Email Reputation or Content
Thursday, January 19th, 2006What are the main factors that get you blocked? Honeypot email addresses, complaint ratio, unknown user email addresses, content, URLs on blocklists. Now content is an issue, but it is really only an issue on the email client side, when it gets to someone’s computer. Outlook checks purely on content, reputation has nothing to do with it.
However, if you do not have a good reputation, you will not even get to the email client, you will be filtered, blocked, or black-holed at the ISP or mail provider.
So what does this mean to you,? Clean your lists constantly, make sure you are keeping an eye on complaints and feedback loops. A good ESP will manage these feedback loops for you and best practices is to unsubscribe those people that hit the report as spam button.
Let’s also get rid of those non-responders as well. Now this does not mean you just need to throw them all away, but rather look at a re-opt-in email or renewal email. Require them to take an action to remain on the list. Why is this important? I think there are 2 reasons: 1) don’t waste money on sending email that is not returning an ROI for you and 2) spamtrap email addresses on your list that is causing you bigger problems that you think.
