Reputation and email deliverability: where to begin?

Scowls were directed at email marketers recently for their apparent neglect of deliverability as an issue and their desire to find some simple deliverability solutions offered by their email service provider.

Solutions that largely don't exist.

So how do mere mortals deal with the problems associated with getting your emails through to the intended recipient?

The lax attitude might well be a defensive reaction to the growth of deliverability as its own art and science...with its own dedicated services...and with its own set of complicated jargon.

The complex technological mysteries that happen somewhere between an email's source and destination can cause level-headed people to throw their hands up in despair and seek easy solutions.

Fortunately it's not as bad as it looks.

We've talked before about how the fate of your sent emails is largely in your own hands. As long as you use a half-decent service or software, you control the factors that determine deliverabilty success.

These days, this success is largely down to your reputation as a sender of email. George Bilbrey outlines exactly what contributes to this reputation in this nice overview.

A closer look through his list reveals that all but one factor is about what you send and who you send it to.

To rephrase, a positive sender reputation comes from sending email to valid addresses representing people who want to get that email's content.

When you put it like that, you see that reputation (= delivery success) depends on doing exactly those things that constitute basic email marketing best practices. These best practices are all about building a list of addresses responsive to your messages.

It's a point made forcibly by Stephanie Miller, who explains how sending relevant email is the key to delivery success.

So when you follow best practices, you are following deliverability best practices, too.

When experts talk about improving the response to your emails, they're effectively telling you how to improve deliverability.

When Simms Jenkins, for example, outlines some best practices for business-to-business email campaigns, he's also outlining best practices for getting B2B email delivered.

When David Baker talks about trigger email, or Loren McDonald writes about attuning your emails' frequency and content to the needs of individual recipients, they are both describing ways to improve deliverability.

This good news has another implication.

An email service provider can't guarantee deliverability for you. But it can provide the tools that help you do the kind of things that improve your deliverability.

It's a point I've made in more detail before, but a more recent post from Ken Takahashi does a better job than me of explaining what it is you should be looking for from your service, both generally and with deliverability in mind.

Of course, there's a dark lining to every silver cloud. There will be times when even the most careful sender of email runs into a deliverabiliy problem.

That's when it's time to call on the expertise of your service or go to a third-party deliverability expert.

If you do take the latter approach, Word to the Wise's Laura has some useful information on what you can expect from a deliverability consultant.

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing services, email deliverability, email reputation

Permalink | March 20, 2008 | 0 comment(s)
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