No man is an iland

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.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Getting email delivered

Part 1: User interaction
Part 2: Authentication

When organizations look at incoming mail, 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

Find related articles:

• Channel: Getting email delivered

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.]

Find related articles:

• Channel: None (just a friendly update)

[Be sure to read Part 1 of this series: User interaction]

OK, hands up if you don’t understand how email authentication works.

(This is where I sincerely hope I’m not the only one holding my hand up).

The good news is you probably don’t have to understand it. But your email marketing service or IT technicians should know how it works because your emails and/or email system need to support the authentication process. Here’s why…

Authentication is not a deliverability solution, but…

A simplified definition of authentication is that it’s the process by which the alleged identity of the sender of an email can be verified. It requires action at both the sending and receiving end of the email delivery process.

Senders must modify some technical domain records and (depending on the type of authentication) also modify the information sent along with emails so that receivers can run appropriate verification checks.

Interest in authentication comes from a need for more accountability in email. You can see immediately how verifying sender identities helps the battle against, for example, phishing.

If an email purports to come from PayPal.com, but cannot be authenticated, then organizations managing incoming email can tag it as suspicious or block it.

Only PayPal can properly authenticate their outgoing email as “from PayPal” because only they have access to the appropriate domain records etc.

Authentication lets us check if mail claiming to be from BigBrand.com really is from BigBrand.com.

But it says very little about the value of BigBrand.com’s emails and whether those emails deserve delivery to the inbox.

So authentication can help stop people claiming your identity (phishing) but authenticating your email doesn’t magically increase your delivery rates.

As George Bilbrey (President) and Tom Sather (Professional Services Director) of Return Path point out:

“Authentication is not about deliverability and that was never the intention. It’s about phishing and spoofing. The intention was never to hurt (or help) deliverability.”

So what’s authentication doing in a deliverability post?

The use of authentication does have indirect impacts on your ability to get email delivered.

As Deirdre Baird, President & CEO of Pivotal Veracity puts it:

“It’s very important to authenticate…not being authenticated doesn’t necessarily hurt you, but being authenticated provides additional benefits that can help deliverability…”

So much so, in fact, that Chris Wheeler, Director of Deliverability at Bronto adds:

“In this day and age and with large-scale adoption at major ISPs, not having authentication is something you cannot get away with any longer.”

There is already talk of authentication having a direct benefit to spam filter scores. And some email address providers are already flagging non-authenticated email with warnings.

Such warnings affect deliverability because trust is an important factor in determining how a subscriber interacts with your email. Remember, positive (clicks) and negative (“report as spam”) interactions with your email play an increasing role in determining your future delivery success.

In Germany, Web.de and GMX webmail services now display “trusted” and brand icons next to authenticated email from selected senders. Gmail has begun something similar.

Suddenly, authentication starts becoming very interesting in terms of trust and brand building.

As it stands, though, the three main benefits of authentication for marketers are: brand protection, access to delivery resources and sender reputation.

1. Authentication helps protect your brand

Accountable email helps protect you and your customers from criminals attempting to send emails that pretend to be from your brand.

Bilbrey and Sather note that authentication as brand protection should be a top priority, and not just for big companies:

“If companies think they don’t get phished or spoofed they are mistaken. Through the Return Path Reputation Data Network we get data on millions of messages coming from ISPs every day. And a shockingly high number of those messages are phishing and spoofing attacks.”

“Companies are being spoofed and phished all the time. This is true even of relatively small, lesser-known brands. Authentication can limit the damage.”

Wheeler adds:

“Brand affinity is put at risk when the potential fallout from spammers and phishers is substantial. Authentication helps avoid this.”

2. Authentication enables access to information and services

Some ISPs require senders to authenticate email before they will provide a lot of courtesy delivery data. Jeremy Saibil, Director of Deliverability at Campaigner, says:

“…if you are not signing Yahoo-destined mail with DomainKeys (DK) or DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) authentication then you are unable to participate in the Yahoo Feedback Loop. DK/DKIM signing is also a requirement for Gmail’s new unsubscribe/complaint reporting function.”

Feedback loop data lets you remove complainers from your list and provides critical information on how recipients are reacting to your different emails. According to Saibil, if you don’t get access to this data, you “…are missing a HUGE piece of the puzzle required to judge the effectiveness of your campaigns.”

And he concludes:

“I suspect every piece of informational candy ISPs will share with email marketers moving forward will have an authentication requirement.”

3. Authentication supports the next phase of sender reputation

Perhaps the biggest delivery influence of authentication in the future will be in support for domain-based sender reputation.

In the ideal email world, those managing incoming email could build up a behavioral history for specific senders (e.g. BigBrand.com), and judge their emails accordingly. You would have a reputation associated with your domain name.

This is good for receivers and good for you, since your reputation is more directly linked to your actions and its independent of the location (IP address) from which your emails are sent.

[Hint: Part 3 will look at the dawn of domain-based reputation in more detail.]

Clearly, this kind of reputation system depends on authentication. Receivers can only use domain-based reputation if they can be sure of the provenance of the email. As Baird puts it:

“Authentication is a pre-requisite for taking advantage of domain-level reputation at major ISPs.”

So what authentication standard should you implement?

Of course, there is more than one way to authenticate your email. Historically, the main standards are:

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Sender ID
DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

Which do you go for?

SPF/Sender ID are relatively easy to implement and important for Microsoft webmail properties. But DKIM is emerging as the real must-have standard. Saibil says:

“DKIM in particular is the authentication standard that is really going to matter moving forward…”

To learn more about DKIM, see these articles:

• Searching for Truth in DKIM by J.D.Falk
• DKIM: Not Shiny, But Very Important, also by J.D.Falk
• How hard is it to deploy DKIM? by John Levine
• What do you want out of DKIM? by Al Iverson
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Grows Significantly by Jim Fenton
• DKIM: what it’s not by Laura Atkins
• Determining the DKIM Value Proposition by Dennis Dayman
• Franck Martin on the Future of DKIM and Domain-Based Reputation, also posted by Dennis Dayman

Should you panic if you’re not authenticated?

Not for the moment. Bilbrey and Sather tell us:

“As it stands today, authentication is at barely 50%. If ISPs started blocking all unauthenticated mail the false positive rate would sky rocket.”

But all our experts advise ensuring authentication ASAP. As Baird states (with my emphasis):

“As ISPs continue to evolve their filtering mechanisms, authentication will play an even more important role in determining the good actors from the bad actors. By setting up email authentication on your mailing domains and IPs you are building a reputation history for the future.”

Part 3: domain-based reputation

Find related articles:

• Channel: Getting email delivered

The growing number of specialist deliverability services and consultants is no coincidence. Email deliverability is a tough topic to stay on top of.

Those managing incoming email (ISPs, webmail services, software manufacturers etc.) are constantly modifying how they sort those messages so that bad email is kept out of each user’s inbox.

That’s a good thing. But what makes a “good” email? Just where is deliverability heading? What do marketers need to plan for?

Four deliverability experts kindly shared their understanding with me for a series of posts covering the biggest trends in deliverability and what they mean for marketers.

This first part looks at the role of user interaction (engagement).

[If you're not familiar with the basic terminology in deliverability, don't worry: here's a simple glossary.]

User interaction and reputation

We know that ISPs and others are using sender reputation to help determine whether an email deserves delivery to, for example, the inbox or the “junk” folder.

Various factors get taken into account when building a reputation for a particular sender (usually defined as a source IP address) and one focus is the number of spam complaints received.

A spam complaint is the classic example of an engagement metric or user interaction contributing to sender reputation.

By clicking on a “report this as spam” button, the user is making a statement about the perceived value of the sender’s emails. These statements then flow into the calculation of reputation.

But spam reports are not the only example.

Increasingly, the likes of Yahoo! Mail and others are looking at all sorts of positive and negative user interactions to build up their overall picture of your sender reputation.

Examples?

George Bilbrey (President) and Tom Sather (Professional Services Director) of Return Path offer three examples that one or more top ISPs are already using:

• Do users open messages from the IP/domain?
• Do users click on links coming from the IP/domain?
• Do users mark wanted email that appears in the spam folder as “not spam”?

They add:

“Another technique to measure engagement is to create a large panel of trusted users…The users are given a sample of their messages and asked to vote each as spam or not spam. This technique is most notably used by Microsoft.”

Bilbrey and Sather note that the “this is not spam” metric has been in use for over three years:

“It’s the primary way that many ISPs get a feel for whether they are making a mistake in placing a message in a junk/bulk folder. Most of the large ISPs that have built their own reputation systems are looking at this.”

Will this approach see wider application?

So, is this engagement approach to email filtering likely to spread?

Yes, says Jeremy Saibil, Director of Deliverability at Campaigner. He continues:

“In fact, it already has been happening on a broad basis…ISPs have and will always leverage this type of information to help serve their clients better.

Deirdre Baird, President & CEO of Pivotal Veracity adds:

“…top ISPs that often account for 50% to 75% of B2C marketers’ lists such as Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail are measuring engagement (clicks, forwards) and disengagement (persistent ignoring) in overall and individual-level folder placement decisions.” (my emphasis)

But what about smaller or regional ISPs without the resources of a Microsoft? Are they applying engagement metrics, too?

Chris Wheeler, Director of Deliverability at Bronto says once the big players prove the usefulness of the approach, others will follow:

“Just as in the past with Feedback Loops and authentication, a wait and see approach by the smaller ISPs is usually the way programs become more widespread.”

Bilbrey and Sather agree:

“Smaller ISPs don’t really have the power to do it right now. But even some second-tier ISPs are starting to experiment with less sophisticated versions. So we expect to see a lot more of this in the coming years.”

Should you worry?

The growing importance of engagement metrics in determining your delivery success makes you even more accountable to your subscribers. Wheeler tells us:

“The interesting thing here is that senders, once again like with the TiS (This is Spam) button, will be at the mercy of their recipients. If marketers send email that is received well and opened and/or clicked on, their good deliverability will reflect this.”

He continues:

“It really puts the onus on the creative and marketing strategy to capture recipient engagement. If you send email out that doesn’t generate complaints, that has been sufficient up to this point. Moving forward, you’ll have to actually drive your recipients to action as well.”

But surely any half-decent email list should easily meet the engagement criteria that might be used by ISPs? Not so, say our experts.

Baird warns:

“Although marketers may make all the necessary technical configurations to their outbound mail stream, mailing practices such as over-mailing may cause list fatigue that will lead to an erosion of engagement and ultimately cause messages to be placed in the spam folder…”

And Bilbrey and Sather note:

“Too many marketers are still satisfied with relatively low response rates. If they have a big enough list they can make the math work even at very low click rates. But that is now starting to have a deliverability penalty.”

…and they cite the example of a top online insurance company:

“They aren’t scraping email addresses off bathroom stalls. The frequency is fine. They are even doing lifecycle segmentation to get the right messages to the right recipients. All way more than many marketers do, frankly. But they are struggling to get to the inbox at AOL and Yahoo! because of their engagement metrics.” (my emphasis)

Ultimately, it’s down to the quality of your email marketing and actively managing those engagement metrics. Saibil says:

“I’d expect that anyone running a decent email marketing program would be very well versed in these metrics. Most likely they are already proactively adjusting their programs should positive interaction metrics drop off.”

And he has a tip for us:

“…one of the most important deliverability tips I preach is ensuring you have consistent visibility of your own campaign stats, ensuring you have a baseline for measuring both positive and negative engagement metrics.”

It’s not all or nothing

Baird also warns that the use of engagement in sender reputation gives ISPs the information they need to direct emails on a recipient-by-recipient basis:

“In the past, if you had a good reputation based on low spam complaints, good list hygiene, and a few other metrics, you could count on inbox delivery. Now, you can have all those things in place, and may have a high delivery rate, but a portion of your list – the disengaged customers – will not be receiving your mail in their inboxes like everyone else is.”

“The most important thing to keep in mind here is that even if a marketer has a great email program, stellar reputation and “will pass”, the individual’s explicit and implicit preferences will still take precedence over which folder your mail is routed to.” (my emphasis)

There’s a positive flip side to that of course, as Baird explains:

“…if a lot of your mail is being sent to the spam folder, an individual’s positive engagement with your messages will override your reputation elsewhere and ensure your messages are routed to that individual’s inbox.”

The key takeaway is this:

Acceptable response rates in the past (from a profit perspective) may not be sufficient in the future: engagement becomes a goal in its own right, thanks to its impact on customer behavior and deliverability.

Part 2: The role of authentication

Still to come: domain-based reputation, reputation and B2B lists, certification, and great links for further reading. Stay tuned…

Find related articles:

• Channel: Getting email delivered