Today I got an email that is all too common:
I work for ABCo, Inc. and we have occasional deliverability issues with our monthly email newsletter. Currently, we use XYZ which just provides us with a unique IP address and double opt-in form. But we still get blocked by Yahoo and AOL every once in awhile. Then we fill out the online forms and they unblock us, etc. Do you offer some kind of service that could help us with this?
Getting whitelisted again from AOL has turned into a full-time job, and a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies, and yes, once I felt your pain.
There’s a good long answer to your problem, and I think we can help. But it is a long answer, with probably too much information at one go, so if at any point in this email you feel like tuning out or putting it on the bedside table, feel free!
WARNING: BORING BUT IMPORTANT TECHNICAL REASONS!
In your case specifically, it’s not enough to just do best practices anymore. And it’s nice to have a unique IP, but if it’s not authenticated regularly with ISPs, there’s the problem. That’s primarily how I got into that end of the business – a lot of the creative we were dropping had weird deliverability issues, and since we’ve been working on this platform for the last 2 years, it allows us the benefits of tools and a secure infrastructure with redundant data centers dedicated to just delivering authenticated emails.
The big difference between us and where you’ve been having problems is that we’re taking advantage of the major authentication standards (SPF, Sender ID and DomainKeys/DKIM). Sender ID is for Windows Live Mail and AOL, DomainKeys/DKIM is for Yahoo and Gmail.
All the large ISP’s are using email authentication as an important layer in their spam fighting arsenal. By setting up this system as an authenticated sender, you can instantly bypass certain filters, giving your campaigns a better chance of arriving in the destination inbox. Not only that, but many ISP’s like Yahoo! and Hotmail will flag your email as authenticated, which helps to build trust between you and your subscribers and improves the chances of your emails being opened.
We offer not only the ability to create custom template, update and get reports, but also test the designs and content against the most popular spam filters:
Norton AntiSpam
McAfee SpamKiller
Microsoft Outlook 2003
McAfee 2008
Norton 2008
Microsoft Outlook 2007
SpamAssassin
Postini
Brightmail
MessageLabs
NOT SO BORING CREATIVE/MARKETING DETAILS:
At the end of the day, the deliverability issues may be also due to simple things like:
HTML/image ratios
Day campaign was sent
Keyword scoring
Placement of unsubscribe and preference center
I’ll give you a call this afternoon, so if you have any other thoughts and information, let me know. Also, if you have a time that’s good to meet/coffee on Wednesday or Thursday, let me know.
In the meantime, I hope that helps!
