The Messaging Times

In life, there are many things that we should do.

1. We should eat healthily and drink responsibly
2. We should recycle, reuse and reduce our consumption of waste products
3. We should be polite, have good manners and be ethical in everything we do
4. We should exercise regularly, floss daily and brush our hair one hundred times each night
5. We should stay within the speed limit, use crosswalks and avoid using mobile phones while driving

In email marketing, there are many things that we should do.

1. We should get permission and use double opt-in subscription practices
2. We should consider using horizontal menus rather than vertical ones
3. We should measure our campaigns using all available metrics and compile behavioral data
4. We should join email accreditation and authentication services to improve deliverability
5. We should format our messages with a growing mobile audience in mind

But in marketing, like in life, there is no perfection; and people are successful whether they abide by all of the things that they should be doing or not.

Sometimes, it’s best to avoid perfection in the pursuit of profit. To not get bogged down in the endless amount of shoulds and just get things done. Action yields results over time.

I’m not suggesting that you stop designing the mobile version of your email campaign or cancel your membership to the gym. I’m just saying that you can be successful even if you do. There is no standard recipe for success.

The reality is that anti-spam filters designed to reduce spam volumes also prevent some legitimate messages from reaching the inbox.

In her blog post, Why Innocent Emails Get Flagged as Spam, Linda Bustos analyzes an email from Musician’s Friend which she found in her junk folder to better understand why it ended up there instead of her inbox.

“…I noticed that a Musician’s Friend email got trapped in my Spam box in Gmail, so I referred back to this post to see if I could diagnose how the email got flagged as spam. I found a few items that might have caused the delivery failure based on the article’s tips, plus a few other borderline-spammy red flags…” continue reading

The good thing is that there are ways to design messages so that they they get a green light from anti-spam filters. Sure, it’s a pain in the neck to have to pay attention to silly things like the use of specific words, subject line length and background color; but if you want to increase the rate of inbox delivery, it’s worth taking the time to do so.

ReturnPath presents a nice case study that illustrates how Travelocity requests recipients to whitelist their email. It’s a simple addition to an email campaign; but one that will certainly help to keep your messages reaching the inboxes of your recipients.

“…Travelocity takes whitelisting to the next level. It’s a best practice for marketers to have whitelisting instructions in every email message they send. Typically, these instructions are included above the header of the email message so that subscribers can add the marketer’s “from” address to their email client’s address book, thereby making them an approved sender. This helps to increase the marketer’s deliverability into the inbox and overrides the default “images off” setting (standard for most email clients) so that the marketer’s images will automatically render. Travelocity goes one step further by including a link titled “ensure deliverability.” This link takes the user to step-by-step whitelisting instructions for 12 major email clients…” continue reading

Although I like the “Ensure Deliverability” link at the top of Travelocity’s email, the hyperlink grammar bugs me a bit. Perhaps I’m being too picky here, but shouldn’t it be “Ensure Delivery?” I always think of deliverability as an adverb (i.e. deliverability rates). Recently, I’ve started using delivery instead of deliverability just to conserve some letters. I haven’t discovered any context yet where deliverability can’t be replaced by the shorter form – delivery? Please inform me if there are any, so I can stop thinking that deliverability is just a longer, redundant term for delivery.

I also think that some (if not many) recipients would be uncertain if they should click on that link or what it means. I would recommend something a bit more descriptive. Something along the lines of “Click here to improve delivery of our messages” or “Click here to help ensure delivery.”

My personal peeves aside, the idea is good and it certainly is something that you might consider adding to your own email campaigns if continued inbox delivery is important to you.

Here are some whitelisting instructions if you need them.

Recently, Google announced that eBay and PayPal have successfully implemented DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signatures. As a result, any email that comes to a Gmail inbox from @paypal.com or @ebay.com is actually certified to be from them. Those pretending to be from those companies (in the form of phishing emails) will not make it into the inbox because they won’t pass the DKIM signature test.

“…eBay and PayPal have worked hard to ensure that all their email is signed with DomainKeys and DKIM. Armed with this information, Gmail can easily reject as a fake anything that doesn’t authenticate. We’ve been testing this for a few weeks now and it’s working so well that few people really noticed.

We think it’s great that PayPal and eBay have taken on the challenge of securing email, and we’re pleased to have put our best efforts together to make this work. It’s a bold move, but one that will really help fight phishing. Our hope is that this will set a good example for other organizations to follow (yes, it can be done!) and that over time more and more email will become trustworthy…” continue reading

We discussed the importance of certifying yourself as a sender previously on this blog:

“…Mark Risher, the anti-abuse product manager for Yahoo! Mail, explains that emails that aren’t authenticated with [DomainKey] signatures are deemed suspicious and routed through additional message-screening filters before getting to the recipient inbox…” continue reading

The importance of email certification is being embraced by many organizations who rely on the integrity of email. This is illustrated by the recommendation of the Banking Industry Consortium to its members to start authenticating their emails.

“… Adoption continues apace throughout the Internet space, and Risher also said banking industry consortium BITS recommended adoption of DKIM for financial institutions. That would go a long way toward restoring trust in email messages from banks, a regularly spoofed item by criminal phishers…” continue reading

If you are interested in implementing DomainKeys or DKIM into your email marketing strategy, a good place to start is the DomainKeys Identified Mail website, dkim.org

Verifying yourself as a legitimate sender of email is becoming more and more important for email marketers. The truth is, the processes to authenticate yourself are varied and, well, quite confusing. Return Path helps to clarify the issue in their post today, Trust in Email Begins with Authentication by providing a link to a new white paper that attempts to make things clearer.

“…We hope that this effort will raise the level of debate within the email industry, and lead to faster adoption of authentication technologies. Sender authentication will not, obviously, solve spam — it has very little to do with spam, in fact — but curtailing the bad guys’ ability to send messages that look like they’re from your bank or other trusted institution will certainly help…” continue reading

Here are the results of a search for posts on this blog relating to email authentication.