Mar
10
Our new episode of Reputation Radio is available now on iTunes.
In this episode we have just one segment -- a fun, free-wheeling discussion with Todd Herr the Postmaster at Time Warner Cable. Todd talks about the challenges he faces as postmaster at one of the country's top internet service providers, how he views sender reputation and what the email universe looks like from his side of the desk. Todd is very smart and very funny -- this is definitely a can't-miss episode.
Is there someone in the email universe you think we should interview? Do you have a question about email deliverability or sender reputation>? ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Mar
09
by J.D. Falk, Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is the leading email authentication technology, supported by major ISPs including Google, AOL, and Yahoo! (who invented its predecessor), popular mail server software like Sendmail, and many of the best minds in email technology. But if you peruse the archives of the IETF DKIM mailing list, or start up a conversation at MAAWG, it might appear that there's still a lot of disagreement about what a DKIM signature actually means.
Often, anyone attempting to describe authentication turns to analogies: a driver's license, or a license plate on a car, or a passport -- all saying that you are who you say you are, but not (by themselves) proving that you're trustworthy. The trust measurement is external to DKIM: a reputation score, or third-party certification status.
But what, exactly, is being trusted? What's being measured? ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Mar
05
By George Bilbrey
President
I have a difficult admission to make: I read a fair number of academic anti-spam papers. We are constantly on the hunt for ideas that can make the reputation systems that Return Path runs a little bit better. There are a lot of people doing some really clever stuff out there. There are a lot of people who are sure that they have the "Final, Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem" (FUSSP) which only requires everyone to change how they handle mail. Rarely, however, have I been as impressed with an anti-spam paper as "Spamlytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion" by a group of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Diego. More than anything, I love the audacity of their project.
A brief summary of the project ...Tell me more
Categories: Email Deliverability
Mar
04
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
Next time your executives ask you to increase email message frequency in order to boost short term revenue, take a moment to refresh yourself with the reasons why this is usually not a great idea - for your revenue, your brand, your email assets and, most importantly, your subscribers. Our friend Mark Brownlow does a great job of painstakingly explaining the impact of higher frequency in his post, "Email Frequency, Can you increase it safely?"
Here's the best answer you can give to this executive demand: "Great idea, Chief. Email marketing certainly is powerful! Let's focus on the highest opportunity subscribers this week (or day, or month) and send THEM more email. They will value it and appreciate it, and respond at a high rate. The rest of the file will be grateful we didn't crowd their inbox full of junk, and they will be more likely to respond to our next offer, which is relevant to them."
Then put on your segmentation hat and look at your data in order to match up promotions with the subscribers most likely to value them. Create some of these targeted messages once, and use them over and over as more subscribers move into these segments. That way, you optimize your resources, as well. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Mar
02
By George Bilbrey
President
It's pretty well established by deliverability lore that complaint rates do matter for inbox placement. However, I haven't seen good quantification of where the thresholds for good vs. bad delivery rates are. My colleague John Young and I pulled together some sample analysis to see if it was possible to quantify complaint thresholds at two different ISPs: AOL and Yahoo.
Yep, complaint rates really do matter.
We took a look at the complaint rates from the Sender Score Reputation Network for IP addresses that had been mailed into our delivery monitoring tool, Mailbox Monitor. The complaint data comes from about 20 ISPs, hosting companies and security providers that are part of our network. The inbox placement data is from the over 1,000 customers that currently use Mailbox Monitor (we eliminated those campaigns that had been sent from multiple IPs).
The graph below shows you what we found ...Tell me more
Categories: Email Deliverability
Feb
25
John Young, Ph.D.
Director of Product Analytics
We encourage receiving networks to share data with us at Return Path so that we can in turn provide solutions and information that will help their filtering decisions. We believe that you can learn from another company's mistakes and success. And, when working in a collaborative environment, receiving networks can learn from cases where one system accepted mail that another system was blocking erroneously or vice versa.
We decided to dig into our data to find out if Internet Service Providers (ISPs) treat IPs differently. We took a random sample of 400,000 IPs that attempted to send messages to four different receiving networks in early 2009. The ISPs used from our network consisted of two webmail providers, one cable operation, and a hosted business email provider.
By looking at IPs that mailed to all four networks, it became clear to us that receiving networks make extremely different decisions about how to treat those mailers. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
By George Bilbrey
President
I spent much of last week at the Messaging Anti-Abuse Work Group (MAAWG) meeting in San Francisco. As usual, MAAWG was a great chance to catch up with the folks we work with both at Email Service Providers and ISPs. Here's the conversation, I heard several times over at the conference between folks from ESPs:
ESP A: How is business?
ESP B: Great, we had the strong fourth quarter and Q1 is looking good
ESP A: Yep, us too.
The other thing I've heard from a lot of email marketing sources is that they are seeing a lot of customers that are new to the market - that are just starting their email marketign programs. ...Tell me more
Categories: Email Deliverability
Feb
24
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
This week's email best practice is: Know Your Sender Score
Wow, was that a quick six weeks or what? We are in the home stretch now ...
In this final week the focus is on figuring out if all our hard work is paying off. Our six-week program was focused on practices that will improve your email sender reputation. This improved reputation will lead to improved deliverability.
So how do you know if it's working?
One quick metric that you can use to assess your reputation right now is your Sender Score. The Sender Score is generated from the Return Path reputation data network which aggregates information from 85 million mailboxes at a variety of ISPs, spam filtering and security companies. The better your Sender Score, the better your email sender reputation. The score is on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is the worst, and 100 is the best possible score.
The information incorporated into the Sender Score includes ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Feb
18
With Yahoo!'s recent adoption of Sender Score Certified, the names that rely on Sender Score Certified now read like a who's who of the email receiving universe - top ISP's like Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Cox; top filtering solutions like Spam Assassin, IronPort Systems and Cloudmark; plus thousands of top universities and Fortune 500 companies.
The Sender Score Certified program is a network of trust based on email reputation. Exemplary emailers agree to follow best practices and uphold the highest standards for email behavior. They submit themselves to a rigorous inspection of their sending practices. In return, major email receivers agree to look favorably upon emails sent by those senders.
This program provides the incentive for both sides of the email universe to do the right thing ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Feb
17
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
This week's email best practice is: Send More Relevant Messages
Creating the kind of relevancy that improves response and retention is pretty straightforward. All you have to do is offer choice, segment your file, tailor the creative and listen to your subscribers.
The problem is that creating relevancy under a broadcast email marketing approach is completely inconsistent. Broadcast email -the old batch and blast approach - is relevant to only a small portion of the file at any given time. There is a trifecta of penalties against any marketer using a broadcast approach.
1. The Recession. To beat down marketing costs, more marketers are sending more and more email messages. The clutter is overwhelming. And both consumer and professional buyers have less to spend overall and are making decisions to buy more slowly.
2. Social Media. Subscribers are spending less time in their inboxes and more time in other online, social communities.
3. The Cost of Fatigue. In email, there is a strict penalty for not being relevant: it's the "miss" behind your response rates and tracked via complaint rate, unsubscribe requests and (sometimes worse) your inactive rate. Each of these rises in direct proportion to how relevant your messages are.
You simply cannot afford NOT to be relevant. In the old days, and frankly, in a lot of other direct marketing channels like postal mail and online advertising, being only mildly relevant to a small portion of the file works. You can make your number and earn acceptable ROI. However, in email marketing ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
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