Reputation and Avoiding the Junk Folder

Christopher Harris — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:41:00 GMT

A client recently asked "Do you have any suggestions on how to not have our email go into people's junk folder?"

Hitting the inbox is the holy grail for email marketers and whether you believe it or not non-profits who send email are definitely email marketers. There are a couple of key factors I'd like to discuss that determine whether your email gets into the inbox, but first I'd like to commend the client who posed the question above on referring those he is trying to reach as "people"! This is the first part of Email's Golden Rule.

Reputation, Reputation, Reputation!
In order for an ISP like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL or others to accept your email you must have a good reputation as a sender. Reputation is king - it doesn't matter how clean the content of your email is if the ISP blocks your email because of a reputation because the content will never be checked.

Your reputation as a sender is based on two things: the From Address of the email and the IP address of the sending email server. The From Address is the one that you specify when you send the mailing and its reputation is largely based on the percentage of complaints, invalid accounts and spam trap hits that emails with the same From Address have generated in the past. (A complaint is what the ISPs call it when someone clicks the "this is spam" button.)

You have complete control over your individual reputation based on the From Address used in your emails and you influence it every time you send an email. You can severely damage your reputation by mailing to an list of questionable quality. Regardless of whether the list is from RE, NetCommunity or is an imported list, if it contains invalid accounts or spam traps it will have a negative effect on your reputation. Or, if the people reading your email consider it to be spam and hit the spam button your reputation will be affected. To avoid these reputation problems, make sure you only send email to people who have asked for it and make sure the content is relevant. For more on this see Email's Golden Rule.

One note, while you might be thinking you can run away from your reputation problems by changing your From Address frequently, this will have a very negative effect on your email campaigns. Different From Addresses will confuse your constituents and negate the positive effect of clients adding your address to their address book which will help get your email into the inbox and cause images to display by default.

The other part of your reputation is the IP address of the sending email server (MTA). The shared and Private IP addresses used by Blackbaud’s MTAs are accredited by SuretyMail and whitelisted at AOL, Yahoo and other major US and Canadian ISPs. In addition we are on the feedback loop with all major ISPs that provide one and we carefully monitor the percentage of spam complaints as well as hard bounces for each client. As a result, we rarely experience any IP address reputation issues with major ISPs. In fact, as a result of becoming accredited with SuretyMail we have see a dramatic improvement in email delivery with Yahoo in particular.

However, due to the fact that small ISPs and corporations do not provide feedback loops it is difficult to determine if users at these organizations feel the email our clients send is spam. Consequently, occasionally one client may cause a shared IP to develop a poor reputation at a small ISP or corporation. This can lead to email being sent to the spam folder or even blocked entirely. As soon as we detect or learn of these issues we work with the client and the ISP to resolve them as quickly as possible. While clients who use a shared IP also share a reputation, clients with Private IPs are not affected by these kinds of problems.

Content
Another key factor in avoiding the junk folder is ensuring that the content of your email doesn’t look “spammy.” There has been a lot written on this topic and as I said above content doesn't matter if your reputation causes your email to be blocked. I'll consider writing a future post on the subject of content if there are some specific questions that folks have. In the mean time, here is a good article that discusses avoiding spam words:
http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2006/01/can-i-get-a-list-of-spam-words.php

Happy mailing!

<>< Chris ><>

The Inbox : Email

Reputation and Avoiding the Junk Folder