Email Marketing News and Tips

Continued from Part II.  Begin at Part I.

What can you do to ensure your emails make it through the filters?

The easiest ways to ensure your emails get through the filters are as follows:

1. Make sure the recipient has opted-in to receive your emails
2. Request the recipient to add your From address to their address book (might not work in all cases)
3. Send out verifications about every 6 months to ensure the recipient still wishes to remain opted-in
4. If you change the From address, re-verify the recipient and request them to add this new address to their address book
5. Have the recipient, if a corporate or government user, contact their IT department and explain they want to receive emails from your company.
6. If you find that a company is using Postini (or a similar filtering service), work with your Email Service Provider (such as Boomerang) to ensure your email sending IP address is allowed to deliver emails.

Doing the above ensures that the recipient really wants to see your content and will make it through the filters. Adding the address to the address book, in many cases, tells the mail server they want to see the email. In some cases, however, the email client does not communicate this address book with the mail server. So, an address book addition may not help in all corporate cases. Adding to an address book helps for sites like Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and similar web based mail clients where the address book is integrated with the server.

What about false positives and how does it affect my campaign?

False positives occur when a filter mistakenly traps legitimate email and doesn’t deliver it to the inbox. This happens when a legitimate email triggers a filter and lands up in the quarantine, in the spam folder or, in some cases, deleted. This issue can affect your email campaign more when the content uses certain words or phrases, or by including certain content elements in your HTML email design. Again, another blog entry will go in depth to describe the internals of filter systems that are available today.

As far as percentages caught as false positives, that’s really dependent on the type of filter, how the filters are built, how well the filters are initially trained, how often they are maintained, how often the administrator retrains the filters and where the filters exist. Some spam technologies claim false positive percentages to 0%. Some false positives can be as high as 10-12% (or higher). The goal of this blog article is to describe where the filters sit and specific types of filters that get implemented. The design internals of the filters is planned as a future blog post.

How dedicated IP addresses help.

If you continue to see lower delivery numbers than you expect, it could be because you are not using a dedicated IP address. Dedicated IP addresses allow you, as an email marketer, to limit email traffic to only one (or a few) IP address(es) dedicated to your email traffic alone. Once a dedicated IP address is set up for you, you can have this IP address whitelisted by many different organizations to improve your inbox deliveries to those organizations. Because a dedicated IP address allows you to whitelist, having a whitelist affects Mail Gateway level filters (which are usually the most problematic type of filters).

Additionally, dedicated IP addresses can be named appropriately in DNS and specifically set up for additional features like Yahoo Domain Keys and SPF which also improve deliverability.

Conclusion

Email filters are here to stay and likely to filter more and more as time progresses. This is a critical time to be thinking about how to get your emails to your recipients through these filters. Recipients will need to stay on top of their own mail administration team to ensure even valid emails make it through. Thus, this is really a two sided issue. While you as an email marketer should understand and do the recommended items above, you will also need to help educate and guide your recipients to do the things they need to do to ensure you can continue to contact them.