How Authentication and Reputation will Impact Email Marketing
By Eric Castelli

Spam Filters and Your Online Success

If your online marketing strategy includes email, you’re likely well aware of how spam filters can impact your results.  Large ISPs like AOL, MSN and Yahoo! have fairly stringent rules about what gets delivered to the inbox.  Also, most individuals and corporations have some level of spam protection in place.  Unfortunately, even the most sophisticated filtration is a blunt instrument at best.  Factors such as complaint volume and bounce volume are used to gauge whether your messages get to the inbox.  But these factors are not a true reflection of your organization.  If you send 100,000 messages to users at a specific ISP and 100 people complain, you could be blocked, even though your complaint rate was 0.1%!  So unless you are utilizing bonding programs to guarantee your way into the inbox, your messages won’t get delivered and your email effectiveness is negatively impacted. 

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Enter Email Authentication

In case you haven’t been following the recent issues with email authentication, the concept is simple.  Rather than guessing who is sending an email based on a mail server IP or other factors, which can be forged, email authentication creates a method for truly identifying who sent a message – a caller ID for email.  While its final form is still up for debate, it’s likely that Microsoft’s Sender ID system or Yahoo!’s Domain Keys will be implemented as a standard by the end of 2005.  Regardless of the final implementation, there will soon be a system in place to uniquely identify senders (and weed out forgeries).  In the end, the online world is now able to reliably track senders. 
 
Reputation - A Better Filter

What will email authentication mean to spam filtration and your success at email marketing?  Well, the good news is that if you are doing things right, it should help your email marketing efforts.  Authentication systems will lead to reputation systems.  Reputation systems will be the phone book for the caller ID that authentication systems provide.   This phone book will be the backbone for the future of spam filtration – a centralized repository for information about senders shared with the online world.  As these systems come online, filtration companies and ISPs will turn to these repositories for filtration rather than each filter using its own rules.  This should make your life as an email marketer easier, since deliverability should be a more universal factor. 
 
Also, the data provided by reputation systems will be superior to that employed by current spam filters.  The basic gauges of complaint volume and bounce volume will be replaced by more meaningful measures.  These measures will likely include a true reflection of your complaint rate and your actual bounce rate.  They will also include more meaningful measures, such as whether you provide a working unsubscribe option and actually honor your unsubscribe requests. 

 

Steps You Should be Taking Now

While an authentication standard is not here quite yet, you should realize that companies are already collecting data about your organization that will form your reputation.  For example, LashBack, the company that I am part of, is currently tracking unsubscribe data.  We are monitoring more than 400,000 senders, and are able to tell which ones are honoring unsubscribe requests.  Also, other companies are compiling data on your true bounce rates, and complaint rates.  Pretty soon, this data will all be made public and be the basis for the next generation of spam filtration.  If you want to ensure deliverability with this new breed of filtration, you should understand how you are currently doing it and what steps you should be taking.  Consider doing the following:

1)       Contact some of the larger ISPs and have them forward spam complaints to you.  AOL, Yahoo! and MSN will set up feeds to you so you can know what your actual complaint rates with these ISPs are.

2)       Analyze your SMTP logs.  There are tools out there that can analyze your email server logs and determine what your bounce rate is.  If your bounce rate is high, consider a third-party list cleansing service that will help improve this rate.

3)       Make sure your unsubscribe process is working as it should.   Consider auditing this process if possible.  You’d be surprised by how many companies have a problem but don’t realize it.

4)       Consider hiring a firm to assist you with these items.  Contact LashBack, and we would be happy to recommend some.

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Eric Castelli
Chief Technology Officer
LashBack LLC
http://www.lashback.com
eric@lashback.com