The Email Wars

Reputation Rules:

What is Reputation?
1. End User Complaints: hit the junk buttons, sends to abuse@
2. Unknown User Rate: an Account that does not exist at a domain.
3. Spam Traps or Honey Pots: Accounts that have NEVER opted into any newsletters.
4. Sending Infrastructure: There is a Checklist of 40 things that ISPs look for - Wish I could type it all out for you.
5. Sending Permenance: If your email frequency is not even or it is bursty then it is a flag for ISPs. Balancing out your volumes and sending schedules helps.

Des Cahill, Haebas
ISP Perspective: 99.95% of all email senders are spammers (now that is a nice look at things)
There are 200 million IP addresses around the globe that are sending emails.
They see about a 20% non delivery to the inbox on average for all good email marketers. (makes us feel good to be well above average).
Your Reputation is driven by: Your Mailings, other departments in your org’s mailings, mailing that go out from your affiliates or partners.
No matter what you are using, you need to be looking at using an online reputation monitoring system.

Delivery is not the MAIN problem in email if you are following best practices.

Email 2.0 is about tigheter data integration and not widgets and applications.

John Ouren: Goodmail
He thinks that complaint rates driven by users will be the biggest influence on delivery at ISPs. ISPs are going to be watching closer and listening better based on user feedback. (This drives the question in my mind if 25% of people are using the Report This buttons to get off a list instead of unsubscribing using the system, how will this impact delivery? Seems to me we need a serious consumer education campaign in partnership with the ISPs.

What is the ecomonic cost if it is not getting to the inbox? If you images aren’t loading? If you are not getting delivered period? Can you measure it? Do you know how?

Email is the most effective and highest ROI marketing you can be doing.

Charles Stiles: Postmaster AOL

You should not be having a delivery problem. This is due to the fact that you are not using best practices. They have a simple list of questions that we actually ask ourselves most of the times.

If you are trying to use tricks to get your mail delivered, we will consider you to be a non legit mailer. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it is a duck…..

QA:

Who can help us?
Many of the ESPs are using the above speakers tools (eROI uses ReturnPath). If you or your ESP is not, you can contact them direct for audits and issue mitigation services.

How do my partners impact my reputation when they promote our products in their mailings.
AOL: we not only look at IPs but also at factors like domains, patterns, frequency, how often to your messages get read, how often are they reported, content, recipient validilty. Think about a FICO score based on all these factors.

You need to be aware of everything that is happening with your IPs daily and how others are using your domains in their emails. Controlling how your domains might be used can be hard.

Charles: Report this as Junk button
When a consumer uses it they need to be removed from your lists. Use the Feedback loops, If you continue to mail to them, they will most likely hurt your AOL reputation.

They tried to use some education to the consumers about how to use this button. Not sure what impact it had.

What we (AOL) needs to do is to habe a accredidation system that we can use for all emailers to enter into with us so we know who is going to be sending what to our subscribers. (I think that there needs to be a standardized system for all ISPS to use together. There needs to be some standards set and agreed to by the ISPs as to how they would like marketers to work with them.

List maintenance is really important to delivery. If there are people that are not reading or interacting with your emails, why not remove them?