Deliverability
Deliverability remains the number one concern for email marketers. Ensuring that emails are delivered to recipients' inboxes is a challenge that every email marketer must overcome as it directly affects every campaign metric. It is estimated that eight out of ten email marketers struggle with deliverability issues, yet few know what to do to monitor and solve the problem.
The first step is to correctly identify your delivery rate. To do this, you must take into account the number of hard bounces (caused by an invalid email address) and soft bounces (caused by a full mailbox), as well as messages that are filtered by ISPs and messages that are delivered to the recipients' junk mail folders instead of their inboxes. Many email marketing solutions only monitor hard and soft bounces, which give the users a false deliverability rate. It is of utmost importance to know the actual deliverability rate so you can properly identify the cause of undelivered messages and, therefore, find the correct solution.
Listrak's Deliverability Commitment
Listrak is committed to helping our clients solve their deliverability issues and avoid future problems. We provide the capabilities required to maximize the effectiveness of email marketing, and to help our clients maintain their standing as senders of legitimate mail. We offer a number of advanced deliverability services such as:
- Authentication Tools - We provide automated stamping and sending of messages as required by the Sender ID and DomainKeys (including cryptographic signatures, header insertion and protocol extensions), which verifies the domain of the sender. Messages that fail the authentication check are removed from the queue and reported as failures.
- Accreditation Tools - Our advanced accreditation tools provide distinct segmentation and classification for each of our clients so legitimate emails are not mistakenly labeled as Spam.
- Deliverability Policy Management - Listrak allows you to define and apply delivery policies at various levels, such as globally, per recipient domain, per campaign, per client, etc.
- Spam Score - Spam Score not only rates the message, it also gives detailed reports on the areas of the email that may present a problem so marketers can edit the message prior to sending it to the list. A low Spam Score greatly increases the deliverability of the message.
- Abuse Processing System - Listrak allows clients to view which users have mistakenly reported their email as Spam so they can immediately remove those individuals from their lists.
- Global Suppression System - Listrak's Global Suppression System is a useful tool for companies managing multiple lists. It automatically flags recipients across all of your lists when an individual unsubscribes. This allows you to remove them permanently from all future email sends from your company.
- By-ISP Deliverability Reporting - Listrak's ISP Delivery Report details your campaign deliverability performance at a glance by ISP so you can instantly see if you have a problem at a specific Internet Service Provider. This report is one of the most effective way to gauge and prioritize deliverability problems that may occur.
- Sender Score - Listrak has partnered with Return Path to offer an even greater level of deliverability protection through Sender Score Manager, which analyzes content, list, complaints, and sending infrastructure. This detailed methodology can increase deliverability up to 20%. We also offer Sender Score Monitor, which examines high-risk areas, such as campaign preview, reputation, and blacklist reports.
- Delivery Reporting - Listrak reports include delivery status summaries as well as categorized bounce reports. Statistics can also be retrieved on a "per job" basis so that you can analyze individual campaigns and assess the impact of different delivery policies, authentication methods, and accreditation services on delivery.
Deliverability, however, is not a one-way street. Email marketing vendors, such as Listrak, can only do so much to ensure the deliverability for our clients. Email marketers must make the investment in their own deliverability by understanding and properly managing their reputation in order to have the best deliverability possible.
How Reputation Impacts Deliverability
Email receivers use four specific components to measure the reputation of the sender. These include number of complaints, number of bounces, number of messages sent, and the size of the messages. If your reputation reaches a specific threshold, email receivers will begin to block messages from you.
There are several proactive steps you can take to ensure your company has a good reputation, including monitoring www.senderscore.com, maintaining isolation and transparency in your messages, and testing email campaigns prior to sending messages.
To learn more, download Listrak's Reputation white paper.
Listrak's Strategic Approach
Listrak's deliverability strategies include educating new subscribers on the types of email communication that will be sent to them, how often or when the communication will arrive, and what email address you will be using to send the message. Along with education and preference, email marketers need to ensure the hygiene of their lists, keeping their bounce ratio to an absolute minimum.
