Email Marketing Best Practices

Running With the Wrong Crowd?

Your Email Service Provider's clientele can directly impact your email deliverability.

You might follow all the rules in your email marketing efforts, but have you ever wondered how the behavior of your Email Service Provider's other clients can adversely affect the deliverability of your emails?

Receiving junk mail from disreputable sources is an unfortunate yet expected hazard of owning an email account. However, sometimes even legitimate businesses show errors in operational procedure or a lapse in judgment by sending to email addresses they acquire through methods other than the traditional opt-in. In this case, the sender falls below the standards of behavior expected of a reputable source, and may have to accept the consequence of having its messages marked as SPAM.

Unfortunately, you might be sharing an IP address with this sender-therefore having your own delivery rates affected.

Your Brand, Your Reputation

Shared IP addresses are used by Email Service Providers (ESPs) to send email on behalf of many different clients. For senders who are new to email marketing, sharing an IP address with an established, respected sender lends credibility to their messages in the eyes of SPAM filters.

Also, because the proportion of SPAM complaints to total recipients is a factor in determining an IP address' reputation, senders with smaller lists are hurt much less by SPAM complaints if they send from a shared IP address. However, sharing an IP address with a reputable sender who receives an inordinately high number of SPAM complaints can outweigh the inherent benefits.

For every message sent from a particular IP address that is labeled as SPAM by a recipient, the probability of future emails from that IP address being designated as junk mail by email clients rises. To protect your brand's reputation, take the time to research the clientele of your current/prospective ESP to make sure you aren't being associated with other senders considered undesirable, such as those who use rented email lists or pre-checked email subscription fields on web site forms.

The Reputation of Your ESP

The thought of having your business' reputation tarnished by running with the wrong crowd on a shared IP is an unsettling one, but remember that most ESPs value their own reputations just as dearly.

Every time email recipients click their email client's variation of a "Mark as SPAM" button, a domino effect is set in motion. Not only does being classified as SPAM put junk mail filters on alert for future communications from the sender, but if the message was sent through an ESP, the negative impact affects all messages being sent from that particular IP address being used by the ESP. If sending from the IP address in question, the deliverability of your outgoing messages, through no fault of your own, would then be compromised.

For this reason, it is absolutely essential that you understand your ESP's position on clients whom they suspect may be sending unsolicited email through their system. If enough messages from the same ESP are marked as SPAM, popular email clients such as Yahoo! or Gmail may block messages from that IP address altogether until the Email Service Provider can prove that the offending client(s) will no longer be sending junk mail through its system.

Protect Yourself Through Research

When discussing your company with an ESP, make special note of their policies regarding acceptable vs. unacceptable practices. If their clients are allowed to use rented lists, for example, it's a safe bet that any of those rented lists are going to result in higher volumes of SPAM complaints. Subscribe to the ESP's email newsletter or those of its clients, which will be sent from one of their IP addresses, and see if your email client's SPAM filters take any action when the message arrives.

It's also a good idea to utilize online tools such as ReturnPath's SenderScore, which allows for more advanced research by analyzing IP addresses to indicate the expected deliverability and amount of SPAM risk associated with messages from those IP addresses. For senders who want to analyze an IP address they already own, Microsoft's Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) can be used to analyze your IP address to make sure your email reputation is where it needs to be.

Using an Email Service Provider can take your email marketing efforts to the next level by offering advanced features and in-depth reporting tools, but don't let the company you keep throw a monkey wrench into those efforts.

You've only got one reputation-don't jeopardize it by sharing an IP address with a sender that doesn't value its own.

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