The Whitelist

ClickMail’s expertise is featured prominently in a story about problems with White House email communications by the Washington DC-based National Journal.  When the Journal needed an expert on email marketing and email best practices, the call went out to ClickMail CEO Marco Marini.

Read the full story here, as reproduced in the Journal’s blog on lobbying and advocacy, Under the Influence.

CAN SPAM. Love it or hate it, it serves a purpose. The real problem isn’t the legislation itself, it’s the fact that we need it in the first place because so many email marketers don’t live up to the standards of email marketing vendors like ClickMail and email marketing people like you.

But the unsubscribe option—required by CAN SPAM—isn’t all bad. Sure it lets people opt out of your email marketing in-house list, but guess what? If they’re opting out, you don’t want to be marketing to them anyway. They’re actually doing you a favor because they’re helping you figure out what’s working and what’s not in your permission-based email marketing initiatives.

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Last time we covered the importance of your digital reputation for deliverability and therefore email marketing ROI. This time, we cover what determines that reputation in the first place.

As we said last time, ISPs are relying more and more on a marketer’s reputation when deciding which emails to let through. Why do you care what the ISPs think? Because they stand between you and your prospects and customers. They are the gatekeepers that let your email pass…or stop it in its tracks.

According to Pivotal Veracity, ISPs look at the following when determining your reputation:

• Complaint rates
• Unknown user rates
• Identity stability
• Volume
• Third-party assessments

You don’t have to live in the dark, however, firing off your email marketing campaigns without knowing if you’re considered a goodie or a baddie. There are a variety of ways to find out what your reputation is and how you fix it. To get you started, here are two great online tools you can use to make sure you’ve got your bases covered:

https://senderscore.org

http://www.senderbase.org

Do you know your reputation? Do you care? No, it’s not a popularity contest, but you should be paying attention to your reputation because it affects your deliverability. And your deliverability rates are key to your email marketing ROI.

Deliverability is a top challenge for online marketers using email marketing. Having a great design and offer won’t do much if you can’t make it to the inbox. And reaching that final destination-the inbox-gets more difficult all the time due to the vast amount of resources that are being thrown at the ‘spam’ problem. There are hardware and software filters and algorithms in place that attempt to stem the flood of spam. As a result, what used to make it to the inbox is no longer a good indicator of what will make it there now…or in future.

And now more and more ISPs are routing inbound email based on the email marketer’s reputation, and not just on the potential spamminess of the content or subject line. In some cases, ISPs are basing that decision solely on the sender’s reputation.

Obviously reputation is now something you as an email marketer must pay attention to.

Now that we have your attention (we have your attention, right?), we’ll spend the next Email Marketing ROI blog post on what affects your reputation and what you can do about it. Stay tuned.