If you know or not, if you track it or not, your Sender Reputation is the single most important factor in making sure your email messages reach the inbox (rather than getting blocked or going to junk mail). Actively monitoring and managing your Sender Reputation - along with its two sisters authentication, and accreditation -- is the only way to achieve maximum deliverability. Sender Reputation is not your content or your subject line alone, although that can occasionally be a factor - it's a combination of your sending practices from permission through infrastructure as well as the subscriber experience you create. Your Sender Reputation is the way ISPs and corporate system administrators (for B2B marketers) better identify and ascertain whether the mail you send should reach the inbox of their subscribers.

With spam, phishing and spoofing proliferating the internet airwaves, delivery rates for legitimate marketers have been compromised. As a result, marketers must take extra steps to ensure the success of their email programs by differentiating themselves from the fraudsters and spammers. Here's how to get started:

1. Authentication: Authentication is a means by which ISPs can identify who you are by your IP address and mailstreams. It's akin to your driver's license and plays a key role in email deliverability. Mailers can authenticate using SPF, SenderID, Domain Keys and now Domain keys Identified Mail (DKIM). These authentication technologies all have different benefits, but today DKIM has proven to be the most reliable scheme since it allows you to account for all of your mail streams and "sign" them individually. This granular approach is more inclusive and more reliable when trying to identify legitimate senders and keep fraudsters from infiltrating the inbox.

2. Reputation: Your sender reputation is the most important factor - and the good news is that all the elements that make up your Sender Reputation are under your control as a marketer. Many ISPs analyze your past sending activity to determine if you are a good sender or a bad one. This includes: keeping complaints under threshold (which can be as low as 1 complaint in a thousand messages or 0.1%) by improving the subscriber experience (and removing complainers by signing up for the ISP feedback loops), bounce processing to remove unknown users from your file, optimizing content for rendering as well as passing the spam filters, infrastructure and sending consistency. You can check out your Reputation for free by visiting www.senderscore.org - this is a rating of your email behavior much like a personal credit score, and not only gives you a metric to actively monitor and improve, but is also used by ISPs in conjunction with authentication to determine inbox placement.

3. Accreditation: Getting whitelisted is the third component in achieving maximum delivery success. Whitelists allow you to bypass some spam filters and get delivered with active links and graphics enabled in some inboxes. One best practice is to encourage all your subscribers to add your from address to their personal whitelists. This is commonly seen as a prompt at the top of a message - but usually drives few results unless it's actively marketed (just like any other consumer action you want to promote). There are whitelists at some of the major ISPs that you can apply to, but most are managed by the postmasters and based on your Sender Reputation. (Getting the idea of why it's so important!?) Then, there are third party whitelists like the one we run called Sender Score Certified (www.senderscorecertified.com) which is the largest and covers 1.2 billion inboxes worldwide including Windows Live Hotmail and soon, Yahoo! Another is run by Habeas (www.habeas.com) and there is still some buzz around the pay-for-delivery model offered by Goodmail (www.goodmail.com). It's worth checking them all out and matching the coverage footprint of each to your file. Be aware - you must be already earning high deliverability and having a strong Sender Reputation to qualify.

Email marketers should not expect their email broadcast solution or ESP to solve their non-infrastructure driven deliverability issues. Why? Because ESPs don't control the levers that drive the majority of deliverability issues - marketers do. Frankly, it's unfair to ask a vendor to fix a problem they have no control over. (Of course, in the rare case that an ESP does have an infrastructure issue, marketers can expect the ESP to fix that problem quickly.) Email marketers need to take responsibility for their program and understand the reputation factors that may be affecting the delivery of their messages.

That doesn't mean email broadcast vendors don't have any role here. They should absolutely provide diagnostic tools that allow you to monitor and analyze deliverability issues in real time, including your Sender Reputation. And your broadcast vendor should be managing authentication for all your IP addresses, as well.

All three components are important to your email success, but can easily be trumped by questionable sending activity. Therefore, all of your hard work in keeping your email stream clean and creating positive subscriber experiences can be washed away with one compromised server, a misguided last-minute seasonal campaign that prompts a lot of complaint from worn out subscribers, or a purchased list of questionable provenance. On the other hand, if you follow email best practices and integrate authentication, reputation and accreditation as a core part of your overall email strategy, you can positively improve your delivery rates and ultimately your overall campaign ROI.

Stephanie Miller
VP, Strategic Services
Return Path, Inc.
Contact Stephanie