« What Agency Owners Want | Main | The Secrets of Email Deliverability Unveiled (Part II) »

The Secrets of Email Deliverability Unveiled (Part I)

February 8, 2007

I attended Return Path's Seattle Workshop yesterday and learned a lot more about "Email Strategies that Increase Deliverability and Response" than I expected. They even had a guest speaker from Microsoft Hotmail (now branded Windows LiveMail) - Product Planner Brian Holdsworth who shed light on Microsoft's deliverability strategies. Apparently, over 50% of email browser use is MS Outlook, so maybe we should listen to what he has to say.

Here are my notes from the event (Return Path speaker):
Large ISPs getting significantly more email volume each day - recently showing 7.4billion emails per day.

What is Email Reputation?
1. Complaints (Informal)
2. High Unknown Users (unclean list)
3. Spam Traps (spamcop.com and other types of spam-catching email addresses)
4. Sending Infrastructure (IP address must be clean)
5. Sending Consistency (similar daily email volume)

Where you are sending from matters a whole lot more than domain reputation and email content.

Feedback loops are important - automatically unsubscribes people who complain. Added benefit of decreasing complaint rates up to 40% at Yahoo, Hotmail, when feedback loops are implemented by senders.

Strategies to Reduce complaints:

  • Welcome email upon subscription
  • Link to sample newsletter
  • Use double opt-in
  • Always respect unsub requests
  • Make it very easy to unsubscribe
  • Content relevancy is key
  • Conduct complaint analysis

Posted by ryan at February 8, 2007 12:55 PM

Comments

Post a comment




Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)