Reputation (or Lack Thereof) and Hotmail Rate Limiting

As I've disclosed before, I tend to spend a lot of time with companies discussing deliverability woes to certain ISPs. Today, I had the occasion to do the same with a pretty high profile sender whose test campaigns were being let's say "improperly manipulated" by the finicky Hotmail MX machines.

Per my last posting, I stated my opinion that most rate limiting is not due to not having the right technical specs the edge gateway is looking for, but rather it's a result of the system taking a cautious approach to mail coming in from an "unknown" sender. This case in question seems to confirm my supposition.

This mailer was sending a six-figure campaign from a fairly new IP address that definitely appeared to trip a rate limit. In fact, the logs indicated that Hotmail would only accept 5,000 messages one hour, do the same for the next hour, not accept ANY mail the next, and then would finally return a level 500 (permanent) error causing their MTA to bounce all remaining 20,000 messages or so from the queue. The one question our team had is that if the sender were to have self-rate limited the campaign, would Hotmail have let mail in the one hour where they blocked it altogether?

In any case, this might be a scenario where one can use empirical data to surmise the amount of mail a major ISP will let in without fully validating the "street cred" of the IP in question. If any marketers want to test this and get back to me with a report as to whether or not the same behavior occurs, please do!

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.

No-Reply No No

It never ceases to amaze me how marketers think it's acceptable to use "no-reply" in either a From: line or as part of the Reply-to: address. The obvious issue is that if you look at email marketing as a true communication channel between the sender and the recipient, this is quite a rude stance to take. These days it's so hard to get people to pay attention to the offers and information they get through email anyway, so it seems crazy that a sender wouldn't want to openly accept return feedback.

The other issue that may not jump out to some marketers is that there are non-standards compliant corporate (and other) email systems that will route replies and/or bounces to the From: and not the Reply-to: address. As such, you're not only potentially alienating subscribers by (in their minds) not caring about what they think, but you could also be taking a deliverability hit because some bounces will not be handled properly.

If you are a marketer that would like to be accepting feedback but are not currently using technology sophisticated enough to enable this, there are vendors offering solutions to consider. For example, you might take a look at a system like ResponseMaster from Extreme Messaging (http://www.extreme-messaging.com). You can also find coding pros via sites like Elance.com to develop a custom solution on a project or hourly basis.

With apologies to Gandhi, your customer wants you to be the change they wish to see in how they interact with your company or organization. Therefore, make a commitment now to increase customer loyalty by accepting their feedback.

Congrats to EMC!

I'd like to congratulate Tamara and Matt of Email Marketer's Club (http://www.emailmarketersclub.com) for recently passing the 1500 member mark! I've been participating for the past few months and enjoy both the membership diversity and salient ideas presented.

I highly recommend that all serious email marketers join ASAP! You'll be glad you did.