I grew up reading Dr. Seuss books and my favourite story happens to be “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” I’m not a huge fan of the Christmas season, and I suppose that part of me secretly sympathizes with the Grinch’s refusal to make merry. There’s something about the irreverence of his all-consuming glee as he snaps up presents, stockings and Christmas trees from each house in Whoville that I can’t help but enjoy. Horrible, I know, but that’s the truth of it.
Even though the Grinch’s antics never fail to amuse me, I’ve come to realize that some in the email marketing industry find a little too much similarity between the Grinch’s attempts to prevent every “Who in Whoville” from having a happy Christmas and the ISPs filtering of their legitimate, permission-based Christmas emails to their consumers and prospects. The fourth quarter of the year is often the most crucial for businesses, especially retailers, and the pain of being bulked and blocked is never felt more strongly than at this time of year.
Having your messages sent to the junk folder or blocked all together can certainly be enough to dampen anyone’s Christmas spirit, but the reasons behind these filtering decisions are actually related to marketers’ sending practices. While the Grinch’s issues with Christmas may be fairly complex (“It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small”), filtering at the ISP level all comes down to one primary factor: your sender reputation.
A high reputation ensures high inbox placement, while a low reputation means bulking and blocking. According to Return Path’s latest Sender Reputation Report, 77% of deliverability issues are caused by a poor sender reputation. So instead of blaming the ISPs, who are tasked with protecting their users from the massive amount of spam being sent year-round (95% of all email sent is spam), it’s time to focus on how your practices may be negatively affecting your sender reputation.
How can you ensure that ISPs view your emails as “nice” rather than “naughty?” By paying attention to the following six factors that impact sender reputation:
- Complaints: the result of subscribers clicking the “This is spam button” in their email client, which registers their complaint to the ISP.
- List Hygiene: related to how you are managing your data, and how clean it is. If it isn’t, you’ll see a higher percentage of spam traps and unknown users.
- Infrastructure: related to how your mail server is configured and whether or not your messages are authenticated with various protocols like SMTP, SenderID and DKIM.
- IP Permanence: whether or not you maintain consistent mailing volume over the same IP addresses. Spammers tend to “pop up” on an IP, blast their messages and then disappear.
- Message Quality: the content of your emails and whether or not you have links, images, text or code that triggers spam filters.
- Engagement: whether or not your subscribers are interacting with your messages, or just ignoring and deleting them.
Of these six factors, complaints and list hygiene weigh the most heavily on your sender reputation. For more information about keeping complaints to a minimum and ensuring your list is squeaky clean, check out my presentation from last week’s JUMP Conference.
So don’t blame the Grinch – or the ISPs – when you find your Christmas emails are being kept out of the inbox. All of the factors contributing to your sender reputation are within your control. However, you can’t fix what you don’t measure. Get started by finding out your sender reputation at this free resource: www.senderscore.org.
Margaret Farmakis is Senior Director, Professional Services at Return Path. View the full bio here.Our bloggers
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