Email Marketing News and Tips

Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned email marketing professional, your company’s Internet Reputation is important to your business.  Your Internet reputation is built primarily by how you market on the Internet. What exactly is an ‘Internet Reputation‘?  Let’s explore.

Email Marketing and Your Business

Whether you use a third party email marketing company or you do-it-yourself by setting up your own email server, your reputation begins with the first email marketing campaign you send.  How is this tracked?  When you send emails, these emails must traverse through various hardware devices (routers, gateways, firewalls, spam filtering products, etc).  Each time an email traverses through one of these gateways, statistics are captured and stored. Specifically, statistics about the domains advertised, the IP address where the email originated and various other information possibly including the subject line and body information.  After a time, you may receive complaints about the campaigns.  These complaints may then be attributed to your domains and IPs thus reducing your reputation score.  Note that bounced emails and complaint emails may also be attributed to your reputation.

But, I use a third party email service provider?

Whether you do it yourself or you use a third party company to send your campaigns, the ultimate end result is the same… to advertise for your products or services.  And, since you probably have an Internet presence, you likely have a web site where your products and services live.  When you send emails describing your products and services, these are usually handled by links to these products and services on your web site. To sell your products or services properly, these links must lead back to your site.  Your reputation is, then, determined by how high quality your list is when combined with the destination links.  In other words, the quality (permission level quality) of your list is directly related to your Internet reputation score.  For example, using harvested lists is likely to lower your score (and reputation) dramatically.  Using confirmed opt-in lists is likely to keep your score high.

Putting this in perspective

Routers and gateways track your emails: How many you send, how often, the IPs used and the links back to your web sites.  All of this information, and more, is tied together into a bundle.  This bundle becomes your Internet reputation.  So, the quality of your emails determines your reputation level.  When you add something new to the mix that leads back to your site(s), this new thing also gets added to the reputation bundle.  So, the bundle is a continually growing and changing entity based on your past and present mailing practices.

The reputation is kind of like a credit score.  This number is not directly used by spam filtering softwares, but can be referenced when necessary.  Some more sophisticated spam filtering systems may be using these scores or a modified version based on various information available on the Internet.

How low is too low?

Since this reputation number may or may not be used specifically to block your mails, the reputation is used more like a Better Business Bureau kind of number.  That is, a grade.  So, if your number is too low, that’s likely to affect people when they go searching for your products and services.  Unfortunately, however, the number is not always specifically published.  What is published is the grade itself (poor, neutral, good).  So, a poor reputation may lead potential clients to complaint pages or other negative information that may dissuade the prospect from purchasing products from you.  So, on the one side you have mail servers that can use this data to block your emails.  On the other side, you have researching users who could negatively perceive your company based on the way you choose to do business.

So, just like the being a member in good standing of the BBB and your local Chamber of Commerce, you should strive to keep your Internet reputation high as well.  So, that means following the rules, doing the proper things with email and following the local laws.

Where do I look?

Your overall Internet Reputation isn’t really in a single place.  However, the best way to determine your reputation of your email marketing campaigns, the associated domains and associated IP addresses is by looking at Senderbase.  This site is probably the top site that manages this type of reputation.  Senderbase is operated by Cisco and manages statistics about email volumes related to IP addresses combined with web site information.  So, if you want to get an idea of your company’s Internet reputation, Senderbase.org is the first place to start.

Another site that also calculates a reputation score is Return Path.  Return Path’s score may be calculated differently from Cisco’s, but may also take into account Cisco’s score in their calculation.  Because there are multiple companies calculating Internet reputations, you will have to manage each of these reputations individually with each of these companies.

Barracuda is another appliance that also has its own internal scoring system.  In this case, however, Barracuda lumps their score into Poor or Good.

How does this reputation affect my company?

The bottom line is that the Internet reputation affects your clients and prospects by how your web site is perceived.  For example, for sites that send boatloads of spam, the likelihood that a web site advertised in the email will remain on the Internet is low.  The reputation will also drop dramatically.  On the other side, a site that follows all the rules and has a Good reputation will have relatively few issues.

How does the reputation affect my ROI?

Here’s the crux of the matter.   Your ROI may or may not be directly affected by having a good reputation. What a good Internet reputation does for you, however, is keep the trust and respect level of your company high. Trust and respect does have some correlation to return business and keeping your customers happy. So, a high reputation may help you retain customers and won’t hurt you in acquiring new customers.  That said, having a good Internet reputation alone will not bring in the customers through the door.  To do that, you still need compelling products and services.  Compelling products and services combined with a good solid Internet reputation will bring customers to your sites.

What does a poor reputation do?

Making the mistake of using non-permission based lists can damage your reputation very rapidly (in less than a month).  By hitting major spamtraps, your company resources could end up on blacklists, your domains could be blacklisted, your IPs blacklisted, and your ISP(s) may even cut your internet services off.   To recover from this mistake, it could take your company a very long time (6-12 months or longer) to recover. It could only take one poor list to do such extensive reputation damage.  Yes, Senderbase, Return Path and Barracuda will see these changes rapidly and update their reputation systems accordingly.

After such a mistake, you might even be forced to rename your company, buy a new domain and join a new ISP.  It can get to be that bad with some mistakes.   Basically, your company might need to start over to clean up the mess.

Doing business on the Internet is basically on the honor system.  That means, everyone trusts everyone else to do the right thing.  That you will follow the rules and make sure that your marketing is done correctly is expected.  But, if you choose to not follow the rules, the reputation consequences are severe and can cause dramatic issues with your company and its continued connectivity.

Following the Rules

Having a business on the Internet today is a must.  So, it is in your company’s best interest to follow both the written and unwritten rules.  It may be hard to find these rules, but a good solid email service provider like Boomerang can get you on the right path.  Doing all of the right things can be difficult, but the first place to start is right with your lists.  So, in that goal, you should make sure that everyone on your list is people who actually want to be there and stated that they want to be there.  If you choose to take the quick route of buying a list from a third party, you have no idea the quality or reputation damage that using that list could do to your company, your products or services and even to your email service provider.

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