Email delivery

What should you be looking to report on and why? Part two

Posted by Mike Parry

In the second of this two part series on email reporting (the first can be found here) I am going to look at delivery reporting, what it means and how it affects your email campaigns. Delivery reporting – what is it and how can you use it to improve your list health (which ultimately improves future inbox placement and subsequently ROI)? The first thing to look at is a reporting overview to give you a snapshot of your campaigns. This should immediately highlight any causes for concern. The numbers you are looking at here are delivered, anything under 98% for an opt in list should lead you to look at the reasons the undeliverable number is above 2-3%. Whether the…

Read more
It's a trap!

Spamtraps: What are they and how to deal with them

Posted by Adrian Nabarro

Spamtraps have been a part of email marketing for some time now and they’re not going away. Like a virus, if untreated, it can kill your email marketing in no time. So what are they? How do you get them? And what can be done about them? What are spamtraps? Spamtraps are email addresses which are monitored but not used. Any email sent to these addresses is considered to be spam as these addresses should not receive any email. They can be old email addresses which have been dormant for years, email addresses specifically setup to catch spammers (also know as honey pots) or addresses commonly used when people signup for things without wanting to give away their real details,…

Read more
Email delivery minefield

Email Delivery – practical tips for better email delivery

Posted by Mike Parry

Email delivery is a minefield. The rules are always changing. What’s right for Hotmail, doesn’t work for Gmail. You need SPF compliance, Sender ID, DKIM, Domain Keys and DMARC. Some people say it’s best to send from a shared IP pool, some that it’s best to have your own IP. The goal posts keep moving and what you thought you knew last year has changed. Only this weekend there was a discussion on the Only Influencers email group discussing some possible Gmail changes last Thursday that have impacted Gmail delivery. Webmail clients, like Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook (Hotmail), never announce changes to their filtering methods so we’re all left to scramble around trying to guess what they’ve done. All of…

Read more