Should I certify my emails?

By Mark Brownlow, July, 2008 |

One of the "problems" faced by email marketers is that not all emails make it to the destination inboxes. One way to increase the number that do is to have your emails certified or accredited by a third-party agency.

Those who guard those inboxes (ISPs, webmail providers, anti-spam technology providers etc.) take that certification as a positive sign: certification gets your emails favorable treatment when it comes to assessing whether or not to filter them through to recipients or dump them as spam.

But what should you think about when deciding if certification makes sense for your email marketing program?

What is my current deliverability?

A key task is to understand how well you're already doing. What percentage of your emails are getting through to inboxes?

This isn't as easy to answer as you might think. The delivery rate reported by your email marketing service or software is only telling you how many sent emails didn't come back marked as undeliverable. Some of these "delivered" emails likely triggered an anti-spam mechanism and found themselves quietly deleted or re-routed to junk folders.

There is no foolproof way to measure inbox delivery success, but you can use an inbox monitoring service like DeliveryMonitor or those built into wider deliverability service packages to get a good idea.

You should estimate delivery success for your list as a whole and for each of the important address domains found in your list database. Your average delivery success might mask some disasters at particular ISPs.

Even without inbox monitoring, you can soon discover if you have a major problem at certain ISPs if you look at open rates for different domains. If your average open rate is 20%, but only 1% across all yahoo.com addresses, then you likely have a delivery problem with Yahoo! Mail.

How does improved deliverability help?

You also need to know the value of improvements in deliverability.

You can think of this value in three ways. The obvious one is through some meaningful metric on the success of your email program: revenue per email sent, leads generated per email sent, etc. This gives you a numerical value you can attach to each extra email that would be delivered as a result of certification.

But there are other benefits to consider. Depending on the agency involved, certification is not limited to improved deliverability. It may also mean that your delivered emails now have:

Then there is also the branding/image/relationship value. Undelivered email is not just about the loss of an opportunity to make money, gain a lead or grab another pageview.

Invoices or account notifications that don't arrive generate huge image problems and cost customer service time. And email users have a lower regard for those organizations that can't match expectations and deliver that promised email reliably.

Does certification make sense?

Now it's time to look at each of the certification and accreditation programs out there (see here for a list) and evaluate the potential value of each in light of the deliverability shortfalls you identified, the likely benefits of certification (as outlined above), and the costs of getting (and staying) certified.

Here's it's important to realize that each program differs in terms of:

Clearly, if you have a particular problem with reaching subscribers with AOL addresses, you need to be sure that the certification program you're considering is recognized by AOL.

Laura Atkins, cofounder of Word to the Wise (a consulting group for ISP abuse desks, email service providers and email marketers) notes, for example, that "...there is strength in uptake. Sender Score Certified has uptake at Hotmail, and is the only way you can get whitelisted at Hotmail. Goodmail has uptake at places like AOL and Yahoo, although they are not the only way to get whitelisted there..."

Other points to note

The above gives you an idea of what you should consider when evaluating email certification. But there are other considerations you need to be aware of:

First, you are not limited to only one certification program. Though there is some overlap, most have their own nominally exclusive arrangements with particular ISPs. The more ISPs you want help with through certification, the more likely you are to need to work with more than one certification partner.

Second, certification is a not a short cut to deliverability success that lets you avoid best practices. You need to implement best practices in order to get certified in the first place. You cannot simply pay to get a free pass through the spam filters. You need to prove to the certification agency that your email marketing deserves that pass.

Matt Vernhout from the deliverability blog EmailKarma notes that certification "...is a good idea to help augment your email reputation and enhance your email delivery, but these services should not be considered the 'Silver Bullet' to email delivery. They should be used by mailers with good (or great) practices and not those trying to just get around spam filters or play in the grey area of permission."

Third, certification is not a one-off. Your email marketing is subject to monitoring such that too many spam complaints or noted deviations from approved practices will see your certification revoked.

Fourth, if you're using an ESP then they may have an existing partnership with a certification program that makes the application process (and pricing) a lot less painful.

What do the experts say?

One of the problems with certification is that nearly all the information on the net benefits comes from the certification agencies themselves. Out in the marketing world there are mixed views.

Louis Chatoff, Deliverability Manager at ESP StreamSend Email Marketing is happy with a recent partnership with Habeas, noting:

"Once on the Habeas SafeList, senders are able to bypass some of the primary filters at the major ISPs, at smaller ISPs and at individual organizations using enterprise filtering technology such as Cloudmark. Besides trying to block spam, some of these primary filters are used for rate limiting email from potentially risky senders, so being on the Habeas SafeList not only allows better delivery, but quicker delivery."

"A sender who has passed the Habeas audit, has been added to Habeas' SafeList, and continues to follow best practices should see a 20% to 30% improvement in delivery."

Jordan Cohen, Senior Director of Industry Relations at Goodmail Systems, reports that senders using Goodmail's certification service see "...increases in clickthroughs of 20% - 35% and increases in total views/opens of up to 50%!"

Return Path (home of Sender Score Certified) also report improvements. Ken Takahashi, Vice President, Global Channels, says, "...clients see up to 17% lift on delivery when they come onto Sender Score Certified."

(Note that the figures from different certification programs are not directly comparable, so don't jump to immediate conclusions about which one is better!)

Word to the Wise's Atkins is more skeptical, suggesting that the delivery benefits of certification are more about the process of gaining certification than the actual whitelisting that generally follows:

"For the vast majority of mailers certification does not make a lot of sense. The real benefits to certification are the screening and correction process that all the companies have you go through before you are certified. Companies who are certified will see an increase in delivery, but this increase happens even at companies that do not use the particular list."

"For my clients, we look at process first and then move on to certification if the process isn't sufficient to get the delivery they need. We audit the client's full process including technical practices, policies and implementation. Fixing these areas typically results in >95% inbox delivery. As of yet, I am unaware of a client that had to get certified in order to get good delivery."

Who are the prime candidates for certification?

Chatoff notes, "I see three types of senders who benefit the most from using certification: the large sender where the cost is not an issue, the organization that does not have the resources to monitor its sending reputation from several external sources, and the company whose delivery rate is poor because it adopted best practices late in the game and now wants to right the ship without having to start from scratch."

And even Atkins sees potential for some specific needs: "There are some areas where certification makes sense: banks or legitimate pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer comes to mind) can benefit from the certification process. But these are specific cases. Generally, if senders are following best practices and spammers aren't sending out large volumes of similar mail (say bank phishes or pills) then sending relevant, wanted email will get good delivery."

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