This document discusses email deliverability and how to improve a sender's reputation score. It explains that a sender reputation score is like a credit score that depends on user complaints, bounce rates, spam trap hits, sending volumes, and list management practices. The document provides tips on monitoring complaint and bounce rates, removing spam traps and inactive users from lists, sending consistent volumes, keeping content relevant, and using personalization. It emphasizes that deliverability depends more on sender behaviors than on content. Maintaining a good reputation score is important for email to reach users' inboxes rather than being marked as spam.
3. Agenda
What is a Sender Score or Reputation?
What are the factors in that Score?
How to improve them?
Deliverability 101
Complaints, Bounces, Spam Trap, Volumes, List
Management, and Content
What does it cost me?
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4. What is a Sender Score?
Sender Score is a credit score. Reputation
Just like when the dealership your getting a car loan from
checks your financial score
Reputation comes down to what other people think of your
email methods.
What is email based on?
Complaints
Bounce Rate
Hard
Block
Backlistings
Volumes
Spamtraps
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6. Why is it Important?
In 2009, an estimated 95% of all email was classified as SPAM
Because of increasingly aggressive filtering technologies
Forgeries, Content Hijackings, growing botnets, etc
On average, 27.6% of commercial emails sent to business
addresses don't reach the inbox. - Return Path (2009)
In North America, only 80% of legitimate email is delivered to
the Inbox - Return Paths Biannual report on message deliverability
90% of delivery issues are related to senders behaviors and NOT
content - George Bilbrey, Return Path
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8. Complaints
#1 most important factor in reputation
Human response to unwanted mail
Receivers notices back to senders
Feedback Loops
Very low threshold
0.01% of all email sent in 24 hour period
10. What You Can Do - Monitor Complaint Rates
SPAM Unsubscribe Report
Remember keep under 0.01%
Trend over time
Review ALL changes when things go wrong
12. All About Bounces
High bounces signal bad lists or list management
practices
Indicative of spammers
Send to as many addresses as possible
No regard for valid of addresses
Dont stay around for reporting
Very hard for receiver to differentiate between bad
list management and actual spamming
13. Dealing with Bounces
Hard Bounce
Bad email addresses
Soft Bounces
Mailbox full
Blocks/Spam
Content
URL
Technical Failures
Server down
Out of Offices
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14. What You Can Do - Spam Traps
Remove them? How?
Dont buy *random* lists
Ask for data history if you buy list
Get SLAs
Watch e-pending services
Remove inactive accounts
Quality over Quantity
Run re-Confirmation processes
Use confirmed opt-in in at capture
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16. Volumes
Volume is not in itself good or bad, but is an
important part of the overall reputation algorithm.
A higher score equates to larger volume monitored
by the Sender Score Reputation Network.
= More to measure you on
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17. What You Can Do - Volumes
Do not send too frequently or randomly
Send a steady, consistent volume
Send from clean shared range if low volumes
Create multiple interests
Newsletter
Marketing
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19. List Management
Send to those who asked to receive your email
People will complain if they dont know who you are
and did NOT request the content
Frequency and Relevancy
Recipients should see what they signed up for and at
what frequency they signed up for it
Meet their expectations of what they signed up for
Know your subscriber
Use personalization. Read their digital body language
Segment & target
20. What You Can Do - List Management
Ensure you dont look like a spammer when delivering to
non-existent accounts
Spammers batch and blast to the same list every time
Old accounts are sometimes re-used as spamtraps 18-24 months later
Remove bad email addresses
Reduce the amount of complaints against your IP
Watch your spam unsubscribe reports regularly for trends
Remove contacts that dont click-through
Ensures spam trap hits are low
Dont buy lists or buy from trusted sources
Perform opt-in
Send email confirmations
Activity filters
Remove inactive contacts from your database
22. Content
Content is still important, but not as much as in
the past when it comes to sounding like a spammer
Content preview testing
Relevancy
Call to action
Image to text ratio
23. What You Can Do - Content
Personalization
>Inserting a person's name into an email increases open
rates by as much as 10%. - Jupiter Research (2006)
Dont include video, flash scripts or forms in email
>Most are blocked by email clients for security
>Spam filtering is more likely to occur because
of HTML coding than the words in your email.
- George Bilbrey, iMediaConnection (2006)
Make sure your content is readable
>On mobile devices
>In preview panes
>With images OFF
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27. Digital Body Language
Drives cleaner leads to website
Who opened?
Who clicked? Where?
Whos active? Whos not?
Whats most important to them?
Segmentation and relevancy
Nurture
Integration
Deliverability PLUS+
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28. What else does NetGains do to help?
Provide dedicated or shared IPs/Branding
Dedicated Delivery and Privacy Team
24x7 Monitoring
Automatically suppress / report hard bouncebacks
Bounceback History Report
Automatically suppress / report ISP based complaints
SPAM Unsubscribe List report
Suppress known bad spelling, known SPAM traps, high
level complainers, FCC Wireless Suppression list
Deliverability Testing through Return Path
Email and Privacy Certification
29. What you can do
Monitor IP reputation
http://www.senderscore.org
Create a FREE account
Have you IP or Domain ready
Monitor complaint rates and adjust
Trend in your email applications
Remove them
Monitor hard bounce rates and adjust
Are you being seen as spam or spammer?
Keep lists clean and relevant
Remove inactive
Quality over Quantity