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Successful delivery is the driving force behind an effective email marketing campaign. Without it, the marketer wastes time, money and resources and does not achieve the end goal. A variety of factors exist that can prevent successful delivery such as content that triggers spam filters, blacklisting and mail server configuration. The recipient's perception can also influence delivery?if they do not trust the source or recognize the message as relevant they may delete it before it is even read.
How can marketers move past these potential barriers to increase their delivery rates? There are many easy-to-implement tips that can improve deliverability. Consulting with an email service provider (ESP), more knowledgeable of the technical aspects of deliverability, helps marketers to develop tactics specifically designed for the organization's campaign scope and budget.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of terms (or jargon) related to e-mail deliverability, increase general knowledge of the concept, discuss delivery barriers and provide tactics to overcome these issues.
WHY IS DELIVERY SO IMPORTANT?
Successful delivery of messages is not only a key metric for evaluating an email marketing campaign; it has much further reaching implications for both the marketer and the email marketing industry as a whole. The consequences of delivery issues unfold in a chain reaction.
The individual organization risks losing money and wasting valuable staff time to develop messages that ultimately fail because they are not delivered or read. The campaign's response rate is lower because messages could not be delivered. The recipient does not respond to the message's call to action because it was not delivered. Recipients that have not received the message are not able to build a relationship with the organization. The organization loses loyalty from its stakeholders and may lose the stakeholders all together. For the industry, the risks may be even greater. Without successful delivery, the medium loses its value and customers become skeptical of all email marketing messages.
GLOSSARY OF COMMON TERMS RELATED TO E-MAIL DELIVERY
Understanding the jargon of email marketing and specifically the concept of deliverability is an essential first step to handling any issues that arise. A summary of related terms is below.
- Affirmative consent: An active request by a reader or subscriber to receive advertising or promotional information, newsletters, etc. Generally affirmative consent does not included the following?failing to uncheck a pre-checked box on a Web form, entering a business relationship with an organization without being asked for separate permission to be sent specific types of email, opt-out.
- Authentication: An automated process that verifies an email sender's identity.
- Bayesian filter: An anti-spam program that evaluates header and content of incoming email messages to determine the probability that it is spam. Bayesian filters assign point values to items that appear frequently in spam, such as the words "money-back guarantee" or "free." A message that accumulated too many points is either rejected as probable spam or delivered to a junkmail folder. (Also known as a content-based filter.)
- Blacklists: Lists of IP addresses that are being used by or belong to organizations or individuals that have been identified as sending spam. Blacklists are often used by organizations and Internet Service Providers as part of their filtering process to block all incoming mail form a particular IP address (or block of addresses).
- Block: An action by an Internet Service Provider to prevent email messages from being forwarded to the end recipient.
- Bounces: Email messages that fail to reach their intended destination. "Hard" bounces are caused by invalid email addresses, whereas "soft" bounces are due to temporary conditions, such as overloaded inboxes.
- Bulk folder (also junk folder): Where many email clients send messages that appear to be from spammers or contain spam or are from any sender who's not in the recipient's address book or contact list. Some clients allow the recipient to override the system's settings and direct that mail from a suspect sender be sent directly to the inbox. E.g., Yahoo Mail gives recipients a button marked "Not Spam" on every message in the bulk folder.
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