The new deliverability: dealing with empowered subscribers

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on August 10, 2007

A couple of weeks ago I quoted the ISPs and their new attitudes to what constituted spam. That theme has spread around the blogs and vendor newsletters of late and become a real complacency killer.

We now have two types of reputation to worry about. Your overall sender reputation in the eyes of email's gatekeepers. And your reputation with each and every one of the people getting your email.

The "this is spam" button is the link between the two of course. Empowered subscribers can make or break your sender reputation with an ISP or webmail service by reporting you as spam.

By way of illustration, check out this tale of woe from one discussion list on their difficulties with AOL subscribers.

Previously, a solid permission-based sign-up process was widely regarded as a sure bet for ensuring a safe sender reputation. But as Stefan Pollard notes, permission is now just the start. A concept echoed earlier by the folk at ReturnPath.

Issues like targeting and relevance used to be ways of "just" improving your results. But as ISPs expand the definition of spam to "anything people don't want," then these concepts become "must haves" rather than "could haves."

Stefan's article goes on to talk about the role of relevancy and recognition in this new deliverability context, suggesting some strategies you might use to boost the latter.

Email Karma also addresses the theme, with some tips on securing your reputation and avoiding spam reports.

Email used to be famous for being the form of marketing you could do badly and still make money from. I'm not sure how much longer that is going to be the case.

More on deliverability and reputation | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, spam reports, AOL, spam

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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1 Comments:

Email marketing is harder than it was ever before, no doubts. Especially at these times it's from high importance that you check the deliverability of your campaign, before it goes out to your customers, in my opinion.

There are some providers like Email Deliverability or Email Monitor who will do the testing of your campaign. I would recommend this service even to people that use Good Mail and such. It doesn't cost you much, but once you tweak your campaigns right (both of them will tell ya) you can get much higher ROIs.
By Anonymous, on 13 August, 2007