How to Ensure Email Compliance and Deliverability

This current brief by Des Cahill of Habeas is right on when it comes to what you can do to ensure email compliance. Read on (article excerpt from iMedia)

You know how to write an email. You know spam is bad. You know to send emails to your customers to promote your products. But what you don't know about email can hurt you. It can damage your reputation as a legitimate business, it can upset your customers and it can decrease your ROI.

Here are eight things you might not know about email, how those unknowns can hurt you, and what you can do to fix them. If you don't know the answers to these questions, you could have a problem.

How do your emails look in various browsers and email servers?
If you don't render your emails, when you send them the images may be blocked, text can be jumbled and your well-crafted message gets lost. To fix this, you can pay for rendering services, or you can send a sample email to fake addresses on a number of different email servers and review them on different browsers.

What is your reputation as a sender?
If you have a poor reputation, you can be unfairly marked as spam and your emails will not be delivered to your targets. To fix this, you can hire an email reputation service provider like Habeas, Return Path, Goodmail or Pivotal Veracity to monitor and maintain your good reputation.

Who wants to get your emails?
If your list is populated with people who don't want to hear from you, they can potentially mark your emails as spam and you can be added to blocklists. To ensure you have a strong list, include an "unsubscribe" button in all of your emails and frequently update your lists to only include interested recipients.

Are your IP and domain addresses verified?
If both your IP and domain addresses are not verified, you can be marked as a spammer and put on blocklists. To avoid being blocked, maintain a static IP address because static addresses look less "spammy" to the receiving systems.

Do you understand and use Sender Authentication technology?
Senders that don't support these standards will have a worse deliverability rate versus other senders. It's essential for companies to understand authentication. SIDF and DKIM are both specifically designed to thwart phishing (and phishing variant) attacks. Commercial senders need only publish appropriate DNS records to complete SIDF. DKIM can be done by any downstream server or even a mail client.

Is your content interesting to your recipients?
If you send an email that is not targeted specifically at the interests of your recipients, they are likely to ignore your message and your clickthrough rates will be very low. The best way to reach your audience is to use customizable content programs from ESPs like ExactTarget, Constant Contact and Silverpop to better target your email messages.

Are you on a blocklist?
If you are identified as spam, especially on the larger lists, your emails will not be delivered. How do you find out if you're on a blocklist? Monitor the public repositories, and consider getting the assistance of an email reputation service provider to get you off the blocklists.

Is your infrastructure new? Are you using a new IP or Domain?
Emerging reputation systems being employed by ISPs like Microsoft will throttle down your email to a trickle until you've established a reputation. Use existing infrastructure to send the bulk of the email while concurrently sending the same message content in smaller volumes off the new system until a reputation is established.