What is ... deliverability?

21.04.2009
Sending a personalised email to thousands or even millions of recipients is just a mouse-click away for the email marketer using an email marketing application. This marketer expects that the emails will be delivered to the recipient's inbox quickly and securely.

To continue to provide guaranteed deliverability demands an immense amount of time and effort by professional email marketing providers such as Inxmail. Our efforts, however, remain in the background to allow our customers to focus on creating award-winning marketing campaigns. Without the background work on our part, many email marketing campaigns would simply flop.

Both German and English use rather inelegant technical terms – ‘Zustellbarkeit’ and ‘deliverability’ respectively – to describe a process that entails various tasks and technologies. The goal: to guarantee that the sent email lands in the recipient’s inbox.

I am proud of our success in finding ways to meet these deliverability requirements for our Inxmail Professional customers. The following is intended to help marketers gain some insight into this valuable background work.

Any problems that arise are a consequence of the numerous advantages of using emails. Emails are a wonderfully uncomplicated, fast and cost-efficient means of communication. They make it possible to automate the sending of personalised messages that will grab the attention of the recipient. This fact transforms emails into a successful medium and attracts numerous advertisers looking to make money from it.

For this reason, recipients are bombarded with thousands of emails daily, offering what appear to be amazing offers. Only a small fraction (often no more than one per cent of these emails) is actually of any interest or relevance. The rest is merely spam.

Luckily, spam-filter technology is attuned to the ever-increasing flood of spam and will filter out any undesired emails before they can infiltrate the inbox. Emails from suspicious senders or untrustworthy mail servers are not given a chance; they are immediately rejected. Likewise, emails with content that is clearly spam are either rejected or land in the Spam folder. Often, providers create a folder for filtering out any emails with ‘spam-like’ characteristics.

The methods for protecting against spam are diverse, sometimes erratic, and can change at any time. One of the negative aspects of spam filters is that serious offers may suddenly be considered ‘false positives’ and marked as spam despite having a legitimate purpose. For example, the same email that lands in an inbox today without difficulty might be tagged as spam tomorrow. This poses an unacceptable risk to the success of a marketing campaign for email marketers like ourselves.

It is here that our company excels, both technically and organizationally. Have you ever dealt with SPF, DKIM, Sender ID, CSA, ISP relations and blacklist monitoring? No? Well, marketers don’t have to worry about this. That’s where we come in.

When looking for a provider for email marketing, it is essential to check the following: the quality of deliverability is an important criterion when choosing a provider. Even the most perfectly composed emails are completely ineffective if they never reach their recipient. If an email marketing service provider is charging substantially less than its competitors, or if it is a very small company, it is worth closer inspection. Otherwise, you risk endangering your marketing success.

An important warning signal is if a company is not a member of the Certified Senders Alliance. But this point will be revisited in future articles. I will also take a closer look at whitelists and blacklists.

Stay tuned! :-)

Part 2: How to avoid being blacklisted

Part 3: High deliverability rates with whitelists