ISP Profiles
The latest estimate is that 93% of all email traffic is spam, so clients should be very aware of how aggressive ISPs have become at managing and filtering spam.
Email Source Issues
Email collected from any source other than your own website is fraught with peril. If you cannot pass a basic audit on an email address (requesting IP and date of request), you expose yourself to issues if you are ever called out for violation of anti-spam legislation such as the CAN-SPAM act, EU Opt-In Directive, or CASL, and so on. Even if you can, the quality of emails from outside sources is substantially lower than those collected internally.
In addition, emails collected via sweepstakes, in store events, partner events, and other locales where providing the address in order to receive an incentive are of much lower quality.
Why is this important? Because bad addresses cause hard bounces, which are a signal to ISPs that a sender is a spammer. If you have not been opting out hard bounces, or soft bounces after a series of consecutive bounces, you are behaving like a spammer would, which is noticed by the ISPs spam filter algorithms very quickly.
In addition, if you are harvesting email from anywhere, for any reason, you are both violating CAN-SPAM, EU Opt-In Directive, or CASL (no opt in) as well as picking up spam trap addresses that are seeded all over the Internet to spot this exact practice.
Personal Whitelists
When a recipient indicates that a sending domain is safe or known, the ISP creates what is known as a personal whitelist. Future email from that domain is delivered to the inbox. Over time, this improves overall delivery, as more and more individuals add you to their safe sender list.
When you first start sending email through Reward, none of your recipients have you added to their personal whitelist. This takes time to overcome, and reduces your inbox delivery and overall open and clickthrough rates.
Basic checks for a clean list
It is important to start emailing on a new IP address with a clean list. Customers that use a clean list see over 90% of their emails delivered in the In box. While maintaining a clean list is an ongoing effort, there are a few simple steps you can do before you start sending with Reward.
The most basic check is to verify that the list of addresses does not include addresses that start with any of the following:
- noe (for noemail)
- spam
- nos (for nospam)
- post (for postmaster)
- abuse
- support
- zzz
- xxx
- and potentially a lot of the triple letters.
This simple step gives you a better understanding of the quality of your list before you start sending with Reward.