Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Debunking Email Delivery Secret Sauce

Having spent much of the past four years in the Message Transfer Agent (MTA) space, I've consulted with countless companies who have been looking for an edge in achieving higher e-mail deliverability. If I only had a nickle for the number of times I've been asked about the "secret sauce" for getting into ISP in-boxes... Well, I must burst many a sender's bubble tonight. Feel the motion of my fingertips hitting the keys to scribe the following sequence: THERE IS NO SECRET DELIVERY SAUCE!

Why does this perception exist? Well, it was a notion introduced two-three years ago by an MTA (and now email marketing) firm that shall remain nameless designed to speak to customers' lack of deliverability fear and decreasing email return desperation. Of course, the firm just so happened to offer (what seemed to be a magical) supplemental update service where users would be blessed with guesstimated delivery technical parameters tantamount to knowing the "secret handshake" ISPs reserved for only the whitest of the whitelisted sender community. While there is certainly enough empirical evidence to conclude that a few ISPs do practice some form of inbound throttling, the fact is that you are less likely to encounter such road blocks if you have a well-established and overwhelmingly positive sender reputation. BTW, this affirmation does not extend to the army of rogue ISPs out there (providers like BobsISPRunOutofHisSpareBedroom.net or GordysRockyMountainConnectivity.net) who are goofy enough to take an "all commercial email is evil" approach by blocking any and everything coming in. Anyway, I always like to point people to the following article (penned by the omnipresent Mr. Magill) as it does an excellent job of articulating the elements to which top-shelf ISPs pay the most attention when making filtering decisions:

http://preview.directmag.com/magilla/e-mail-rep-magilla-061207/index.html

So there you go. For those of you out there who have been secretly planning to bribe Yahoo or Hotmail mail server engineers with a batch of your Grandma's State Fair winning chocolate chip cookies and a six-pack of Red Bull to obtain the "top secret delivery windows" when the server flood gates will be opened to the inbox promised land, I'm sorry to be the one telling you that there's no Santa Claus if you will. A much better use of time would be devising a long-term strategy for reducing Spam complaints and producing creative that actually reflects a recipient's stated content preferences or previous response patterns.

So the next time you order an email campaign, remember to hold the secret sauce.

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