Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

30 INFRASTRUCTURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
Keep your e-mail safe from
legal challenges
BY ZAFAR KHAN
If your company does business transactions via e-mail, you’ll
need to be sure that business-critical messages are treated, well,
critically. While most e-mail users are not concerned about the
electronic record they have created, it can serve as a critically
important defense for business transitions, if properly managed.
Businesses must consider anti-spam laws, e-discovery rulings,
storage and retention of e-mails. Proof of e-mails for business
transactions are a must have, and companies are investing billions
of dollars to protect themselves. Analysts at the Radicati Group
estimate that the e-mail archiving market will hit $6 billion in
2010.
The good news is e-mail technology is catching up with the
evolving regulatory and business landscape. A case in point is
Great Lakes List Management, an Erie, PA-based provider of data
for direct marketers, and an RPost client. Because Great Lakes’
business model involves multiple companies — including direct
customers and list brokers — it experiences a sizeable time lag
between delivering services and getting paid for them. By sending
business files with a registered e-mail service, Great Lakes receives
a detailed electronic audit trail that proves precisely what e-mail
content and attachments were sent and received, by whom and
when. Armed with this information, the company can ensure it
gets paid for services rendered without hassle, and has the necessary
backup to demonstrate compliance with regulated/required
disclosures, such as privacy notices.
For companies that operate their business using e-mail, legal protection
is even more critical.
Provisions of electronic law and
recent court decisions underscore
the fact that electronic business
systems require proper transaction
documentation, and a reliable
recordkeeping management
system.
Here are a few ways you can
ensure your business is safe from
legal challenges:
■ Send business-critical e-mails
Zafar Khan
with legal proof of delivery and
RPost
content.
■ Archive your e-mails in a solution that’s easy to retrieve.
■ Prevent e-mail manipulation on the receiving end with encryption
tools.
■ Don’t save every single e-mail, just the business-critical ones.
Many e-mail service providers aim to ensure deliverability and
legally protect their e-mail users with value-added services, such as
proof of delivery and content with registered e-mail, e-contracting
tools, encryption, meta data cleaning and e-mail archiving capabilities.
Take advantage of the technology that is out there to cost
effectively and proactively protect yourself.
Zafar Khan is CEO and founder of RPost. You can reach him at
zkhan@rpost.com.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
Questions and answers
about sending reputation
BY GEORGE BILBREY
Astudy by Return Path indicates that more than 80 percent of
delivery problems are caused by reputation. But there is still
confusion as to what reputation is, where the data comes from and
how to manage your reputation for better deliverability. Below are
three common questions that
marketers ask about reputation.
1. What is a sender reputation
and how do ISPs and other e-mail
receivers monitor it? Your sending
reputation is made up of a
variety of factors, primarily complaint
rates, unknown user rates,
spam trap hits, infrastructure
issues and sending stability.
Spammers tend to do badly on
these measures. Your job is to not
George Bilbrey
look like a spammer by perform-
Return Path’s Sender Score
ing well on these measures. Every
major receiver has a slightly different way of determining and
measuring reputation. They begin with their own data — what they
see on their network. Some ISPs also use proprietary reputation
data aggregators to see how a sender behaves with other receivers.
2. How can I manage my e-mail reputation to ensure high deliverability?
It really comes down to the top five factors that are
most likely to get you blocked. These are:
■ Complaint rate: Isolating why your subscribers complain about
you is crucial to bringing this number down. We find the following
factors to be the most common: Weak or no permission; content
that isn’t valuable or relevant; too high or low frequency; and
subscribers’ inability to recognize the e-mail.
■ Unknown user rate: If you have a high unknown user rate you
need to review your bounce processing rules and make sure you
are removing “unknown user” hard bounces after two attempts.
■ Spam trap hits: You can see if you are hitting some spam traps
through Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services. Unfortunately,
while this and other publicly available tools can tell you if you have
spam traps, there isn’t any way to identify which e-mail addresses
they are. Instead, you need to isolate the parts of your list most
likely to harbor spam traps and suppress those parts of the list.
■ Infrastructure: There are specific ways that ISPs like to see a
mailing system set up in order to have some confidence that the
e-mail is legitimate. If you use a reputable e-mail service provider,
you shouldn’t have infrastructure issues. If you are sending your
own messages, you should consider reaching out to a deliverability
expert.
■ Sending stability: Once you have established a good reputation
for an IP address, don’t move to a new server.
3. How can I determine my reputation? There are a number of
public sources of reputation data. These include Microsoft’s
SNDS, DNSStuff, CipherTrust’s TrustedSource, Ironport’s
Senderbase, and Return Path’s Sender Score.
George Bilbrey is vice president and general manager of Return Path’s Sender
Score. You can reach him at george.bilbrey@returnpath.net.