Marketing Profs

Deliverability is overwhelmingly the greatest email marketing challenge. What can you do to make sure your marketing campaigns avoid the obstacles and get delivered for the highest possible ROI?

The major obstacles to email deliverability are lack of consumer trust in email, ISP blocking and emerging authentication standards. Consumer trust in email is under assault on two fronts:

1) Trustworthiness: Can I trust that this email is coming from whom it claims to be coming from?

2) Reliability: Can email be relied upon to deliver the communications I want, need and expect to receive?

How can we make email safe and trusted again?

Bringing Trust Back to Email

Underhanded tactics such as spoofing and phishing, as well as the larger spam problem, are the reasons for people not trusting unknown email and ISPs being forced to beef up their filtering process.

Many ISPs are adopting authentication standards such as Microsoft's Sender ID and Yahoo DomainKeys. These technologies provide a way to verify that an email server is authorized to send email for the sender's domain. Legitimate senders need to comply with these standards to ensure their mail gets through and that images and links are displayed properly. In fact, Microsoft recently announced plans to activate a user interface warning customers of mail that does not comply with the Sender ID standard.

Although systems such as these do catch spam, they can also be hurtful to legitimate marketers because they sometimes incorrectly flag legitimate email as spam (these instances are known as "false positives").

CAN-SPAM legislation is yet another major hurdle to overcome to get your mail delivered. In early 2004, CAN-SPAM drew a line in the sand between spammers and legitimate mailers. In addition to putting yourself at risk of legal repercussions, including the possibility of jail time, noncompliance will hurt your deliverability and puts your entire corporate brand image at stake. Developing a reputation as a spammer certainly will do nothing to increase your deliverability rates and thus your ROI and the overall efficacy of your marketing strategy.