|
Are your emails getting delivered to their intended recipients? A recent study by Return Path indicated that approximately 12 percent of all email messages sent to valid email addresses at the top nine ISPs and Web mail service providers did not end up in recipients' inboxes as intended. With bounce rates climbing, assessing and managing your unknown bounce problem is becoming a new area of focus.
What is an unknown bounce? When ISPs divert email messages to a junk or bulk-mail folder, a bounce error message is not generated back to you as the sender. Additionally, some ISPs accept delivery of all messages and then apply the spam/bulk-mail folder - again resulting in non delivery and no bounce message being delivered if the email is filtered.
There are three primary causes of emails not being delivered to valid email addresses:
- Full Inboxes - When a recipient's inbox is full, incoming messages will "soft" bounce.
- Overloaded Servers - On occasion, an ISP's server will become overloaded during periods of excessive volume, again resulting in a soft bounce.
- Spam Filters ("False Positives") - ISPs estimate that up to 50 percent of message volume is spam. To combat this huge volume of spam, ISPs use a variety of tools including content-based filters, black lists and volume-based filters.
The "False Positive" Problem
"False positive" is when a legitimate opt-in email is falsely identified as being spam or junk email because of content, volume or inclusion on a blacklist. Each of the following approaches correctly catches spam emails, but will also frequently filter legitimate opt-in emails:
- Content-Based Filters - Content-based filters block email messages that appear to be spam because they contain words, symbols and other indicators that identify the email as potential spam.
- Volume-Based Filters - Many ISPs use volume-based filters to counter high-volume demand from large junk mailers. If email messages exceed a certain volume threshold (bandwidth, messages per second or number of simultaneous connections from a given server), the email messages will be blocked or redirected to a junk mail folder.
- Blacklists - Blacklists are lists of IP addresses that are associated with known and alleged spammers. According to Return Path, there are more than 300 spam blacklists in use today by ISPs and system administrators - and virtually every legitimate marketer (or its email service provider) appears on one or more of these lists.
What Can Email Marketers Do to Increase Their Delivery Rate?
To reduce the false positive problem and increase your successful delivery rate, it is important that email marketers actively manage and reduce their bounce backs (see How To Reduce Email Bounces).
Secondly, consider utilizing the service of a company such as Return Path. The company provides three primary services:
- Message Checker - Send a test email to Return Path and in seconds you receive back an email that identifies aspects of your email that are considered "spam like." Even if your email's spam score is below the "filter point", Message Checker may identify some aspects of the email that should probably be modified for future mailings.
- Delivery Monitor - Return Path provides you with a seed list that you add to your database. After sending out your test or bulk email, you log into a report page that tells you whether your email was successfully delivered to various key domains, or if some emails ended up in the junk folder or are missing altogether. In a test with a client campaign, Return Path reported a problem with a second-tier email provider. Sure enough, we checked the bounce report and all 8 test emails from this ISP bounced in the test. We then searched the client's database and discovered that of the 77 email addresses with this ISP domain, 48 had bounced in the last campaign. In this case, George Bilbrey, General Manager of Return Path's Delivery Assurance Solutions division, informed us that this ISP frequently has server problems. The resolution? Send to customers with that ISP domain multiple times until they are successfully delivered.
- Blacklist Alert - This service alerts you via email when your mail server (or email service provider's mail server) has been placed on a blacklist.
Whether you send an eNewsletter to 500 clients and propsects or a promotional email to 500,000 ecommerce customers, increasing your email delivery rate is important to your business and bottom line.
|
