Demystifying email deliverability

1. Demystifying Email Deliverability
Rishikesh Someshetti
NetGains Technologies Pvt Ltd.
Makint iT Simple
1

2. Demystifying Email Deliverability
Junk
2

3. Agenda
What is a Sender Score or Reputation?
What are the factors in that Score?
How to improve them?
Deliverability 101
Complaints, Bounces, Spam Trap, Volumes, List
Management, and Content
What does it cost me?
3

4. What is a Sender Score?
•Sender Score is a credit score. “Reputation”
•Just like when the dealership your getting a car loan from
•checks your financial score
•Reputation comes down to what other people think of your
email methods.
•What is email based on?
•Complaints
•Bounce Rate
• Hard
• Block
• Backlistings
•Volumes
•Spamtraps
4

5. Sender Score
•http://www.senderscore.org
•IP
•Domain
5

6. Why is it Important?
•In 2009, an estimated 95% of all email was classified as SPAM
Because of increasingly aggressive filtering technologies
• Forgeries, Content Hijackings, growing botnets, etc
•On average, 27.6% of commercial emails sent to business
addresses don't reach the inbox. - Return Path (2009)
•In North America, only 80% of legitimate email is delivered to
the Inbox - Return Path’s Biannual report on message deliverability
•90% of delivery issues are related to senders behaviors and NOT
content - George Bilbrey, Return Path
6

7. Email Deliverability 101
•Complaints
•Bounces
•Spam Trap
•Volumes
•List Management
•Content
7

8. Complaints
•#1 most important factor in reputation
•Human response to unwanted mail
•Receivers notices back to senders
•Feedback Loops
•Very low threshold
•0.01% of all email sent in 24 hour period

9. Email Clients

10. What You Can Do - Monitor Complaint Rates
•SPAM Unsubscribe Report
•Remember keep under 0.01%
•Trend over time
•Review ALL changes when things go wrong

11. Email Deliverability 101
•Complaints
•Bounces
•Spam Trap
•Volumes
•List Management
•Content
11

12. All About Bounces
•High bounces signal bad lists or list management
practices
•Indicative of spammers
•Send to as many addresses as possible
No regard for valid of addresses
•Don’t stay around for reporting
•Very hard for receiver to differentiate between bad
list management and actual spamming

13. Dealing with Bounces
•Hard Bounce
•Bad email addresses
•Soft Bounces
•Mailbox full
•Blocks/Spam
•Content
•URL
•Technical Failures
•Server down
•Out of Offices
13

14. What You Can Do - Spam Traps
•Remove them? How?
•Don’t buy *random* lists
•Ask for data history if you buy list
•Get SLA’s
•Watch e-pending services
•Remove inactive accounts
•Quality over Quantity
•Run re-Confirmation processes
•Use confirmed opt-in in at capture
14

15. Email Deliverability 101
•Complaints
•Bounces
•Spam Trap
•Volumes
•List Management
•Content
15

16. Volumes
•Volume is not in itself good or bad, but is an
important part of the overall reputation algorithm.
•A higher score equates to larger volume monitored
by the Sender Score Reputation Network.
= More to measure you on
16

17. What You Can Do - Volumes
•Do not send too frequently or randomly
•Send a steady, consistent volume
•Send from clean shared range if low volumes
•Create multiple interests
•Newsletter
•Marketing
17

18. Email Deliverability 101
•Complaints
•Bounces
•Spam Trap
•Volumes
•List Management
•Content
18

19. List Management
•Send to those who asked to receive your email
•People will complain if they don’t know who you are
and did NOT request the content
•Frequency and Relevancy
•Recipients should see what they signed up for and at
what frequency they signed up for it
•Meet their expectations of what they signed up for
•Know your subscriber
•Use personalization. Read their digital body language
•Segment & target

20. What You Can Do - List Management
•Ensure you don’t look like a spammer when delivering to
non-existent accounts
•Spammers batch and blast to the same list every time
•Old accounts are sometimes re-used as spamtraps 18-24 months later
Remove bad email addresses
•Reduce the amount of complaints against your IP
•Watch your spam unsubscribe reports regularly for trends
•Remove contacts that don’t click-through
•Ensures spam trap hits are low
•Don’t buy lists or buy from trusted sources
•Perform opt-in
•Send email confirmations
•Activity filters
•Remove inactive contacts from your database

21. Email Deliverability 101
•Complaints
•Bounces
•Spam Trap
•Volumes
•List Management
•Content
21

22. Content
•Content is still important, but not as much as in
the past when it comes to “sounding” like a spammer
•Content preview testing
•Relevancy
•Call to action
•Image to text ratio

23. What You Can Do - Content
•Personalization
>Inserting a person's name into an email increases open
rates by as much as 10%. - Jupiter Research (2006)
•Don’t include video, flash scripts or forms in email
>Most are blocked by email clients for security
>Spam filtering is more likely to occur because
of HTML coding than the words in your email.
- George Bilbrey, iMediaConnection (2006)
•Make sure your content is readable…
>On mobile devices
>In preview panes
>With images OFF
23

24. Content Preview Example
24

25. Why Do You Care?

26. W

27. Digital Body Language™
•Drives cleaner leads to website
•Who opened?
•Who clicked? Where?
•Who’s active? Who’s not?
•What’s most important to them?
•Segmentation and relevancy
•Nurture
•Integration
•Deliverability PLUS+
27

28. What else does NetGains do to help?
•Provide dedicated or shared IP’s/Branding
•Dedicated Delivery and Privacy Team
•24x7 Monitoring
•Automatically suppress / report hard bouncebacks
•Bounceback History Report
•Automatically suppress / report ISP based complaints
•SPAM Unsubscribe List report
•Suppress known bad spelling, known SPAM traps, high
•level complainers, FCC Wireless Suppression list
•Deliverability Testing through Return Path
•Email and Privacy Certification

29. What you can do
•Monitor IP reputation
•http://www.senderscore.org
• Create a FREE account
• Have you IP or Domain ready
•Monitor complaint rates and adjust
•Trend in your email applications
•Remove them
•Monitor hard bounce rates and adjust
•Are you being seen as spam or spammer?
•Keep lists clean and relevant
•Remove inactive
•Quality over Quantity

30. Getting to the Inbox

31. Contact Info
NetGains Technologies Pvt.
Ltd.
708 / 709, Corporate Avenue,
Sonawala Road, Near Udyog Bhavan,
Email: Sales@netgainstechnologies.com
Goregaon (E). Mumbai-400 063. India.
Website: http://www.netgainstechnologies.com

32. Q&A