Is Your Marketing Email Getting Trashed?

Direct marketers can deal with a large percentage of consumers pitching their marketing messages into the wastebasket – but at least the Postal Service doesn’t trash those brochures in a wholesale fashion before it’s delivered.

The same isn’t true for email. Early studies indicate that 20% to 30% of all legitimate business-to-consumer email is caught in spam filters, according to Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct Marketing and manager of the NorCal BMA’s eMarketing Roundtable.

At the roundtable’s September meeting, Beasley led a discussion of how major ISPs such as Yahoo, MSN, HotMail, and Earthlink set up their filters; how legitimate message are sidetracked; and how to avoid the most common spam traps.

Three categories

Spam filters come in three basic categories that are often used in combination:

• Volume, frequency, and “bad address” filters monitor the number of emails being sent in each flight, the time between flights, and how many bad addresses are included. For business-to-consumer email campaigns, limiting the number of emails per flight to about 1000, and allowing a few minutes between flights is usually enough. The ratio of bad addresses to valid addresses can be kept low by scrupulously updating and purging your address database.

• Blacklist filters are based on compiled lists of domains addresses that have been reported (not necessarily verified) as spammers. Major ISPs maintain their own private blacklists. Independent entities such as Spamcop, Spamhaus and SPEWS assemble lists that are often based on anonymous complaints. The lists are published and Internet system administrators use them to block email selectively. Beasley’s advice is to contact major ISPs to see if you have been erroneously blacklisted and to check the publicly available lists of the major spam filter entities.

• Content-based filtering is perhaps the best known spam trap – and trickiest to avoid. Here, an ISP or local system administrator monitors the subject lines and/or the full text of the email for keywords, formatting, capitalization, and/or phrases that set off the spam filter. The algorithms that attempt to identify spam through content analysis are ever changing and secret. Many ISPs use the Brightmail filter. Avoid the content-analysis net is challenging but partial solutions can be implemented.

Since Beasley’s business is largely direct email marketing, she has set up a content-filer testbench that she uses to vett her clients’ email messages. An example of how tricky this can be, she said, is the case of a customer who asked to have an email marketing message vetted. It passed the first part of the test – the inferred word/phrase/formatting lists of ISPs. But the follow-on test – sending it to the customer – failed. The customer’s own spam filter trashed it because it included the word “unsubscribe” in the text.

Spam filter avoidance

Just as there are three categories of spam filters, so there are three categories of spam filter solutions:

• Whitelists are lists of domains and email addresses that have been specifically verified and approved by the service provider as legitimate. B2C marketers should see to it that their domains are whitelisted by Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. but whitelisting is a virtual impossibility for B2B marketers, however, because the send to so many servers.

• Content evaluation systems can help you avoid the words, phrases, formatting etc. that sets of spam filters. Email delivery companies such as Lyris, SiteSell, and Assurance Systems have products that vett email content.

• “Third-party” whitelisting eliminates the need to contact every ISP directly by joining a group or system that has already negotiated whitelisting with most filtering programs for its members. The three best-known services are: Positiva’s Trusted Sender Program; Habeas;, and IronPort’s Bonder Sender Program.

Habeas’s business model is perhaps the most ingenious, says Beasley. Formed by several lawyers, Habeas requires its clients to sign a contract guaranteeing that they will keep their promises about 100% opt-in and other measures Habeas requires to assure quality and integrity.

If a client violates the agreement, Habeas is very aggressive about taking the company to court for breech of contract.

Links:
http://www.norcalbma.org
http://www.beasleydirect.com
http://www.habeas.com