The four approaches to deliverability
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on January 24, 2008
The process of getting your email in front of the would-be recipient is a lot like snakes and ladders. As your email travels across the ether, it can get help from ladders (such as certification programs) and hindrance from snakes (such as anti-spam filters.)Unfortunately, unlike in the board game, your email won't necessarily "get there eventually." Some of those deliverability snakes have tails that end in electronic shredders.
There are four approaches currently favored by marketers when tackling the deliverability challenge:
1. Remain in blissful ignorance. (If you don't understand why some emails fail to reach their destination, click here for an explanation.)
2. Work hard on basic email marketing best practices and rely on this to keep delivery rates high. Hope that sending relevant email to people who asked for it will keep you out of trouble.
3. Become expert in the intricacies of blacklists, whitelists, etc. and proactively optimize your deliverability yourself.
4. Pay an email marketing service or delivery specialist to do the job for you.
The resource-rich few and big emailers take Approaches 3 or 4. The enlightened, yet resource-constrained, marketers take Approach 2. And the (I suspect) majority take Approach 1.
The problem is the growing complexity of delivery issues. Read any overview of how to improve your delivery rates (like this recent one from Silverpop) and you'll see that the theory is fine, but it's quite a technical business putting that theory into practice.
Just yesterday, Return Path and others reported that AOL was making changes to their whitelisting program and using Domain Keys Identified Mail to authenticate incoming email. Key intelligence for marketers but probably confusing to most mortals not steeped in deliverability issues and jargon.
If buying in email deliverability expertise is not an option for you, there is still much mileage to be got out of Approach 2 and sticking to principled email marketing.
And just as value-priced email marketing services gave small business access to professional email marketing, my hope is that value-priced tools and services will soon appear to do something similar for deliverability. So hang on in there.
Related post:
Yahoo, deliverability, the little guy and ESPs
More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, aol email, Domain Keys Identified Mail, DKIM
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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