Commentary
A Daily Checklist For Deliverability
- by George Bilbrey , Op-Ed Contributor, July 7, 2010
Achieving high levels of deliverability requires the same sorts of diligence that improving your time on a 10K race does. Like improving a race time, it doesn't require genius, just diligence. The following is a list of tasks that someone in your organization should perform every day.
I've pulled this list from practices of the account managers at my firm, Return Path. For the purposes of this list I'm assuming you send email every day, even multiple times per day. Marketers that send less frequently can adjust how often they perform these tasks accordingly.
First set of checks: Are you having any delivery problems?
After that first cup of coffee in the morning, the first thing to check is whether you have any urgent delivery problems. There are three methods that deliverability professionals frequently use to measure delivery problems:
Review "delivered" rates trends by receiving domain from your MTA (mail server) -- Most mail servers and ESPs will provide a report that shows "delivered" rates for your account. This is based on the response codes by receiving mail servers. Although the report will likely indicate that the mail is delivered, all the mail server can actually tell you is that the messages were accepted for delivery.
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Review inbox placement rates from your
seedlist -- Data from your mail server can only tell you whether or not mail is accepted for delivery and not what happens after that. To find out if mail is discarded or placed in a bulk
mail folder, a seedlist is a great tool to find problems after mail acceptance. Review the results from your seedlist to see if your messages have been placed in a bulk mail folder or have been
discarded after acceptance.
Review trends in open and click rates by receiving domain -- If you have a delivery problem at a particular domain, you will usually find that open- and click-rate trends will drop from previous levels. Many ESPs and campaign management systems will have the ability to view open rates and clicks by receiving domain.
Second Set of Checks: Are there problematic trends in reputation?
If you are in the happy situation of not having any urgent deliverability issues, the next step is to review trends in reputation to see if there might be any upcoming delivery issues based on reputation. Over 80% of delivery problems are based on the reputation of the sending mail server. A few things you might want to check would include:
Summary reputation score -- There are several places to check the overall sending reputation of your sending IP addresses. The two that I tend to check the most are Senderbase (www.senderbase.org) and Sender Score (www.senderscore.org). On Sender Score, a declining score or a score that is below 50 indicate that you should spend some time diving into the specific metrics that make up the score. These include...
Complaint rate -- Review the overall trend of number of messages when a subscriber hits the "report spam" button relative to the number of messages accepted for delivery at that domain. You can get these complaint messages by signing up for feedback loops that are available at Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Comcast and other top ISPs. If you see a spike in complaints, your next step will be to figure out what has changed. New data source? Increased frequency? New mailing programs?
Unknown-user rate -- Most mail servers and ESPs can give you a report that shows the number of bounced messages that were going to "unknown users": dead addresses. A high unknown-user rate (in excess of 5%) is frequently correlated with deliverability issues.
Unsubscribe rate -- Are you seeing an increase in unsubscribes? This could be an indication of future problems as well.
Blacklists -- There are a lot of blacklists out there. However, there are only a small handful that matter. This can be an easy metric to monitor,as there are a variety of free blacklist checkers on the market. Just remember that it's not the kiss of death if you are on some blacklists. If you are on a blacklist, review your mail server log files to see if you find a reference to that blacklist. If you find a lot of blocks notices that reference that blacklist, you'll know to start worrying.
In future installments, we'll discuss what to do if you have a delivery problem.
What's on your checklist? Please let me know with your comments below.
Another solid article, George! But let's get to the heart of the matter. George states that over 80% of delivery problems are based on the reputation of the sending mail server - never mind that I think the true percentage is 95%. So what's a marketer to do?
Put the semantics aside and focus on the underlying problem. Deliverability problems are caused by problems with the underlying list, which result in high complaint rates, unknown user (i.e. bounce) rates, and spam trap hits. To solve this problem, vet your data very carefully as it comes in the door, remove bounces sooner rather than later, and hygiene your file on a regular basis to ensure your bounce/spam complaint/spamtrap rates stay under the radar.
Email list hygiene might not be the sexiest place to invest some of your marketing budget but it will certainly earn you the highest return.
Great article!
We also monitor Complaint trends on a daily basis to be able to pro-actively find indicators of messaging abuse amongst our customers.
However, about the statement "80 or 95 percent of delivery issues are due to MTA reputation" I do not fully agree. My view on this is that indeed reputation is key but engagement is gaining territory fast in the deliverability process.
Good comment from Bill as well on lyst hygiene which should be priority number one for marketers !
One thing that should be reviewed in your daily checklist of deliveribility is user engagement with the emails that you send.
The reason that you want to measure engagement in your daily checklist for delivery is because ISPs are looking more at the email recipient actions once they receive the email. If a large number of their users are not opening, clicking or engaging in the emails that they receive from a particular vendor it can be looked at by the ISPs as email SPAM since no one is reading or interested in these emails.
If these things are looked at daily and you see a trend, you can act quickly before the ISP does because once they do, if can and will effect your future email deliverability.
In the last year or two ISPs have been looking at user engagement with more scrutiny then they did in the past.