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Mastering Your Email Reputation: Seven Strategies for Improving WHITE PAPER | AugusT 2008 Best Practices in Email Marketing Mastering Your Email Reputation: seven strategies for Improving Deliverability Effective tips and best practices for safeguarding your email sender reputation in today’s ever-changing email environment PUBLISHED BY: StrongMail Systems, Inc. StrongMail Systems UK, Ltd 1300 Island Drive, Suite 200 Prospect House, Crendon Street Redwood City, CA 94065 High Wycombe, Bucks Telephone: (650) 421-4200 HP13 6LA Facsimile: (650) 421-4201 Telephone: +44 (0) 1494 435 120 Copyright © 2008 StrongMail Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of StrongMail Systems, Inc. STRONGMAIL and the STRONGMAIL logo are registered trademarks in the United States, other countries or both. All Rights Reserved. StrongMail Systems UK, Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales at Carmelite, 50 Victoria Embankment, Blackfriars, London EC4Y 0DX. Reg. No. 6398867. VAT # GB 925 07 6228. Trading Address: Prospect House, Crendon Street, High Wycombe, Bucks HP13 6LA. www.strongmail.com Table of Contents STRATEGY 1: MAINTAIN A CLEAN LIST .......................................................................1 Bounce Management .............................................................................................................1 List Hygiene ................................................................................................................................3 Feedback Loops ........................................................................................................................3 Spam Traps .................................................................................................................................4 STRATEGY 2: ADOPT EmAIL AUTHENTICATION .......................................................4 Forms of Email Authentication ............................................................................................5 Email Authentication Adoption ..........................................................................................5 STRATEGY 3: REDUCE COMPLAINT RATES ................................................................6 Relevancy ....................................................................................................................................6 Frequency ...................................................................................................................................6 Privacy Policy and Permissions............................................................................................6 STRATEGY 4: MONITOR YOUR SENDER REPUTATION .............................................7 Blacklists / Blocklists ................................................................................................................7 NANAE ..........................................................................................................................................8 SenderScore.org .......................................................................................................................8 SNDS .............................................................................................................................................8 Key Performance Indicators .................................................................................................8 STRATEGY 5: AVOID ALLIANCES WITH DISREPUTABLE PARTNERS ......................9 STRATEGY 6: VERIFY SETUP OF COmmERCIAL EmAIL SERVER .............................9 STRATEGY 7: RAMP UP NEW IPs SLOWLY ...............................................................10 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................10 ABOUT STRONGMAIL SYSTEms ................................................................................11 Whether you know it or not, ISPs constantly check your reputation as a commercial email sender and filter or block messages accordingly. Gone are the days when receiving domains filtered on content and keywords alone. In fact, according to Return Path1, more than 80 percent of delivery problems today are caused by the sender’s email reputation. Given the important role that sender reputation plays in getting your email delivered, you need to take an active role in ensuring that your practices don’t prevent your messages from reaching the inbox – or being blocked entirely. Promotional emails aren’t the only messages at stake. The delivery of business-critical transactional emails are also affected by your sender reputation. Put simply, you can’t afford to overlook this increasingly important component of email deliverability. While there isn’t one standardized formula that all ISPs use to assess your sender reputation, there are a number of metrics and attributes that play a “A study by Return Path critical role, including complaint rate, bounce rate, sending infrastructure, indicates that more and spam trap and blocklist inclusions. Understanding the actions and best practices that can have a positive impact is critical, and this whitepaper will than 80% of delivery outline seven of the most important strategies for measuring, managing problems are caused and maintaining your reputation as a commercial email sender. by reputation.” George Bilbrey, GM of Delivery Assurance, Return Path STRATEGY 1: MAINTAIN A CLEAN LIST List hygiene is one of the most important practices that you can engage in – both from a reputation and results standpoint. Sending to bad addresses not only skews your response rates, it is a core metric that ISPs use to determine your sender reputation. The following sections offer proven advice for maintaining a clean list. Bounce Management Bounce management plays a principle role in list hygiene, as it’s the primary mechanism for tracking and responding to the failure codes that you receive from ISPs and other domains. ISPs and other receiving domains issue these bounce codes to let the sender know why a message has failed, and very few follow any standard protocols. As a result, you need to ensure that you have a robust bounce management system that can automatically process and correctly categorize varying bounce codes, so that you can address the causes of those failures. 1 DM News, “Questions and Answers About Sending Reputation,” February 2008 1 Mastering Your Email Reputation: Seven Strategies for Improving Deliverability Copyright © 2008 StrongMail Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. SM-AP10808 When evaluating your bounce management system and practices, you will want to ensure that they allow you to overcome the following five challenges: 1. Capture All Data Streams. You need to capture all data streams, including asynchronous and synchronous bounces. While most bounce systems capture the immediate synchronous bounces, it’s equally important to capture asynchronous bounces, which can be delayed by hours or days. 2. Interpret Data. You need to process bounce data and correctly interpret the varying bounce descriptions that come from each receiving domain. If bounces are not properly identified or categorized, problems may go undetected and good records could be invalidated. 3. Organize Data. After acquiring the data, you need to organize it into logical categories, such as hard bounce, soft bounce, block and technical failure. By normalizing the data across ISPs, you can more accurately identify delivery problems. 4. Make Data Actionable. Once organized, you should be able to generate reports that make the data actionable in addressing the causes of failures. The reporting “Senders should should be user-friendly and available near real-time so you can easily and quickly take action to clean your list, adjust your targeting or modify other practices to improve exercise proper bounce your deliverability. management by 5. Update Rules Continually. Unfortunately, the dynamic email environment causes promptly removing ISPs to periodically update bounce codes, so you need to make sure that your rules addresses returned as are updated regularly to keep up with the changes. Verify that your bounce management system has a process for being continually updated with the latest permanent errors by an bounce codes and messages. ISP or other receiver.” Email Sender and Provider Coalition, “Principles of Email Sender Reputation,” April 2006 Challenge 1 Challenge 2 Challenge 3 Challenge 4 Capture ALL Data Streams Interpret Data Organize Data Make Data Actionable Asynchronous Bounces 554: Quota 452: 421: 452: 552: 421: 550: Violation Server Timeout Out of Storage Service Not 421: Busy Memory Exceeded Available Timeout Access 452: 421: Denied Server Service Not Busy Available Thousands of 450: 550: 450: 421: Mailbox Mailbox 421: 550: 552: 550: 554: 571: ISPs, Domains Full Relay not Relay not SPAM Spam not Quota Unsolicited DNS Permitted 550: Unavailable Too Many Failure User Errors Permitted Accepted Violation Junk Mail Unknown Mishmash of inconsistent, incomplete, 450: 550: 550: 450: 553: ever-changing failure codes and messages Mailbox Account User Mailbox Address Unavailable Inactive Unknown Full Unknown 452: Smart Bounce Processor StrongMail Delivery Reports Out of 550: Memory 554: Account No No Failures logically categorized 550: Account 552: Inactive Code Description Spam not Disabled 553: SPAM 571: for management reporting, Accepted XXX: Address Unsolicited No Code Unknown Junk Mail diagnosis and corrective action
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