The Daily Telegraph runs a Business Club feature every Tuesday, in a which a company presents a problem that they are currently grappling with, and a panel of experts then provides their recommendations on what steps should be taken to resolve the problem in question. The week before last’s edition was a particularly interesting one for our industry – Via-Vox ( the company behind the Powwownow conference calling solution ) has a significant issue with email deliverability. The full story can be found at :
This is obviously a major problem for Via-Vox. It is not just a question of their marketing emails ending up in the junk folder. Even their transactional emails – vital in terms of carrying login and pin number details for an upcoming conference call – are regularly failing to deliver.
The real eye-opener for me was the responses from the “expert” panel. Some of the points that they raised ( or failed to raise ) that particularly stuck in my mind included :
- One of the panel made the statement that email deliverability is a subject that “most companies are only just waking up to.” That left me gob-smacked – I’ve been involved in email marketing for the past 10 years, and I can’t recall a time when delivery rates were not a key success metric for e-marketers.
- Not one of them touched on the subject of sender reputation. Given that a good set of sender reputation metrics now plays a role in three out of every four decisions that are taken on whether to process or reject inbound emails, all of the other recommendations that were put forward ( authentication, spam filter testing, embedded images ) – while important – are secondary. Sender reputation trumps them all in terms of importance for email deliverability.
- While all 3 members of the panel referenced the importance of email authentication, not one of them mentioned Domain Keys Identified Mail ( DKIM ) – something of an oversight given that particular importance of this form of authentication when broadcasting to BT/Yahoo! addresses.
- There was also quite a lot of focus on “spam trigger words”. In my mind, this is an increasingly irrelevant subject. Key spam filters such as Spam Assassin and Barracuda operate weighted scoring systems that will not reject an email simply because it identifies a text string as having spam-like attributes. In any case, the knowledge bases that contain these words are continually updated, so there isn’t really such a thing as a definitive list. And the chance of a transactional email containing enough spam trigger words to cause the email to be blocked is remote to say the least . . . !
I spoke to the Technical Director at Via-Vox after the article had been published, and he was in agreement, saying “we’ve already implemented most of this – they haven’t really told us anything we didn’t already know. It was a good article from a PR point of view !”
What this really flags up for me is the completely “moving goalposts” nature of the technological issues that affect the email marketing industry. Intelligence that was 100% correct 12 months ago is quickly out of date, and it is a major challenge for e-marketers to stay abreast of the key factors that ensure that their campaigns will be successful. While there is no shortage of white papers and best practice documents that are available for them to refer to, they are quickly out of date.
The DMA’s Email Marketing Council recognises this. The existing deliverability white paper ( published in 2007 ) is currently being revised by the EMC’s Legal, Data & Best Practice hub. It will be a considerably different document to its predecessor in terms of the issues that it focuses on, as will be seen when it is published in January 2010, and the intention is for it to provide its readers with common-sense, practical, and ( most importantly ) up to date guidance on how to deal effectively with the latest email deliverability obstacles.
Guy Hanson is Director, Response Consulting at Return Path. View the full bio here.
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