Maintaining a good reputation with Internet Service Providers is a tricky task for email marketing companies. Often the attributes that make for a strong direct marketing piece are the same flags that ISP’s use as red flags to junk or block spam messages from cluttering their users inbox.

Shortcomings in the United States CAN SPAM Act have resulted in ISP’s having to take a technical approach to protect their end users.

In addition to these issues, it seems that more web-savvy end users are opting to hit the “spam” button in hotmail instead of using the provided unsubscribe link.  99.98% of our spam complaints come from hotmail users. I would assert that this is because too many direct mailers use complicated multi-step unsubscribe mechanisms to remove you from their list, instead of a one-click and your out methodology. Hitting the “spam” button ensures instant removal from any legitimate list. Whilst it is easy to see why smart users choose this option, this has a disastrous effect on mailer reputation.

All of these issues add up to a real world where mailers need to be completely assured that their Email Service provider has the deliverability know how and relationships to ensure maximised delivery capacity.

Cogent Online sells access to its recipients almost exclusively on a cost-per- response basis. This sales methodology makes the sales process considerably simpler and puts the onus on us to be skillful in our marketing techniques and delivery capacity.

In the constant technical analysis that it takes to maintain good delivery rates through content monitoring, frequency, click analysis and so forth it is easy to forget to ask the simple questions.

We recently raised our head up out of the data from one of our new communities and asked ourselves – “what will it take to have our end users add us to the safe sender list?”

The answer seemed embarrassingly simple. “Why don’t we offer them an additional chance to win the prize for adding us to the safe sender list?”

After a little research we put together a campaign (in plain text) offering our end users an additional chance to win $5000 to add us to the safe sender list. In addition we requested that they reply to the message telling us this was done.

The effect of this was thought to be two fold. First, adding us to the safe sender list is one of the strongest indicators to the ISP that our messages are, in fact, welcome by the end user. Second, replying to our message will have us added to many client-side email programs’ address books. Being in the address book will flag to most client side junk filters that the message is welcomed.

The response to the initial send had around 24% of recipients add us to their safe-sender list. Our mailings have been 100% delivered to hotmail ever since.

View Comments