Chip's Deliverability Tips

e-Consultancy Asks My Opinion - Yikes!

Below is an excerpt from my interview with Chris Lake, of e-Consultancy, www.e-consultancy.com

What are the biggest challenges facing email marketers today?

Email deliverability is a topic that is at the top of everyone's mind. 5 years ago most people were asking me about how to best format their email, or write copy, subject lines or calls to action. Today many are just trying to make it to the inbox.

The discipline is getting more complex. You now have CAN-SPAM in the USA, PIPEDA in Canada and the EU Privacy Directive to think about, and may have to take steps to make sure your program is compliant.

The story is the same on the technical front, as new standards seem to crop up monthly for authentication -- Sender ID, SPF or DomainKeys, as well as accreditation and reputation programs such as Bonded Sender, Habeas or Goodmail. With this much complexity, outsourcing email is becoming more critical.

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How do you think the market is going to evolve in 2006? What will be the key trends?

Two main trends have been creeping into the industry. First, you have an increasing need to authenticate your email using at least one of the popular protocols, SPF, Sender ID or DomainKeys.

Hotmail adopted SPF/Sender ID in 2005 and has begun showing a warning to end users if the Sender ID record check fails. They have said that eventually the lack of authentication will drive filtering. In fact, having a valid SPF/Sender ID record now will reduce your chance of a false-positive bulk folder at Hotmail or MSN.

The second trend is the rise of sender accountability, via sender reputation and scoring systems, such as Bonded Sender, Habeas and Goodmail Systems CertifiedEmail. These systems are intended to improve the email equation for both senders and receivers.

Good senders, with low complaints are able to capitalize on their "good behaviour" by being accredited by one of these firms, providing them with deliverability guarantees.

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Deliverability seems to be the single biggest concern for the majority of marketers. What tips do you have to help increase deliverability?

Tip 1: "The Deliverability Golden Rule: Send only email to others as you would have email sent to you." It seems silly, and a bit basic, but it is the best way to sum up how to steer clear of most issues that could affect your deliverability.

The number one driver of blocking is complaints. Avoid the complaints and you avoid most everything. Then you just have to focus on content, which is really just trial and error if you have the right testing tools. We use our own Content Detective to look for spam-like words, phrases, and HTML, then weed them out before sending.

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We've just gone through the painful process of securing Bonded Sender status, and still have no clue as to why we were blacklisted by Hotmail during 2005. Aren't ISPs accountable to companies if they choose not to deliver email?

I think that you could easily argue that ISPs' number one accountability would be with their users - protecting them from spam and other bad things.

Hotmail is sensitive, again, to complaints when they issue a block. They monitor averages for all senders, so they maybe made a mistake on your email (a false positive block or junk folder), but they probably saw a pattern on their end that was similar to what they see from spammers. Also, were you authenticating with SPF or Sender ID? This should reduce the chance of a false-positive at Hotmail and MSN.

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How should companies running in-house email campaigns deal with ISPs, in the event of deliverability problems?

First, don't attack. Find the correct contact on their website, or at last resort send an email to their postmaster, and politely ask what they saw on their end that triggered the block? In many cases, just by reaching out they'll remove you. Spammers don't contact ISPs. Second, take their feedback and see if you need to modify your name capture policies to meet their recommendations.

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What are the key factors that govern open rates?

Though our recent study shows that open rates are decreasing due to image blocking at ISPs, click rates have held constant. Driving opens has most to do with your subject line, from address and brand, and the quality of your communication.

Also, are your emails anticipated by the recipients? If not, they won't open them. Always brand your subject line, and provide a reason to open your email. "April 2006 Newsletter" won't cut it anymore.

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How can companies encourage recipients to whitelist their email?

Make it part of your name capture process. Have an "add to address book strategy". Ask the subscriber to add your email address to their address book or safelist, and also at the top of each email. This will get you around almost all filters at major ISPs and desktop mail clients.

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What is the percentage share of the main email clients, eg Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc?

The top 3 - AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo make up nearly 60% combined. Gmail is still only about 1-2% of a typical B2C list.

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How can data gathered from email campaigns be used to improve a company's understanding of its customers? (ie using email as a behavioural data capture tool)

Behaviour is really the number one thing to monitor and use to your benefit for remarketing. What are they clicking on? What are they buying? When are they buying?

Each email is a chance to learn as buyers self-select their interests just by interacting with your email. Also, email surveys are a great way to get more pointed data on an audience, and to help fill out a subscriber's profile.

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Do you have any ROI metrics related to the adoption of personalisation and segmentation? What are the main trends in this area?

Relevance really goes beyond just adding a personal greeting to an email. The gains can be 10% or more for a very relevant/targeted email. For example, we have a client that focuses on ticket sales for second-tier concerts and festivals. They use the data I gave them on "music interest" at the time I signed up to know they should send me information on jam and jazz bands (my preference), but not for other genres of music. Then, they customize each communication using our dynamic content engine.

We also have Scotts Lawn Care that is using up to 70 attributes on each customer to customize an email communication helping them with lawn and garden tips customized to their region of the US, or world.

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You have a lot of experience in offline direct marketing. What can email marketers learn from old school DM techniques?

It's funny - most of it applies. What I would recommend to offline marketers choosing to do email, is use the same logic to select your list! Just because email is very low cost, doesn't mean you should mail everyone on your list.

The fact that email is inexpensive has lead much of the DM community to discontinue their list modelling and segmentation, which is really just as important for email as it is to the offline direct marketer.

Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value are still the most important metrics to look at. Also, multi-media is a must. Using email to support an offline campaign, remind the recipients that they just received a new catalogue, etc. is very effective.

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What do you make of the email charges proposed by AOL/Yahoo?

The media has been largely confused by this one. CertifiedEmail is largely a good development, though its impact as of yet isn't fully known. Goodmail Systems CertifiedEmail is really a "new class" of email. Think 3rd class mail vs. FedEx. Why shouldn't guaranteed delivery and a trust stamp cost money?

This is a new type of email for which many senders, especially those sending "high-value" email, or critical transactional email, will be willing to pay. The status quo really doesn't change for other senders who choose not to "stamp" their email with CertifiedEmail, or don't have low enough complaints to qualify. They will continue to get the service they received before the Goodmail/AOL/Yahoo agreement.

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Can you name five companies that are best-in-class when it comes to email?

There are hundreds that are doing email well right now - though that is still just a drop in the ocean. I still like Amazon because I only get an email when it is relevant to my music tastes.

Also, a client of ours, Home Depot, does a fabulous job of segmenting their list based on interest and engagement level. Subscribers that don't open or click for awhile will gradually see fewer offers, or will enter their reactivation program. If they don't reactivate, they are removed from the list. This kind of active drive towards relevance and list hygiene is the absolute best practice any mailer can pursue.

Opt-in Appends Anyone? Please!?

As a deliverability executive I’ve made the decision to prohibit any appended lists from the ExactTarget system, unless they have used an “opt-in” method for the permission pass (meaning after the addresses have been matched to the client’s database).  We do this because no true “permission” can exist with a typical opt-out append, leaving the sender open for hitting spamtraps, and eventually bulk folders or blocking.

I’ve been pushing for this for awhile, but the list industry needs to respond with a legitimate package for providing true “opt-in” append, rather than the same old opt-out appends that can cause so much problem. Unfortunately, the list append industry has thus far preferred the latter – which they believe does a better job of lining their pockets with cash.  They might be right for the short-term, but I argue that there is a lot of opportunity for a list append vendor who chooses to take the high road. From a marketer’s perspective, I’d much rather pay a premium for a customer that actually asked for my campaigns, than save money on names and teeter on the edge of legitimate permission.

Business Card in Hand Doesn’t Mean “Opt-in”

The business card has long been an important instrument to a salesperson attempting to build their network, and in turn, their success. This was true long before email marketing came to be, though the collision of the two hasn’t always been pretty. Big surprises are ahead for the unwary salesperson (and their company) who don’t carefully manage their contacts derived from business cards.

What’s the problem?

According to Jupiter Research, the average b-to-b delivery rate, not counting bounces, is 89%. What factors are driving businesses to block or eat emails at such a rate? In addition to the general rise in spam, the business community in general is to blame. At least in part, I think it has to do with the poor way that many businesses have managed their B2B lead acquisition campaigns. In many cases, a large part of some companies’ prospects come from personal meetings, tradeshows, and other events where business cards change hands. This makes sense. But what doesn’t make sense is just adding all of the email addresses derived in this manner to the company marketing database and beginning to send weekly sales pitch emails.

How you get the card makes a difference.

Certainly the way you capture the business card has a lot to do with how you might use it. If it is captured in a face-to-face meeting with a handshake, then you’ll have implicit permission from that recipient to contact them at least once via phone or email and try to strike up a conversation, or spark his or her interest in what you’re selling. However, if the card was merely placed in a fishbowl at your booth for a chance to win something, then you’ll be treading up hill a bit. In this situation, it should be only one email only asking the recipient to opt-in, sign-up, fill out a trial form or something else before you can communicate with them again.

Approach it like a one-to-one business or personal email communication.

The golden rule applies here. Treat others how you would want to be treated yourself! With personal or one-to-one business email you don’t harass someone every week until they yell at you to go away. So why would you get a business card, then add it to your marketing database and force the recipient to unsubscribe if they want to be removed from further communications? Let’s be serious. Respect the wishes of your potential clients and you’re more likely to get a sale over time, and less likely to do you, your brand and your deliverability some measure of damage.

Capture date and time in your database.

The ability to prove you have permission to email a name is critical. Ensure you keep a record of the date and time that you captured an subscriber’s opt-in in your CRM database or contact file.  If captured online, capture their IP address if possible.

Permission marketing is the only way to improve the reputation for business to business email.

Does Sending Domain Impact Deliverability?

Email recipients put more weight on who the email is from than any other item when choosing which emails to open, which to delete and which to complain about.

Our “from address” testing shows an increase in open rates and click-through rates when the from name, from address and subject line are appropriately branded.  It also shows a reduction in spam complaints.

An Email Service Provider (ESP) should provide you a choice of how your from address is managed. Possible options for XYZ Brand include:

Option 1: news@xyzbrand.com

Option 2: xyzbrand@xyzbrand.com

Option 3: news@xyzbrand.espdomain.com

Option 4: xyzbrand@xyzbrand.espdomain.com

In options 1 and 3 above, the “name side” of the email address (left side of the @ symbol) isn’t branded. This is the first item I’d recommend testing in your business. We recently changed to option 2 (a branded email name) for several clients based on statistically significant tests showing a response increase and a complaint reduction when compared to option 1.

Options 3 and 4 are typical implementations with an ESP. Both options utilize a “sub-domain” of the ESP (espdomain.com), enabling the ESP to more easily support reply mail management or manage DNS issues such as Sender ID or SPF authentication (since they maintain control of the root domain).

How does using a different email domain from your own affect response rates and complaints?  The jury is still out. However, a recent Gartner survey of 5,000 online buyers found that more than 1 million consumers were scammed out of $925 million in 2004 because of phishing attacks. Think that makes consumers aware of the brands their emails come from? Of course it does.

If consumer reactions to spam and phishing are any indication, it would seem the best solution is one that doesn’t obfuscate your brand in any way. Leverage your asset and use your name in your from name, from address and subject line.

MI & UT Registries: Right Idea, Wrong Laws

Michigan and Utah aimed to protect children from objectional email content with their new "Child Protection Registry" laws, initially scheduled to take effect on August 1st, 2005. Problem is, these new state laws are fraught with security and compliance issues that likely will increase spam for children -- not slow it. Plus, as usual, this will harm legitimate businesses only (both in terms of time and money), but won't touch spammers who ignore laws anyway.

This article in USA Today agrees: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2005-08-21-email-children_x.htm

First, let me say I love the idea of being able to protect minors from email content regarding alcohol, tobacco, porn etc., because we all know they see too much of it these days -- and the web is at least partially to blame. Such is the idea behind the laws, and a stance against them clearly would be a tough platform for a legislator to defend. However, the implementation of them in MI and UT make it more likely that a spammer could get hold of a "children only" email list by "cleaning" a spamlist against the registry. So this law doesn't win on a security basis.

Second, the law also has failings on the basis of expense. Currently a mailer wanting to comply with these laws will spend 1.2 cents for each record on their file to scrub their list against both the MI and UT laws. This process would need to be repeated every 30 days. That means a company with even a modest-sized list of 100,000 names would spend $1,200 per month cleaning their list against the registry. Strike 2 on economics.

Finally, we have to look at the law from a legal standpoint. CAN-SPAM preempts any state law that has anything to do with spam or email. So, these laws should be preempted by CAN-SPAM. Strike 3.

With that said, compliance is now required as of 8/15 in Utah and is pending in Michigan. My recommendation for now is to comply if you are sending (or linking to) content minors shouldn't see. We are making tools available to our clients to do so since we may be living with these laws for some time.

The right way to reduce spam for kids?  Get behind email authentication technologies...

Phishing: A Call to Authenticate!

I recently saw these stats on the impact of Phishing (spammers fraudulently coaxing consumers into providing credit and other information). The time for email authentication technologies, such as Sender ID, SPF and DKIM has clearly arrived and is necessary to keep the email from its steady erosion in the eyes of consumers.

"--Survey: Phishing Increase In 2005 Is Eroding Confidence of Online Customers
The Gartner survey of 5,000 online buyers found that more than 1 million consumers were scammed out of $925 million in 2004 because of phishing attacks. In 2005, 34 percent of the world’s phishing sites are based in the U.S. China is home to 15 percent, followed by Korea at 9 percent of all phishing sites. The Anti-Phishing Working Group’s statistics show that active phishing sites increased by nearly 17 percent between April and May 2005. The group found 3,326 U.S. phishing sites in May 2005, compared with 1,142 in October 2004."

Sure SPF and Sender ID have some shortcomings with email forwarding, etc. But my recommendation is that all firms authenticate their email in some way this year -- especially true for businesses in the financial industry. The benefits have already begun to payoff with major ISP's all planning to check for authenticated mail in the near term. Get on board.

http://spf.pobox.com

www.anti-spamtools.org

http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys

Thanks for reading.

Chip

Has CAN-SPAM been effective?

I think there is some evidence indicating that CAN-SPAM is bringing down spammers. These cases, however, haven’t been as publicized as much as they need to be, giving spammers the feeling that they are untouchable. I agree with Trevor Hughes of the Email Service Providers Coalition – until the evening news shows these virtual thugs being carted away in handcuffs, no tangible deterrent is in place for spammers.

CAN-SPAM has primarily been an academic, often heady, debate that occurs in the conference rooms or chief counsel’s office of legitimate businesses. However, that debate has been good for the medium by triggering more control over the way email, privacy, permission and opt-outs are managed by businesses. Prior to CAN-SPAM, these key discussions did not take place. Although this is a positive outcome, most of the burden for CAN-SPAM is placed on legitimate businesses, leaving spammers untouched. Again, enforcement and funding for state attorneys general to track down spammers are key to turning the tide.

The FTC’s recent notice of proposed rulemaking does a good job of clarifying the law.  It identifies how the law treats emails with multiple advertisers and makes some strides for consumers by mandating that unsubscribe functions cannot exceed one page or require a log-in. However, their proposal to move the number of days for unsubscribe compliance from ten to three days again creates hurdles for legitimate businesses, but won’t deter spammers. Although the technology certainly exists to unsubscribe an address quickly, this can be difficult to implement in a large or distributed organization. A legitimate business certainly isn’t using the additional seven days to spam the unwilling recipient. Spammers, however, will ignore the rules altogether. 

The silver lining in all of this is pre-emption – provided that it will continue to work to keep poorly-written state laws off the books. The FTC does understand the problem as evidenced by their comments last year on the Do Not Email registry. This bodes well for balanced rulemaking in the future.

see you soon!

Chip

Will DKIM become Industry Standard?

Yahoo and Cisco are proposing DomainKeys as THE industry standard. How do I think that will affect marketers?

An encrypted authentication standard has a number of benefits for both senders and receivers – largely due to the level of confidence encryption provides to the receiving community. Encryption-based authentication, such as DKIM, provides the most protection available against domain spoofing by spammers.

DKIM has a good chance of becoming an industry standard, because it is being released as open-source code, but also because of the size of the community that supports it, including Yahoo, GMail, and likely Earthlink. Plus, the DKIM protocol was just submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) who had commented publicly last fall that they had a preference for an encryption-based solution. With IETF support, many fence-sitters on the receiving side are likely to move forward. The IETF meets at the end of July in Paris.

With that said, the technology inherent to DKIM also has its challenges. It requires new software (and hardware in most cases) for both senders and receivers, and causes performance reductions in send speeds and receiving speeds. So even though it is a “better” long-term solution (that Microsoft has hinted they will also eventually embrace), it will still be some time before a majority of the sending and receiving community are supporting DKIM.

ExactTarget will continue to support all authentication techologies, as we believe it is for the good of the medium. Our clients are rapidly becoming SPF and Sender ID compliant, and many are likely to take advantage of our DKIM offering this fall.

'till next time,

Chip

Opt-out Compliance -- Is 3 Days Enough?

In their latest “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” (NPR) the FTC contemplates CAN-SPAM’s current 10-business-day unsubscribe policy and, based on comments from emarketers and the anti-spam community alike, recommends we move it to three (3).

Is three business days enough time? It’s hard to say. But let’s look at the issue from three different vantage points: that of the technologist, the anti-spammer, and the Fortune 500 marketer.

The technologist says: “Yes, of course three days is enough! The bulk of unsubscribe requests we, and the lion’s share of marketers receive, come via the web nearly instantaneously. Certainly it isn’t inconvenient or difficult to make this happen. It is basic web technology, that, when linked to a customer database, can immediately change the ‘status’ of a subscriber such that they won’t ever receive email again.” 

The anti-spammer says: “10-days is a ridiculously long time to allow a spammer to continue to spam you. This continued abuse is unnecessary, and can easily be avoided with technology that legitimate companies will use.”

The legitimate email marketer from a Fortune 500 company most likely is empathetic to this view – in part. However, they are well aware of the complexities of their organization that may work against their ability to comply with the shortened opt-out timeframe. The answer on whether or not three days is enough will largely depend on the company, the complexity of its operations, the number of employees, the quantity of email addresses under management, its use of 3^rd parties for marketing, and the number of physical offices or locations from which they do business.

Take, for example, the multinational corporation with operations in 3 states, 15 countries, and 5 different consumer and business product lines all marketed via email under the brand of the parent company. Under CAN-SPAM, such an organization is the “sender” of an email when they initiate an email AND their products or services are advertised in the message. The revised rules would require them to manage opt-outs across their enterprise in just 3 days. Compliance will require not only state-of-the-art technology, but also a coordinated communication effort to manage compliance between divisions. For example, when a national email campaign is sent by one division, the email address of customers that choose to opt-out from the email must be populated to the database, then linked with a company-wide database, potentially with millions of records.

This is possible with current technology, but what if the computer and communications infrastructure isn’t up to speed at a company? What if it takes more than a few days to propagate this data due to typical processing speeds? What if the Paris division is on a different system? Different database? What about opt-outs taken via the phone? Via the mail? Via an inperson meeting? CAN-SPAM doesn’t have a volume minimum for compliance. Just one email sent to a person who had unsubscribed 4 days ago would be a federal violation.

Will most companies be able to comply with most requests in the time period? Yes. Does technology exist for managing unsubscribes across a complex organization? Yes to that too – in fact ExactTarget’s Enterprise product satisfies this need. 

The better question may be: “isn’t the current 10-day standard good enough?” Isn’t it more important to ensure companies are complying in the first place? Wasn’t CAN-SPAM targeting spammers anyway, not legitimate businesses? Spammers aren’t going to pay attention to unsubscribes anyway. Legitimate marketers will. Also, a legitimate marketer isn’t going to see an unsubscribe and say “Oh oh, just 10 days left to spam that guy. Let’s crank up the spam machine!” Such a notion is ludicrous, yet that is what the proposed rule change is based upon. Who does the change hurt? Unfortunately it hurts legitimate, if complex, enterprises rather than the spammers it aims to penalize.

Marketing at the Roxbury

Get known. Get invited. Build Relationships.

Remember the movie “A Night at the Roxbury?” Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan, resplendent in their colorful, silk suits, gold chains, and perfectly-teased hair, try to find a dance partner by gyrating their hips at any unwilling female they can find. Then, when rebuffed, they congratulate themselves and move on to the next dance partner (er, um – victim). Funny right!? As silly as this strategy is, it is not all that different from the approach many companies still use for their email programs.

The “Night at the Roxbury” boys failed in their attempt to win a dance partner each time because they were never “invited” in – rather they barged in assuming their “good looks” and smooth dance moves would win the ladies over. Is this any different than a flashy, yet uninvited email? Of course not!

The lesson is that it doesn’t matter how tasteful or appropriate you think your suit (or email) is, or how closely the nightclub (or list) matches your target, you’re not going to get a response unless you’re invited in. That's what makes permission marketing so powerful -- focusing on building and enhancing relationships.

In 2005 building strong email relationships is more important than ever since many email programs provide distinct deliverability and rendering advantages when the email sender’s from address is in the recipient's “address book” or “safe sender list.”

The benefits of having your email “from address” already in the recipient address book or safe sender list has taken on new importance with recent email software releases: AOL 9.0, Gmail, Hotmail, as well as Outlook 2003 and Outlook Express (when XP Service Pack 2 is installed). All of these programs have resorted to image suppression, and in some cases link suppression, for all “unknown” email senders. In most cases, however, they provide preferred delivery (often around filters) and display images and functioning links for all senders in the address book. The message? Get known. Get invited. Or, have your email moved to the “junk” folder or ignored.

How do you get invited to the dance? Here’s what I recommend to maximize your email delivery, display, and response:

1. When you capture email subscribers on your Web site, add a note to the subscription “thank you page” asking your subscribers to add your email address (youremail@yourcompany.com) to their address book.
   
2. At the top of each email you send, remind the subscriber to add your email address to their “address book or safe sender list.”
3. Always capture an opt-in for every subscriber and pay attention to click data to ensure your email content is driving interest with your readers.

With 20% - 50% of a typical email list being made up of AOL 9.0, Hotmail, or Outlook readers, paying attention to these tricks can have a real impact on your inbox delivery rates, email display, and readership.

P.S. - A special thanks goes out to Seth Godin, whose thoughts on "how to get married..." in his book “Permission Marketing” sparked the idea for this article.