StrongMail Webinar Series
Q & A: Mastering the Email Deliverability Lifecycle
April 2009
Q: If your company is new to email marketing but your ESP has been around a long time, do you have a better chance of your email getting through? A: Yes, if you’re brand new to email marketing, an established email service provider can help you get your email delivered more quickly by putting you on a shared block of IP Addresses that have been sending email for a while and have established a positive reputation. However, some are wary of doing this, because if the newcomer has deliverability problems, it could decrease the sending reputation of that entire block. The most fail-safe way to ensure a positive sender reputation is to build it using your own dedicated IP Address(es) and not share them with other senders. For more information, download this free whitepaper: Mastering Your Email Reputation: Seven Strategies for Improving Deliverability. |
Q: We are a BtoB media company and nearly all of our subscribers utilize a corporate email server such as MS Exchange or Lotus Notes. What are best practices to get to those inboxes? A: The best practices are largely the same as B2C in terms of authentication, bounce management, monitoring and optimization. Most inbox monitoring tools now offer some sort of B2B placement monitoring to determine where your email is likely to be placed in various corporate email clients. Because every email client is different and can be customized to suit the individual’s preferences, there is no silver bullet; however, by optimizing your campaigns to comply with general email marketing best practices, you will help ensure high deliverability. |
Q: What is CPM? A: CPM stands for “Cost per 1,000.” It is a pricing model that most email service providers (ESPs) use for their email offerings. The email marketer will pay that amount per thousand emails sent. For example, if an email marketer with a list of 200,000 email addresses uses an ESP that charges $5 CPM, they would pay $1,000 to send an email campaign to their entire list. StrongMail offers its products via a perpetual license model, which means the email marketer pays one up-front cost and then can send as much email as he/she wants for the rest of the life of that product. |
Q: How do you go about signing up for FBLs and Whitelists? A: Each ISP that offers a FBL or Whitelist has their own procedures. I recommend either speaking with your email service provider or reviewing the postmaster site for each ISP. |
Q: How many times should an email address fail in order to consider it as ''bounced email''? A: If you receive what a permanent bounce error code (unknown user, invalid account, etc.), it should only bounce one time and then be removed from any future mailing list. If it bounces for other reasons such as mailbox full, then I suggest three consecutive bounces before removing that person from future mailings. |
Q: Is StrongMail partnered with Return Path in terms of monitoring services? (Campaign Preview; Mailbox Monitor, etc.) A: StrongMail partners with Return Path to provide our suite of StrongDelivery Tools, including Mailbox Monitor, Campaign Preview, Reputation Monitor, and Blacklist Alerting features; however, we have our own in-house team of deliverability experts that provide services including reputation building, ISP remediation and best practices consulting. |
Q: Yahoo's web client shrinks our emails. I believe this is something to do with coding. Would you advise what we should use to make sure emails are displayed correctly on Yahoo? A: Send a sample of your email to a professional email coder and have them rewrite the code. You can either do this through an agency or your current email marketing solutions provider. The professional coder can rebuild the email using best practices for rendering across all email clients. Once you have the initial template recoded, you can drop in the content for future emails and ensure that they all render properly using a tool like Campaign Preview. |
Q: When you say 'complaints,' where do these complaints go to? If the user unsubscribes, does that mean the user complained about us? A: Unsubscribes and complaints are very different things, and they should be processed separately. Your unsubscribes should be automatically processed through your email marketing technology, and complaints should be logged using either your bounce management tools or feedback loops from the major ISPs. In both cases, you should remove the email addresses from your list immediately. |
| Q: Is there a limit on the number of emails we can send out per minute or per hour? A: Yes, each ISP and corporate domain has its own “throttling limits," which means the maximum rate at which it will accept email from a given sender. These rates not only vary by entity, but change periodically, meaning that the throttling rate for Yahoo in June may not be the same as the throttling rate in July. This is why it’s important for you to use a commercial system that can identify these rates and build them into your email delivery platform, so you’re always sending at optimal speeds. For more information, check out StrongMail’s Live Updates feature. |
Q: We are a B2B marketing department; how would we determine the most popular ISP to send to -- since many are company domains -- rather than Yahoo! or Gmail. Is this something our ESP should provide? A: Yes, your email marketing platform provider should be able to provide you with this information, regardless of whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer. |
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Q: What kind of bounce/failure rate is considered "acceptable"? A: It really depends on the mailer, but you should aim for less than 5%. |
Q: Most of the time, I have a huge email list in Excel. How would I know what is the highest web client on the list? Is there any Excel formula or any other tools that I can use which would tell me the popularity of web client in my list? A: The easiest way to generate this information is to send a campaign through your email marketing solution and view the results in that application. Alternatively, you can simply do a sort function in Excel, but I do not know of any tools that are available to help with this. |
Q: Is this an automatic tool that tells you the email was delivered to the inbox? A: Yes, Mailbox Monitor is a “seed list” tool that will tell you whether your email was likely delivered to the inbox, the junk box, or not delivered at all across all the major receiving ISPs and corporate spam filters. |
Q: Are The Motley Fool’s email addresses primarily corporate or personal (ISP)? A: We are B-to-C marketers, so our top email domains match with the top web-based clients (Yahoo, MSN/Hotmail, AOL, Gmail, etc). However, our customer base does skew older/male/professional, so we have a significant number of corporate addresses on file as well. |
Q: What are the accreditation services to help display images used by The Motley Fool? A: There are two primary accreditation services: Goodmail’s Certified Email program and Return Path’s Sender Score Certified (formerly called Bonded Sender). Both programs require that you pass an accreditation test to verify that you’re a reputable sender, after which point you can pay them to guarantee delivery to the inbox. If your list is comprised primarily of AOL and Yahoo users, you should seriously consider Goodmail. However, if your list is comprised primarily of Hotmail users, you should consider Sender Score Certified. |
Q: Greg, does your 98% deliverability include your hard and soft bounces? In other words, are the 2% undeliverable emails hard and soft bounces and opt outs? A: The 2% includes failures, but not opt-outs. We do track opt-outs and complaints, by campaign, but do not factor that into the delivery rate (since they were in fact delivered). |
Q: What's the ideal email sending frequency; how much is too much? Are there any benchmarking tools to determine what would be the ideal frequency in a given setup? A: The optimal sending frequency for a given list is going to vary by sender; however, a good place to start is by dividing your list into four segments and testing different frequencies to each of those segments. Here’s a great blog post on this topic by Peter Norton, StrongMail’s Director of Strategic Services, that includes a detailed example of how to get started: “Email Frequency: How Much is Too Much?” |
Q: For Outlook, is it considered an "open" if the email is in the preview pane, yet images are not turned on or is not clicked? A: No, if the images aren’t turned on, then it does not count as an open. This is why many in the industry are calling for the term to be renamed “render rate” instead of “open rate," because the latter is misleading. Your true number of opens will always be higher than the number that’s reported through your email marketing system, as many people read their emails in the preview window with images disabled. |
Q: What are preview rendering tools? A: Campaign Preview is a great example of a preview rendering tool. It enables you to preview how your email will appear across all the major email clients, before you actually send it. This enables you to determine key design and performance attributes; for example, whether or not your call to action appears above the fold in a preview pane. You can also test your emails for compliance with spam filters and determine if any of your content is likely to trigger spam filters. |
Q: What about animated GIFs in emails? A: Animated GIFs are a great tactic to use in emails, given that they’re accepted by every email client except for Microsoft Outlook 2007. (MS Outlook 2007 will only show the first frame of an animated GIF.) If your list is primarily B2B, be sure to build your animated GIFs so that the first frame conveys enough information to stand on its own. Animated GIFs are also a great way to present video in email without actually streaming video into the client itself. Check out this blog post for details, “How to Leverage Video in Your Email Marketing Campaigns." |
Q: What exactly is a spam trap? A: A Spam Trap is an email account that has not been active for some period of time—it could be anywhere between 12 and 36 months. The ISP will then put the email back into rotation and if a mailer sends it, the ISP views that as not keeping a clean list. |
Q: Syntactically, what are some examples of "spam trap" email addresses? A: Spam traps can include an email address with your company name in it, but more often, they’re simply old dormant email addresses of ISP users that have abandoned their accounts. The ISP knows that this user is no longer opting-in to receive email, so they assume that any marketers who are sending to that account are spammers. This is why it’s critical to continually clean your list and remove bounces that are labeled as “inactive account” or “invalid email address” from an ISP. |
Q: I know that StrongMail uses the Strong DeliveryTools via Return Path but what does Motley Fool use? A: StrongMail offers our StrongDelivery Tools product, and as a StrongMail customer, The Motley Fool uses that system. The screenshots used in The Motley Fool presentation were of StrongDelivery Tools. |
Q: What is Lashback, and how we do get off their list? A: Founded as a consumer product driven anti-spam company, LashBack evolved into C2B data services providing compliance information and unsubscribe reputation scores for a range of email marketing clients and email reputation providers. If you’re “on their list," then you probably had an issue with honoring your unsubscribes in compliance with CAN-SPAM, or were blacklisted due to poor mailing practices. You should contact them directly and ask them what it will take for you to resolve the reputation issue. Here is a link to their full contact information. |
Q: Is it okay to use words such as FREE or 20% in your emails, since these words might negatively affect deliverability? A: Yes! 80% of deliverability problems today are based on the sender’s reputation, rather than the content of the email. While content is still important, it doesn’t carry nearly the amount of weight that it used to. The key is to test your emails before you send them out, using a testing tool such as Campaign Preview. If it looks like those words are going to cause you issues, then you can change them prior to deploying your mailing. However in most cases, using them once or twice in an email isn’t an issue any more. |
Q: For Greg: What does "Gracefully Degrade" mean, please rephrase? A: Our User Experience Designers use the term “gracefully degrade” to connote that an email should render well and be usable across all major email clients. Since there are no design standards across email clients, it’s important that an email’s design “gracefully degrades” from its ideal/original design to a still-usable and still-readable format in email clients that don’t support certain design elements (e.g., inline CSS, background images, etc.). |
Q: What is the most important address match? If the Return-Path matches the domain, can the "From" address vary? How about if the root domain is identical, but the subdomain is different? A: There are 2 different types of From addresses: there is the envelop From and the friendly From. The ISPs look at both. |
Q: Are there Feedback Loops for international ISP's, and how do we get on them? A: Currently there are very few FBLs available for international ISPs. The best way to find out is to check their postmaster sites. |
Q: What are some of the SPAM monitoring best practices? A: Continually monitor and process your bounces and complaints from ISPs. It’s also important to scrub your list periodically to remove potential spam-traps and monitor your reputation using a tool like Reputation Monitor. Finally, you should set up alerts to notify you any time that you’re added to a blacklist so that you can quickly take action to resolve the problem. |
Q: What kind of role does "open rate" play in the overall reputation at each of the ISP's in general? Does a higher open rate get you an overall better technical reputation with them? A: Your open rate is not related to your sender reputation in any way. The primary factors that affect your open rate are: 1) Your spam complaint rate at that ISP, 2) The number of bad email addresses that you continue to send to vs. taking them off of your list (bounce management), and 3) The frequency of email that you send. You need to send enough to be recognized as a trusted and legitimate sender, but not so much that you generate a high complaint rate. You’ll need to test to determine the right frequency for you. For more information on building and maintaining a positive sender reputation, download this free whitepaper: Mastering Your Email Reputation: Seven Strategies for Improving Deliverability. |
Q: What is the real difference between SPF and Sender ID? A: In the most basic sense, SenderID is SPF v2. There are a couple of other checks, but as long as you are publishing your SPF records you should be fine since most ISPs will default back to SPF if they do not see a SenderID record. |
Q: Is there a free email rendering tool you would recommend? Our ESP doesn't provide this. A: I am not aware of free one at this time. Even though your ESP does not offer this, you can go directly to Return Path or Pivitol Veracity and purchase their products. |
Q: Would there be different contact strategies for B-oB companies, where most individual contacts use their home email as their contact account? A. If most of your B2B contacts use their home address, then your contact strategy should take that into account. Try to determine when your recipients will be reading that account and test contacting them at that time. It might work better to contact them in the evening or on weekends. One email marketer found great success reaching CEOs on the weekend, because that’s when they found time to catch up on their personal email. You won’t know what’s right for your business until you test, but this might give you some interesting angles to try. |
Q: Is it possible to track what percentage of our customers are getting/opening our emails on blackberries? A: According to MarketingSherpa, up to 64% of key decision makers could be viewing your email on a smart phone or mobile device such as a Blackberry of iPhone. Unfortunately, there isn't a good way to track this type of viewership. One option would be to include a unique link at the top of the email that asks mobile users to click on it; however, there is no guarantee that they will. |
Q: What is the best way to educate users to unsubscribe rather than press the spam button? A: This is one of the biggest challenges facing the email marketing industry today. Unfortunately, consumers have made it apparent in several studies that they don’t see a difference between the two, and even if they did, they wouldn’t care about harming a company’s reputation. If you’re having an issue with uncommonly high complaints, try moving the Unsubscribe button above the fold and making it a prominent visual button that’s hard to miss. By making it as easy as possible for the consumer to press the right button, they will most likely do what you want them to do versus hit the Spam button. |
Q: Based on that deliverability, what are typical open rates? A: Open rates don’t have a direct correlation with deliverability. Many factors will impact your open rate, including the composition of your list, the percentage of active recipients on your list, and probably most importantly – your subject line. |
Q: Can you explain canonicalization? A: According to Wikipedia, canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a "standard" canonical representation. This can also take the form of dots where file names should be in a directory, such as ../../../email_image.gif. |
Q. Did he say cryptographic base? What does that mean? How do you use private and public keys in email? A: There are two types of email authentication: IP-based (SPF, Sender-ID) and cryptographic based (DomainKeys, DKIM.) The cryptographic authentication protocols rely on matching a public and a private key to verify the identity of the sender. The private key is only made available to the sender and the public key is made available to the ISP. If both keys match, then the ISP knows that the sender is who they claim to be and will let the mail through the authentication check. For a detailed explanation of the different types of authentication, download this free whitepaper, “Email Authentication: The Time is Now.” |
Q: Are these tools free (Sender Score) etc.? A: There are many websites where you can check your reputation for free, including www.Senderscore.org and www.Senderbase.com. |
Q: What is a 4006 error anyway? A: A 4006 is a Network or Configuration Error, and there could be a couple of different reasons for receiving this. I would suggest digging deeper into the failure logs to be able to fully understand what caused the issue. |
Q: Are there products you can use to render images properly in the email? A: Yes, Goodmail offers the ability to have images render intact as part of its Certified Email offering. |
Q: For a small start-up that doesn't have a big budget for managing email lists, are there any websites or providers that help you increase your deliverability and manage your lists? A: One company that does a good job at this for smaller start-up companies is Constant Contact. Their system will help you manage your lists as well as track and potentially increase your deliverability. |
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