Chip's Deliverability Tips

2005 Predictions

Though I don’t have any predictions about J-Lo, “Bennifer,” or whatever in 2005, I’ve got lots of ideas of what will happen in the email space. It turns out that 2004 was a pretty interesting (and pivotal) year for email, and next year hopes to be much the same. At least if my predictions come true…

1. Email Sender Authentication Becomes Standard
2004 was the year that email sender authentication moved from just an idea to a set of proposals. Though there was mixed industry cooperation. SPF, Sender ID and Domain Keys gained followers with the help of major corporate backing from AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo, respectively.

Nearly 70% of the mail received at some ISP’s is now SPF compliant, and both Yahoo and Gmail are now signing outbound email with DomainKeys. 2005 will see not only consolidation of sender authentication standards, but also widespread adoption of them from the sending and receiving communities. By late ’05, a majority of major ISP’s will be using some form of sender authentication check on inbound email and use the results as a component of their accept/reject decision.

2. Sender Reputation Gains Prominence
Legitimate email senders will have more opportunity to prove themselves in 2005 by sending clean email. With authentication will come more responsibility on the senders and spammers will be forced into the light. Ultimately a sender’s reputation (for name opt-in name capture, consumer privacy, list hygiene, and unsubscribe practices) will drive delivery.

Hotmail already relies on Bonded Sender, a reputation program created by IronPort and TRUSTe, to help them make inbox or filter decisions on incoming mail. Other reputation providers such as CloudMark and Habeus will gain traction, as well as e-stamp pioneers GoodMail will all see further adoption of their technologies next year. If I have my wish, reputation systems will be used by all major ISP’s—though I’m not predicting they will (at least not by next year).

3. Address Book Strategy Critical to ROI
With Microsoft Outlook, AOL, Gmail, and Hotmail all using image and link suppression to reduce the impact of spam on their users, marketers will find that the presence (or lack there of) of their email “from address” in their subscribers’ address books more critical than ever to their ROI. Once in a subscriber’s address book (or safe sender list) as marketer can hope for not only improved message rendering and visible images, but reduced filtering and higher ROI.

4. Quality List Practices a Must, not an Option
In 2005 marketers will no longer be able to live by pre-Web name capture, trade and sell methodologies. What worked in the offline/catalog world for the past 30 years doesn’t fly when it comes to email—not even close. In fact, living by old name capture and hygiene practices can result in reduced ROI, increased customer attrition, reduced deliverability, and possibly litigation.

By 2007, Jupiter expects a typical user to receive double the number of opt-in emails than they do now. The increase will become evident for most subscribers in 2005 and more of them will treat messages that are irrelevant or come too frequently as spam. In an email environment driven by reputation, end user complaints could be the death of a company’s deliverability. Also, managing removal requests across an organization will continue to be critical to CAN-SPAM compliance—requiring more diligence and technology focused on enterprise data hygiene.

5. Relevance Drives Action
When email ceases to be relevant it becomes spam. Or at least that is what most users will tell you. 2005 will reward only companies sending relevant, timely messages. Though this trend has existed as long as email has, unwanted messages now make up the bulk of mail we each receive. Only by speaking to your subscribers with information that they care about can you hope to continually be “invited back.” Permission marketing, after all, is about dialog. Dialog needs to be two-way, so if you’re not listening, or observing, your subscribers behavior, interests, etc.—then expect to get a pink slip from them in 2005.

Agree, disagree or indifferent, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Brand Names Under Fire

Protecting your Brand in the New Email World Order

By Chip House, ExactTarget.

I received a phishing email today that made me smirk. The email pretended to be an “eBay Fraud Mediation Request,” saying that someone had used my account to make “fake bids” at eBay. Funny thing is, I don’t have an eBay account and the address the email was sent to, privacy@exacttarget.com, isn’t subscribed to anything—so it was clearly scraped from the web. The email then asked for me to provide my eBay account log-in information, which they would have no doubt captured for their own fraudulent operations.

This wasn’t a big deal to me, but it’s a big deal to those who believe scams like these (per www.anti-phishing.org, about 5% of recipients fall for this sort of scam), and an even bigger annoyance for eBay and other organizations that find their brands under fire.

Hopefully, sender authentication plans like SPF and Sender ID will begin to take hold with ISP’s soon, thereby allowing legitimate senders to better protect their brand names. But what about damage you do to your own brand via email? Don’t think it can happen? Think again. One type of blacklist gaining adoption is called a SURBL. These blacklists focus on domain names and links in an email, rather than IP addresses, as the key component of their filtering logic.

Historically, blocking has been done at the IP address level, affecting marketers with poor name capture policies or those that fail to capture proper opt-in permission. But an IP address isn’t intrinsically tied to a brand, whereas a URL and domain often is. With the increasing use of sender authentication and blocking technologies like SURBL’s, it is more difficult for a company to escape its past email missteps. A SURBL is a “Spam URL Realtime Block List,” and focuses not on message source, but message content—specifically URL’s used in unwanted email. For example, if the domain www.mycompany.com shows up on a SURBL it can destroy their deliverability and brand reputation. Also, since there isn’t a common procedure for removal of your URL, the problem can be difficult to correct.

Your company’s email practices may be creating skeletons in your closet that can damage your brand over time. Want to see if your brand is in peril? Plug your brand name into the “lookup” function on www.surbl.org and see what you get.

How does this affect you? My friends at Pivotal Veracity who offer phenomenal new technology for tracking email deliveries to top ISP’s recently completed a study on the topic of SURBL’s and deliverability. They found that emails containing a blocked URL were blocked entirely at 5 of the 20 ISP’s tested, while 7 ISP’s moved the email to the bulk folder. Also, their tests showed that emails with blocked URL’s were filtered to bulk or discarded at 50% of medium to larger enterprises. Pivotal Veracity’s new product, eBrand Monitor (also offered via ExactTarget’s Inbox Detective), helps companies detect blocking before it causes problems.

Still think sending unsolicited email can’t hurt your brand? Think again.

Until next time…

Chip