Deliverability Tips for Marketers

1. Deliverability Tips for Marketers

2. Introductions Tom VanOstrand Senior Director of Deliverability deliverability@realmagnet.com Tom joined Real Magnet in December of 2013. He has spent over 15 years in the software development industry, including three years at iContact where he built and managed their Deliverability Engineering team. He came to Real Magnet after helping an online marketing firm build its own internal email marketing infrastructure.

3. Today's Email Environment - How is it different from just a few years ago?

4. Today’s Email Environment • Stopping Spam Bots and large spammers is no longer a major priority for the ISPs • Spam filtering and message placement are now the focus • The goal - give recipients what they want, and only what they want (everything else is blocked or goes to Spam)

5. Today’s Email Environment • Spam filter technology is highly advanced, especially at the major ISPs (Gmail/Yahoo) • They’re fingerprinting your messages (they know who you are, what you're sending, and who you're sending to)

6. Today’s Email Environment • Message placement is determined mainly by sender reputation, especially for B2C • Sender reputation is based mainly on the overall engagement of prior sends • Reputation is being pinned to your 'From' domain, not your IP(s) Return Path: 83% of email delivery failures are caused by sender reputation problems

7. Today’s Email Environment Some Spam filters are so sophisticated, they're now able to: • Place a reputation on message content based on engagement with that content across multiple senders • Analyze the entire body of recipients you're sending to looking for things like: • How many of them have a throw-away account or dead account • How many of them are receiving a large number of similar promotional messages • Track each recipient’s message preferences based on historical engagement

8. Today’s Email Environment IP reputation and whitelisting don't mean much anymore • Once an ISP has an established reputation for you as a sender, they won't pay much (if any) attention to your IP reputation • IPs are no longer truly "whitelisted", even by AOL/Yahoo who still maintain an online whitelist form • If we obtain a "preferred" status for your IP, it'll be removed/downgraded as soon as the IP starts sending spam

9. Today’s Email Environment • Message content is still important, especially at B2B domains, but much less important than sender reputation Chart by: Return Path

10. Today’s Email Environment • Frequent email blasts are becoming less and less effective due to their low overall engagement rates NOTE: This is not actual client data

11. So…how does all this affect you and your email campaigns?

12. Engagement is Key • Keep your lists clean • Regularly remove long-term non-engaged recipients • Regularly remove addresses that bounce consistently, esp. UNF (we can automate that for you) • Maintain consistent sending volume and frequency • If you change sending frequency (either way), pay close attention to your recipients' reaction • Keep your content in line with your recipients' expectations

13. Engagement is Key • Send to permission-based (opted-in) recipients • Avoid sending to purchased lists • If you do, have them cleaned by a list cleaning service first • If possible, break up the list and send over several days • Especially avoid sending to OLD lists, e.g. one you haven’t sent to for over six months • They're likely to contain spam traps and undeliverable addresses • They can damage your sending reputation, or worse, cause your IPs to be blocked/blacklisted • Again, if you must do this, have the list cleaned first

14. Engagement is Key Make your messages easily recognizable • Consistent color schemes and branding (e.g. logo placement/size) • Descriptive "Friendly From" label “Sally’s Sweets”<email@sallyssweets.com> • Consistent, recognizable 'From' address for each message/campaign/content type • Consistent content

15. Engagement is Key • Many senders are moving toward targeted messaging using marketing automation (e.g. recipient scoring)

16. What Else Should You Be Doing? Authenticate your messages with your company domain • Allows recipient email servers to clearly identify your messages • DKIM authentication is done with your domain (email reputation is often associated with the DKIM domain) • Puts your domain in the Return Path address (especially important for B2B sending) • Consider DMARC authentication as well, esp. if you’re concerned about phishing attempts

17. What Else Should You Be Doing? • Monitor your 'From' address domain for blacklistings – email@mydomain.com-http://mxtoolbox.com/supertool.aspx • Monitor any domains used in the content of your messages as well • If your domain is listed, look for a delisting form on the listing agency’s website (most have one) • Not all blacklistings are the same, so here are the major ones to look for: • Spamhaus DBL, URIBL, SURBL, CBL • If you are listed by any of these, fill out the delist form immediately and then contact us

18. What Should You NOT Be Doing? Anything that spammers frequently do: • Large spikes in volume • Using different 'From' domains for the same campaign/content • Sending multiple messages per day to the same recipients (esp. if they're promotional) • Sending to a large percentage of recipients at the same domain, at the same time (e.g. 30% of the employees at companyXYZ.com) • Using message content that's "spamlike": • Javascript • Excessive use of capital letters, symbols, or punctuation marks (Huge Savings!!!, CLICK HERE!!) • Shortened URLs in the message body • Broken HTML (missing tags, empty tags, content below the closing HTML tag)