, USA.net, BlueTie, Rackspace, Cox.net and Abuse.net.
• Clever SMTP MTA – We use an SMTP which can do a heck of a lot of clever stuff. Things like throttling the email delivery to certain domains to keep under their thresholds and cycling the IP addresses so each one gets a piece of the action, which more importantly means the emails are balanced. It will detect temporary rejection messages which we call “backoff”, from ISPs and then alter its email delivery throttling. Equally, it will detect when the “backoff” has been lifted so normal sending can resume.
• Cool functionality to help – We also give you some sweet tools to assist you. Inbox Checker, to see how the email looks before you send it, browser results so you know what browsers to tailor your email designs for.

And more.

Hopefully as you can see we are helping you out here. The rest is very much in your control.

9 times out of 10 the thing that stops emails getting delivered is design, and the contacts you are sending it to. You can design an email with the best intentions in the world, but to the mean anti-spam filter in the clients network, it might be considered so infested with spam, that it’s immediately destroyed. It’s never an exact science to what exactly in your email is the cause, and what you can change to make it work. Emails get scanned for millions of things; the structure of the HTML, the subject, the words and sentences used and the amount of images to name but a few. What fixes one email may not necessarily guarantee the fixing of another.

You also need to keep your contact lists clean. ISPs such as Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, BT etc, all check how many good emails you have against the bad ones. So, when your campaign is sending away, there are thresholds you never know about which can impact deliverability. If your contact lists are not “clean” then this invisible line will be crossed, and suddenly the likelihood of inbox against junk delivery goes down. The worst case is you have email addresses in your lists which are “spam traps”. These are email addresses created by the major ISPs as well as 3rd party companies. These traps have never been subscribed to anything. So, if an email gets delivered to one, it tells that company there is a spammer out there.

As long as you obey these simple rules, you will give the email the best chance to be delivered successfully...

• Don’t be a spammer.
• Design a good email – See my next blog for this, it is a large topic in itself.
• Remind recipients to add the email to their address / contacts list - When you send emails out to new recipients ask users to add your email address to their address book or contact/safe sender list to ensure they receive their newsletter/offer.  You may want to remind users to do this every so often in your emails.
• Send email to those that want it – It’s obvious that buying in email lists is the quickest way to ensure that your email will be delivered to the bulk mail folder or rejected outright. Instead, use confirmed, opt-in email lists.

To do this, after you receive a subscription request, send a confirmation email to that address which requires some affirmative action before that email address is added to the mailing list. As only the true owner of that email address can respond, you will know that the true owner has truly intended to subscribe and that the address is valid. Without this process, you cannot be sure that the recipient requested your mail. Unintended recipients will likely tell us your message is Spam. If you have not read ‘The Story of Nadine’ (http://www.honet.com/Nadine/), you should do so.

• Honour the scope of the list's intent - If customers believe they are signing up for a specific list on a specific topic, and they are subscribed to other lists or receive unrelated, off-topic messages in the process, they will likely mark such messages as Spam.
• Honour the frequency of the list's intent - If customers believe they are signing up for a list that will message them once a week, and they receive messages daily, they will likely mark messages as Spam.
• Don't hide your identity - Misleading "From" names and subject lines are not likely to help you win your customer's hearts.
• Include valid unsubscribe links and periodically refresh your list - Unfortunately, Spammers have taught users that unsubscribing is a bad idea. By periodically sending a confirmation email, you can be sure that the people receiving your email want to receive it. It is also worth having an unsubscribe link at the top and the bottom of the email.
• Honour unsubscribe requests as fast as you honour subscribe requests – Obviously if you use the unsubscribe facility in GatorMail then it happens instantly. When a user unsubscribes, they don't want to receive that mail anymore. Promptly removing them from the list should help to prevent users marking messages received after unsubscribing as Spam.
• Segregate your lists to different IP addresses - If you maintain several lists (or clients, especially for an ASP), you may want to segregate your lists to ensure that users are marking each list on its own merits. If a user sees both Spam and legitimate mail from the same IP, their notifications will be hazy and will likely result in the Spam overriding the legitimate mail.
• And guess what, don’t be a spammer. If you are a spammer and you are using GatorMail, you will be hearing from me!!!