Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

24 INFRASTRUCTURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
INFRASTRUCTURE
Page 24
It starts with reputation,
by J.F. Sullivan, Habeas
Thinking beyond deliverability,
by Ellen Siegel, Constant Contact
Page 26
CAN-SPAM, four years on, by
Jeremy Saibil, Campaigner
Page 28
E-mail authentication: It’s time,
by Al Iverson, ExactTarget
How marketers can prevent spam
complaints, by Ben Chestnut,
MailChimp.com
Page 30
Keep your e-mail safe from legal
challenges, by Zafar Khan, RPost
Questions and answers about
sending reputation, by George
Bilbrey, Return Path’s Sender
Score
Page 32
Spam finally has a definition, by
Jordan Cohen, Epsilon
Controlling messaging costs, by
Barry Abel, Message Systems
Infrastructure
E-mail delivery is no longer just about whether or not you get in
the inbox, as reputation systems and feedback loops have become
commonplace. All e-mail marketers must be fluent in the issues of
reputation, monitoring, CAN-SPAM, authentication, preventing spam
complaints, auditing e-mails and ISP relations.
It starts with
reputation
BY J.F. SULLIVAN
Vendors are doing their best to get marketers
to take seriously the issues of monitoring
and maintaining online reputation. Within the
once-tiny industry of
e-mail deliverability,
there are now more
companies springing up
to give you a snap-shot
of your online reputation
than photographers
following Paris Hilton.
Why is that?
In reality, much of
what people refer to as
J.F. Sullivan
Habeas
reputation is not new. It
has existed for years,
mostly in the form of anti-spam blacklist services.
As anti-spam techniques became more complex
and mature, the concepts of whitelists sprung up
as a form of positive reputation.
In more recent years, ISPs have also been
developing their own metrics for reputation in
the form of collected user complaints. This “feedback
reputation” has been dangled over the
heads of senders for years now, like a Sword of
Damocles ready to slice and dice the mail of any
sender flagged by the ISP’s users.
A number of anti-spam content analysis vendors
have also begun repositioning themselves as
being in the business of helping senders enhance
and improve their reputation through a variety of
add-on tools.
Lest anyone wonder, we at Habeas confess that
for the last several years we have been aggregating
and maintaining a reputation data network. Our
database contains reputation information on several
million receiving systems and networks, allowing
us to build a detailed picture of how senders
are perceived by receivers around the world.
If reputation is truly a lot of old processes
wrapped in a trendy new name, why all the
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
sudden fuss?
Simply put: Senders are beginning to lean more
and more heavily on reputation data in order to
make the kinds of delivery decisions that mean
life or death for e-mail marketing campaigns.
One of the events that crystallized the issue
was Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will
begin throttling the connections of new senders,
not by whether they were on a whitelist, but solely
by the established reputation of that sender.
Microsoft’s assessment of senders’ reputations
incorporates a number of factors, including individual
and aggregated views of sending volumes,
complaint rates and a variety of technical and
infrastructure characteristics, all measured and
assessed over time.
Why should you care about how ISPs view
your e-mail reputation? It really boils down to
whether you are interested in maintaining the relationships
you enjoy today with your customers.
In this new world of e-mail reputation, all the
old rules apply with regard to message content
and construction. But whereas you might have
found blacklists, whitelists and other reputation
information to be little more than an inconvenience
or an annoyance in the past, the future is
going to be very different.
Your customer relationships are going to start
with that reputation, or your customer relationships
won’t be relationships at all.
J.F. Sullivan is vice president of marketing at Habeas.
You can reach him at jfsullivan@habeas.com.
Thinking beyond
deliverability
BY ELLEN SIEGEL
According to the December 2006 ESPC/Ipsos
E-mail Survey, most consumers decide to
delete e-mails or report them as spam based on
their “from” and “subject” lines, and nearly 80
percent do so without ever opening them. Hence
it is critical for small businesses to understand the
importance of reputation and trust if they want