No man is an iland

November 19, 2009

If you're looking to take the next big leap with your email marketing, one way is to distinguish between two types* of best practices.

There are best practices that help optimize your email marketing. Truths that are as near-universal as we can get them. A good example is sending new sign-ups an immediate welcome message.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where not sending some kind of welcome message is the best course of action.

That's what best practices are supposed to be about: proven approaches that are better than the alternatives.

But there's another type of best practice. One that does not optimize your email marketing, but does prevent you from blowing it up.

These are really "safe practices" and exist as best practices because industry experts recognize that "a little knowledge can be a bad thing."

In a review of an unusual email, Justin Premick raised the issue, asking:

"...are best practices always the way to go?"

One response came from Laura Atkins, who said:

"The things we tell people are best practices are not written in stone and inviolable. Rather, they're a way to succeed without understanding all the ins and outs of email."

It's a concept worth expanding on.

There are a lot of tactics that bring excellent results if applied wisely. If not, they lead to disaster.

But wise application demands an understanding and attention to detail that can't be taught (or learned) in 140 characters or a 400-word blog post.

So rather than try and run the risk that over-simplification leads people to make poor choices, industry experts often take the safe route and preach absolute best practices that aren't always truly best practices. But they will keep you out of harm's way.

For example, nearly everyone (me included) would say that a best practice is not to send emails that are pretty much all-images. Because image blocking kills the message.

That's not really a best practice. That's a safe practice.

Fact is, image-heavy emails - in the right circumstances with the right execution - can outperform the alternatives.

Newsmarketing, a Swiss agency, recently tested 6 different levels of images in 2.1 million emails to see which drove most traffic to a landing page.

The winner? The giant single image with a text salutation. Details here (in German only).

The catch is knowing the right circumstances and the right execution that lets you break the rules. To make image-heavy work, you need a solid understanding of various factors:

• role and strength of imagery in driving action for the audience/conversion in question
• trust factors
• proper use of alt attributes
• text/copy interaction
• use of sender and subject lines to encourage curiosity
• Subscriber open rate patterns
• etc.

...all of which takes time and effort to understand. Knowing people are often not in a position to find that time, experts deal in safe absolutes: don't use image-heavy emails. If they didn't say this, too many people would make mistakes like this one:



There is no reason to respond to this email. Now I could download images out of curiosity, but the email does not do enough to exploit the curiosity effect.

The sender is a marketing agency, the subject line is "November News" and there are no alt attributes, so my curiosity really isn't aroused enough.

Email marketing without best practices is like being put in a Formula 1 racing car. Know what you're doing and you'll reach your goal faster. If you don't know what you're doing, you end up in a car wreck.

So experts take the "safe practices" route: stick to your family car. It's not always as fast, but you're much less likely to crash and burn your email marketing program.

Of course the positive side to this is that if you do take the time to understand the nuances of various tactics...if you know what the right circumstances and execution are...if you know what's a best practice and what's a safe practice...then you can "break" best practices and profit as a result.

Not forgetting the critical role of testing here.

The required knowledge comes not only through experience, but through interaction with other practitioners and extensive reading. Because "when to break the rules" information is out there if you look for it. (Alternatively, hire a consultant).

More examples

A best practice is to include privacy reassurances immediately next to sign-up fields for email lists. Correct. (People need to know their email is safe in your hands before submitting it.)

But...if you have a trusted brand, does an overt privacy reassurance actually raise privacy concerns where none were there before? When I removed mine, sign-up rates increased. Perhaps worth a test?

A best practice is not to increase frequency significantly. Correct. (This can lead to more spam complaints and deliverability problems.)

But...this advice largely applies to sending "more of the same." There are ways to increase frequency that deliver more value to both the subscriber and the sender. See this post.

A best practice is not to force people to scroll horizontally when viewing an email. Correct. (Mostly because compelling people to scroll doesn't work when people don't...um...feel compelled to scroll. And some email clients have problems displaying wide emails)

But...give them a reason to do so and perhaps you open up a novel, memorable email experience? See Justin Premick's look at Stuck in Customs, Dylan Boyd's analysis of Abercrombie and Fitch emails or Anna Yeaman's take on a very creative email from the Canadian Tourism Commission.

The takeaway here is not to rush out and start ignoring best practices. Without the background understanding, that way lies email marketing hell.

But if you can gain (or hire) a more nuanced understanding of issues, you might be able to break selected rules to the benefit of both you and your subscribers.

What do you think?

*A third type is best practice that isn't really best practice. It's a lazy title for someone's opinion or an approach that is best for a particular scenario but isn't universally applicable. For more on this, see Morgan Stewart's excellent post.

November 16, 2009

Part 1: User interaction
Part 2: Authentication
Part 3: Domain-based reputation
Part 4: Certification
Part 5: B2B and sender reputation

And so we come to the end of this series. To finish, I compiled a list of 192 deliverability resources available for you at this site and elsewhere.

These cover: introductory articles, themed article collections (e.g. authentication, sender reputation), blogs, Twitter accounts, tools/services and a special section on deliverability's future.

If you have any recommended sites, services etc. to add to the list, use the comments to let me know. Though 192 is a nice figure, being the sum of ten consecutive prime numbers.

P.S. A big thanks to Chris Wheeler, George Bilbrey, Deirdre Baird, Jeremy Saibil and Tom Sather for their expert contributions over the course of this series.

November 10, 2009

Part 1: User interaction
Part 2: Authentication
Part 3: Domain-based reputation
Part 4: Certification

You can't avoid the idea of reputation when talking about deliverability.

And we've already seen how your reputation as a sender of email will become associated with your domain, making you more accountable for your email activities.

[Accountability is a good thing as long as you're delivering true value to your subscribers. It helps keep bad emailers out of the inbox.]

Still, some marketers wonder just how much attention to give sender reputation.

OK, it plays a major role at big B2C webmail services and ISPs. But small corporate IT departments don't have the email throughput to start classifying senders using some detailed sender reputation formula.

So can't B2B list owners safely ignore the topic?

Let our experts guide us...

It is true to say that reputation-based filtering plays a smaller role in B2B than it does in B2C.

George Bilbrey (President) and Tom Sather (Professional Services Director) of Return Path confirm that...

"...content filtering is likely to always be a bigger issue in the corporate world where system administrators may set limits on what employees can receive."

But that doesn't mean reputation is irrelevant in B2B. Indeed, Bilbrey and Sather describe the idea that B2B deliverability is only about content filtering as a myth.

Here are three reasons why B2B marketers also need to worry about their sender reputation.

1. Business users have "consumer" email addresses

In the past, many senders regarded free webmail addresses as the preserve of fly-by-night freebie hunters. Webmail has come a long way since then.

Many people use a webmail address today - like Gmail or Windows Live Hotmail - because of the robust feature-rich services offered, integration with other online activities (like chat) and longevity.

So check any B2B email list and you'll likely find a significant proportion of "real" "active" webmail addresses on it.

For example, 15% of those who opened the last issue of my own niche B2B list did so at a webmail service.

2. "Consumer" webmail services power business addresses

Deirdre Baird, President & CEO of Pivotal Veracity, tells us:

"...ISPs like Yahoo don't just provide free webmail accounts, but also rank among the largest hosts for businesses."

She adds:

"Marketers set up their own domain and mail under these hosts, so even though you may think you are sending your mail to a company's domain, it's going through the same delivery processes as Yahoo."

Chris Wheeler, Director of Deliverability at Bronto, also cites the growing spread of big ISPs and webmail services into business mail hosting:

"...the ISPs are increasing their footprint with companies outsourcing mail handling to them, such as Gmail's popular Google Apps email for companies."

Google recently noted that "over two million business and 20 million users in over 100 countries" have switched to Google Apps email hosting.

Over a year ago, Al Iverson reported that Yahoo was hosting email for over 125,000 domains.

3. Businesses use third-party email filtering services

We often mistakenly assume that email to a B2B audience must simply negotiate a local spam filter at the destination organization: one that just checks the incoming email's content.

Pass that test and you're in.

In an earlier post, Wheeler reminds us there are various deliverability layers to go through with corporate email.

In particular, many businesses are using third-party filtering services to sort email before it gets anywhere near a user.

Since these services process email for hundreds and thousands of businesses, they see enough messages to let them build sender reputation into the filtering equation.

Reputation problems (like too many spam complaints) are also a common reason for ending up on one of the public blacklists that IT departments might use to filter out spam from incoming email.

Jeremy Saibil, Director of Deliverability at Campaigner says:

"...it is important to remember that a considerable number of B2B mailboxes are protected by large filtering companies like Postini, Cloudmark, Message Systems, Barracuda etc, who all very much rely on reputational data to make delivery decisions."

A similar concept applies to authentication. Baird says:

"...major spam filtering companies such as Postini and Spam Assassin are integrating DKIM into their processes and providing benefits to senders' that are signing mail from their domains."

Clearly reputation is important in B2B email marketing. Bilbrey and Sather add:

"We expect, much like major ISPs, corporate filtering companies will come to see reputation as more reliable than content filtering, though we expect them to continue to use both."

The last word on this goes to Saibil:

"While it may seem as if reputation is lagging a bit behind in the B2B world, it is very much in play. At the end of the day, doing the right thing will be rewarded no matter what system is before you."

OK, we're coming to the end of this series on the future of deliverability. The final part offers dozens of useful links to relevant articles, blogs, websites and services. Look out for it in the next few days.

November 05, 2009

Who cares what software people use to read your emails?

If you have a "safe" email design, you know each message displays gracefully whether viewed in Outlook 2007 or Gmail.

The only exception is when people use a mobile device, but you can get round that with the assumption that they'll save your mail to view on a desktop later.

But there is value to knowing exactly where your emails are viewed.

Getting the stats

You may be wondering how on earth you can tell whether people are viewing your messages on AOL or Apple Mail. It's only recently that the right tools have become available.

I used the client distribution component of the wider MailboxIQ service to analyze my list. FingerPrint is a standalone service or you may have access to a solution through your ESP (example).

Here's a snapshot summary of the 50 or so different clients and webmail services my list used to view a recent newsletter issue:



83% viewed the email using desktop software (like Outlook), 15% using a webmail service (like Yahoo! Mail) and some 2% using a mobile device.

So what?

1. Compare with benchmarks

The first thing you can do is compare the numbers with benchmarks to see how your list differs and then think about why that might be so:

• Email client popularity stats by Campaign Monitor (June 2009)
• Email client statistics for B2B and B2C by Fingerprint (Sept 2008)
• Recipient platform preferences for B2B and B2C by Pivotal Veracity (Oct 2009)

It seems I have an usually large number of people viewing on Outlook 2007 (even for a B2B list), Apple Mail and Gmail.

This suggests the list is attracting a business audience that's updating its software faster than most, perhaps a little more first-mover, tech-savvy than others and with a significant minority of design/creative individuals?

Supporting evidence for that interpretation comes from the data provided by MailboxIQ on the browsers used to view my messages in webmail environments:



Both Firefox and Chrome are more popular with subscribers than you'd expect given broader stats on browser market share.

Such knowledge might influence my content strategy going forward. It also worries me that my email's design is pretty simplistic: what must those cutting-edge and creative folk think?

2. Compare with your list

Software stats are only recorded when an open/render is recorded (more on that later). Your standard campaign reports should also tell you which subscribers "open" an email.

So you can calculate the percentage of recorded opens associated with a webmail address (i.e. how many of your gmail.com addresses recorded an open) and then compare this with the results from your software/webmail distribution stats.

Let's take the newsletter issue used to produce the software stats above.

7.9% of opens recorded by my ESP were from subscribers with a gmail.com address, 4.2% subscribers with a yahoo.com address and 3.2% subscribers with a hotmail.com address.

All these numbers are higher than the equivalent number produced by MailboxIQ, suggesting that people are signing up with a webmail address but downloading their webmail to another viewing environment.

If the results were reversed, it would suggest many people are signing up with business domain addresses, but actually viewing the mail in a consumer webmail environment: either directly or because their email applications are actually powered by Gmail, etc..

[Gmail recently announced that over 20 million users do this.]

In reality, both these activities are happening. Your stats simply tell you which is happening more often.

The clear message is this: you can't make assumptions about viewing environments based on the domain name of the email address.

B2B marketers may also be surprised at the volume of webmail users on their list (15% in my case), suggesting they need to pay just as much attention to webmail deliverability issues (particularly sender reputation) as their B2C counterparts.

3. Trend spotting and mobile strategies

If you follow your stats through time, you can pick up software trends that perhaps reflect changes in the makeup of your list. Most importantly, this data helps you decide on whether (and how) to tackle the issue of mobile email.

I have a small list and only 2% use mobile devices to view my emails. For now, it makes little sense to develop a fully-fledged mobile email strategy, with mobile-ready landing pages etc. But what if that number was 10%?

4. Design testing

Of course, if you haven't got a "safe" email design, information on subscriber software use lets you know exactly what display environments you should be testing.

Perhaps you have a B2C list and never worried too much about Outlook 2007? Or a B2B list and ignored Windows Live Hotmail? Now you know if you were right to do so.

Even if your design is "safe", there are things to learn. Most design testing tools do not include software/browser combinations. In other words, you get a single screenshot of how your design looks in Gmail. And maybe it looks just great.

But does it look great in Gmail when viewed in IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari? For example, I never really bothered to worry about Google's Chrome browser. But now I see 17% of my Gmail users also use Chrome, maybe it's worth investigating.

5. Customer-level design

What if you could associate a particular email software or webmail service with an individual email address? Could you then begin sending emails optimized for that particular display environment?

The possibilities are many. For example,

• Including detailed "add to address list" instructions that are a perfect match in terms of vocabulary and instructional steps
• Changing subject lines to fit the likely available space (especially for webmail users)
• Streamlined versions for mobile users
• Dumping inline CSS for an external stylesheet or "CSS in head" approach for those environments that support it (saving bandwidth costs)
• etc...

The danger here is that people sometimes switch between software or webmail services. But you could build in rules: if someone records the same software over a certain time period, then you can feel safe sending them future emails customized for that software.

Theoretically you could do this anyway for the webmail domains on your subscriber list. But as we've already seen, the domain name in the email address does not necessarily tell you where the subscriber actually reads their email.

Obviously, you'd need to test to see if creating such customized versions was justified by the results. But the potential is clear, especially when combined with other targeting technologies, such as trigger emails.

A note on measurement issues

As mentioned, a recipient needs to "open" an email for the tools to capture data on the software that recipient is using. So no data is recorded where no open is registered.

Pretty much every major email client or webmail service has image blocking in place, which prevents the open tracking image from displaying.

If we assume that people's propensity to activate images is independent of the software they use, then this technical problem is irrelevant: everyone is equally underrepresented. But there are still issues to take into account when interpreting software distribution numbers:

1. The assumption isn't necessarily true. Recent data from MailChimp, for example, showed that Gmail users tend to engage more with email than other webmail users (i.e. they are more likely to open email). So maybe the stats overestimate Gmail use.

2. Some display environments don't have the facility to display (tracking) images at all. So, for example, certain mobile devices will be heavily underrepresented in the stats.

3. One-off deliverability problems can skew the results. If you trigger a block at Yahoo.com, well, the number of people viewing your email using Yahoo.com is...um...likely to be low.

If you trigger a block at Postini, then corporate users see less of your email than webmail users. The result: a false impression of how many people use software like Outlook.

Keep those issues in mind. In particular, you might want to average numbers over several campaigns so that short-term or one-off delivery problems don't bias the stats too much.

October 30, 2009

Part 1: User interaction
Part 2: Authentication
Part 3: Domain-based reputation

If your emails are certified by an authoritative third-party, then you get priority delivery treatment at ISPs that recognize that certification.

Sound good?

Yes, no, maybe: the pros and cons of getting your emails certified are outlined here.

In theory, certification simplifies life for ISPs and others managing incoming email by pre-identifying "good" messages.

So some might suggest (I have in the past) that certification is the future of email deliverability.

But does our panel of experts agree?

Will certification become a must have?

First off, it seems very unlikely that email stamps will become a serious proposition, where everyone has to pay to get email delivered.

Jeremy Saibil, Director of Deliverability at Campaigner says:

"I don't think pay-for-delivery is going to happen. Unless there is a radical change in how internet interaction is billed overall...email has purposes other than those associated with marketing, so the needs of personal and professional users will trump paid email."

But will some kind of paid certification become critical for marketing email?

Chris Wheeler, Director of Deliverability at Bronto, says:

"I would never say that 3rd party accreditation and certifications will be a must for every sender. They make financial sense for some senders who need an extra lift in inbox delivery or want the added assurance emails will be automatically rendered, but this won't replace responsible email marketing."

Even those running certification programs agree that not everyone will need it. George Bilbrey (President) and Tom Sather (Professional Services Director) of Return Path say:

"Email is never going to be 100% pay-to-play, which is a good thing. Good email marketers will always have good deliverability."

Does this mean certification is primarily for bad senders?

If low delivery rates come from poor email practices, then is certification a way for bad senders to pay to get into the inbox?

No.

You need to satisfy rigorous standards before obtaining certification: ISPs are not going to give special treatment to certified email if it means more unwanted messages landing in their customers' inbox.

The credibility and growth of certification therefore depends on certifiers maintaining those standards, even if it means turning down paying customers.

Which means senders whose poor email practices cause them delivery problems probably can't get certified. Saibil notes:

"...businesses that would consistently benefit from certification will likely not qualify for it."

But do good senders need certification if they already have good delivery rates?

Conversely, if you run a high-quality email program, then the potential delivery lift through certification may not be big enough to justify the expense. Saibil again:

"...at the end of the day, if your email marketing practices are good, you won't need certification to deliver the mail..."

Deirdre Baird, President & CEO of Pivotal Veracity adds:

"...we probably will never reach a day when all mail is certified because if mailers are engaging in industry-established best practices and have a winning marketing strategy, they don't need a 3rd party to certify their email as deserving of inbox placement: users will do that."

She continues:

"Its also critically important to note that "Certification" or "Safe Listing" is not going to insulate the mailer against poor deliverability."

"...the ISPs' move to customer-level preferences and engagement as the highest-priority filter significantly minimizes the impact these types of programs can have on folder placement."

So who does benefit from certification, if bad senders don't qualify and good senders don't need it?

Well, even small improvements might justify the costs of certification and there are still real delivery benefits. One is what we might call delivery insurance. As Saibil notes:

"Many of our clients use certification as a safety net to guard against content issues or similar surprises that can periodically negatively impact on their delivery rates."

Bilbrey and Sather also say:

"...we are seeing a lot of ISPs shift their focus toward finding ways to identify good email in an attempt to reduce false positives. With this wider acceptance by ISPs we think the benefits for marketers will make certification programs like ours even more attractive and more cost-effective."

...and certification is not just about deliverability

What many forget is that certification has other potential benefits.

For example, participating ISPs may not block images on emails certified by partners. Some certification programs cause icons to be displayed that mark you out as a certified sender, which might bring trust benefits.

Long-term, certification may be linked to other benefits, such as support for more design functionality (e.g. scripts) that current webmail services typically block automatically.

Baird says:

"Certification will continue to hold appeal for some marketers, especially those whose messages are frequently being spoofed and those that need assurance that critical communications are bypassing filters (even then, end-user preferences prevail, by the way)."

Each sender needs to assess each certification alternative in the light of their current situation, the relative benefit to their current performance levels, and the cost of complying with the standards and paying for the certification process.

It seems unlikely that certification will come to dominate deliverability in the way that reputation etc. does.

But certification's role seems set to grow in a wider context, through the overall mix of potential benefits for design, delivery, trust-building etc.

Part 5: a look at B2B lists and reputation.

More on deliverability

October 28, 2009

Part 1: User interaction
Part 2: Authentication

When organizations look at incoming email, they use a set of criteria to decide what to do with it.

For many such organizations, particularly the big webmail services, the reputation of the sender is a very important criterion determining whether that email should go to the inbox.

This sender reputation is itself built out of various factors, such as how many spam complaints the sender gets or how many defunct addresses they are trying to email.

It's a pretty good way of regulating email, but problems arise through the definition of the "sender" part of sender reputation.

To date, this reputation has largely been tied not to the sender in the traditional sense of the word, but to the sending IP address: the original "connection" to the net that initiated the email transfer.

This gives rise to various difficulties.

For example, if different organizations send email through the same "connection" (sharing an IP address at an email marketing service, for example) then they also share a common sender reputation.

So a "good" email sender can find their reputation dragged down by the others. And vice versa.

Even if you have a dedicated IP address all to your own, you can face problems if you move to a new one. Your sender reputation isn't portable: you have to start from scratch.

If we could associate reputation with an actual domain (e.g. news.email-marketing-reports.com), then reputation would become independent of the system/location used to send out that domain's emails.

It wouldn't matter where my emails are sent out from, because the reputation factors associated with those emails would be tied to the news.email-marketing-report.com domain name.

I wouldn't have to worry about naughty senders putting out their email through the same "connection" as me: it wouldn't affect my domain-based reputation.

This concept is called domain-based sender reputation and it's already impacting the email deliverability world.

Unfortunately, the reality is not quite as simple and positive as the above theory suggests. Nevertheless, the potential benefits are clear.

Deirdre Baird, President & CEO of Pivotal Veracity told me:

"...domain-based reputation will be of big help in addressing the pain-points associated with sharing IP addresses...furthermore, large mailers will have the benefit of being able to add new IPs and/or switch IPs (or ESPs) without the painful and blocking-fraught 'IP warm up process'."

Domain-based reputation works both ways, of course, as George Bilbrey (President) and Tom Sather (Professional Services Director) of Return Path explain:

"If you are a good mailer, sharing IP space with less-good mailers, you no longer pay the penalty for their practices. But if you are a bad mailer sharing IP space with good mailers, no more free ride."

Is domain-based reputation relevant today?

Understandably, ISPs and others are cagey about providing details, but domain reputation is already a factor at some organizations and likely to spread rapidly.

Baird reveals:

"...many leading providers are already in the process of moving to domain-based reputation. Yahoo is already enabling DKIM-compliant senders to benefit from domain-based reputation portability. AOL is switching later in Q4/early Q1."

Bilbrey and Sather confirm that the impacts are already being felt, noting that the top-tier ESPs they work with have started to see some domains get treated differently off the same IP addresses.

Jeremy Saibil, Director of Deliverability at Campaigner offers further confirmation:

"I believe we'll be seeing domain-based reputation "kick in" almost immediately. In fact, I have suspicions it has already started; certainly "warming up" new DKIM authenticated IPs has been much easier of late with certain ISPs."

These quotes highlight the importance of authentication, particularly DKIM (see Part 2 for details).

Domain reputation only works if the receiver can verify whether the domain claiming to be the sender is indeed the source of the email.

The implication is clear. If you want to benefit from domain-based sender reputation, then authenticate your messages. Equally, since not everyone will do so, "traditional" IP-based reputation will continue to play a role in deliverability (more on that later).

Domain-based reputation is not a "get out of jail free" card

Of course, the advantages of domain-based reputation only accrue if you have a good one (a point often overlooked).

Bilbrey and Sather note that the metrics that make up the current IP reputation systems are going to be the same for domain reputation: complaints, unknown users, spam trap hits, sending consistency, "this is not spam" votes, opens and clicks:

"Bottom line: if you have a bad IP reputation because of poor practices, domain reputation is not going to improve your inbox placement rates."

They also warn that the mix of factors and thresholds for these factors will also likely change as ISPs adapt their approaches:

"What defines a "good" complaint rate, for example, is not static and never will be."

So marketers need to stay on top of new developments.

Will it replace IP-based sender reputation?

A question that's hard to answer is the extent to which domain-based reputation will truly replace the current role played by IP-based reputation.

One thing that's certain: the two will inevitably coexist for the foreseeable future. Chris Wheeler, Director of Deliverability at Bronto, says:

"...IP reputation will still be used by many ISPs while domain reputation gains momentum. Also, IP and domain reputation heuristics will not be mutually exclusive."

Instead, he says, domain-based and IP-based reputation will blend together in determining the final destination of delivered email.

Baird also believes IP-based reputation will remain important:

"...the switch to domain-based reputation is just beginning, and many smaller ISPs haven't implemented DKIM or SPF yet. Additionally, we don't expect IP-based reputation to go away entirely as it is used when no domain-reputation exists even at the largest ISPs."

Bilbrey and Sather add:

"The truth is that ISPs are using both domain and IP reputation. And that is not going to change anytime soon. ISPs will still be looking at reputation metrics for IPs, IP-ranges, URLs and more."

So domain-based reputation isn't a global panacea to the issues surrounding shared IPs. It makes you more accountable for your actions, but you won't become completely independent of other senders' email activities if you share an IP address with them.

Bilbrey and Sather continue:

"A high-performing marketer with a stellar domain reputation that is sharing an IP with bottom-of-the-barrel spammers is still likely to see issues getting to the inbox, even with domain reputation in place at both ends of the pipe."

For the individual marketers, it's important to know if your ESP is using DKIM authentication. If not, as Bilbrey and Sather note, today's rules continue to apply because...

"...in the absence of DKIM, ISPs are going to fall back to IP reputation."

Another issue is exactly how DKIM is implemented. Saibil explains:

"...it will be interesting to see how ESPs roll out DKIM/DK...For shared IP environments that support hundreds of thousands of small customers, will it be feasible for each customer to sign as well as the ESP? Perhaps eventually, but I suspect the majority of those emails will be signed by the ESP only for some time to come."

Should different email types be sent from different domains?

Domain-based sender reputation brings accountability, which is a welcome development if you're a good sender. But even the best senders can run into temporary deliverability problems.

If your domain reputation takes a hit, then all email from that domain might struggle to get to inboxes.

Does it make sense, then, to allocate different message types to different (sub-)domains?

Saibil notes that those using an ESP for marketing email likely already have this domain split:

"Using an ESP generally requires a separate domain entity so the ESP can do reply processing."

...but he adds:

"Splitting corporate, transactional and marketing mails at a domain level is something I recommend, however, we usually suggest using sub-domains for these splits."

Bilbrey and Sather go into further detail:

"There is a string in the DKIM record, d=, which is what reputation is tied to. So you can use different d= strings (examples: d= marketing.returnpath.net, d=sales.returnpath.net, d= service.returnpath.net) to differentiate various streams even though the recipient still just sees "returnpath.net"."

Baird warns, however, that while email authentication can help make the process of separating mail streams more efficient and clearly defined, marketers should not rely on authentication alone.

After all, as we just learned, domain-based reputation isn't the only factor affecting deliverability.

"There should be physical separations between corporate mail and all other mail. If a marketer's mail stream comes under fire and you're blocked, your corporate mail may be the only line of communication to a filtering body/ISP. At the very least it's important to leave yourself a life raft in case the whole ship goes down."

Wheeler also points us to this detailed post on domain-based reputation, where he recommends auditing all your outgoing email to identify any potential conflicts:

"If Bob over in coupon sales is killing it with blasting recipients twice daily and aggravating them, Sally over in order processing trying to get shipment confirmation emails out will suffer if both mail streams are coming from the same domain."

Part 4: Email certification

More on deliverability

October 23, 2009

A reader asked me if there was a central repository for all the statistics and articles rebuffing the regular media hype suggesting that "(insert new technology) killed email".

One good source is Morgan Stewart's list of data sources on the state of email use and email marketing.

Another is EmailIsNotDead.com. I put up that site as a one-page factsheet with stats and article links you can show to anyone whose head is turned by sensationalist headline writers.

I deliberately stay out of "Is email dead?" arguments because I'm not convinced of the practical value.

But I understand that people with budgets to plan and/or fight for need hard evidence to support future investment in different channels. Hence the new site.

One point that does need to be made is that email is, obviously, not dead. But it is changing.

And will continue to change.

As will other media.

At the moment, for example, people aren't keen on getting overtly commercial messages through social media. I've been online long enough to remember people saying the same about banner ads on websites.

Buddhists will tell you that impermanence is a basic condition of existence. They're right.

[The series on the future of email deliverability continues next week.]

Sign-up for the Email Marketing Reports NEWSLETTER
Twice a month, free, packed with email marketing advice and all the posts from this blog.

Email:      First Name:     
    More info and sample

 feed | email | Twitter

The main website for everything email marketing
Email marketing search engine
Introduction and email advertising basics
Service listings and sources of statistics
Advice on email design and delivery issues

Top email marketing info sources for 2009
Outlook 2007 and HTML design
42 HTML email design resources

follow me on Twitter