Jun. 4, 2007

A new report provides further evidence to dispel the widely-held myth among Internet marketers that email message content is the number one reason Internet Service Providers filter and then delete legitimate email marketing messages.

Overall, that's the primary finding of the Lyris Email Advisor ISP Deliverability Report Card for the first quarter of this year.

The report is a quarterly research study that monitors deliverability rates for permission-based email marketing. The Email Advisor Report Card also reveals that a majority of the largest US-based ISPs have the lowest rates of delivering email to the inbox.

According to the EmailAdvisor Report Card, message content is not the major cause of deliverability challenges for most email marketers. Overall, more than 1,705 unique emails were run through the EmailAdvisor content scoring application that includes the content scoring rules subset to the widely adopted Spam Assassin open source project.

The average content point score of these 1,705 unique emails was 1.04 - well below the filter's generally accepted spam identification level of 3.0 or higher.

Stefan Pollard, director of consulting for EmailLabs says "the main message of this quarter's EmailAdvisor Report Card for email marketers is that there are no easy fixes to senders' deliverability challenge."

Along with J.L. Halsey's Lyris and Sparklist brands, the report was integrated with the EmailAdvisor deliverability monitoring tool.

Pollard added "changing a few keywords in the hopes of boosting inbox success rates is no substitute for adhering to email marketing best practices. It's unfair and just simply an oversimplification to place blame primarily on content filters when a marketing campaign has poor returns, when in fact most delivery challenges are due to subscriber feedback."

Such feedback typically takes the form of complaints by recipients who mark the message as "spam" in their respective email clients and problematic traffic patterns such as bounces and spam trap hits, according to Pollard.

Pollard also said "that's why both EmailLabs and Lyris have developed deliverability programs that build on EmailAdvisor and focus on the real issues that affect a sender's deliverability."

Of the emails subjected to content scoring, two Spam Assassin rules that were frequently triggered - generated content filter point scores of significance.

Overall, most Internet marketers should find that easy to adjust and fix. The first rule cautions against heavy use of images, which can increase spam scores up to a full point and render poorly in email clients with image blocking enabled, according to Pollard.

The second problem, sending messages with a "From Name" composed of numbers or symbols rather than an actual name, can also increase the likelihood of the message being identified as spam and ending up in users' junk mail or spam folders, Pollard said.

Of the twenty-five top U.S. ISPs tracked by the EmailAdvisor Report Card, several leading providers rank among the top-10 domains with the highest rates of deletion or delivery to the spam folder.

These include Gmail (3rd with 28 percent), Yahoo (4th with 19 percent), and Hotmail (6th with 16 percent).

Noticeably absent from the top-10 ISPs with the worst inbox delivery is AOL, which ranked 14th on the list with a junk delivery rate of only 2.33 percent.

For the study's top-ten ranked U.S. ISPs, gross deliverability was more than 90 percent in all cases, with average deliverability of 83.8 percent across the sample.

CompuServe had the highest rate of inbox delivery at 88 percent, with the remainder of the top-ten ranked ISPs achieving delivery rates of more than 81 percent in all cases.

Among international ISPs, European ISPs performed the best, followed by Australian, Canadian and finally U.S. domains - although the disparities between regions were all within +/- five percentage points.

Dave Dabbah, Lyris' senior director of marketing said "overall, fighting spam and other types of malicious messaging continues to be a major challenge for most ISPs, who are leaning on the side of protecting their customers and users more than anything else."

Dabbah added "marketers who adopt authentication protocols such as Domain Keys, SPF and SenderID and who actively manage their sender reputation with deliverability best practices are able to reach the inbox with their campaigns giving them a distinct advantage over other marketers that lack deliverability know-how."

In many instances, deliverability rates can be adversely affected by a number of various factors in addition to individual ISP policies and sender content, including the sender's mailing history, number of complaints the sender receives, data collection practices, use of sender authentication protocols and other reputation factors.

Dabbah also added that "there are many different variables to keep track of when managing deliverability. That's why Lyris and Email Labs deliverability consulting packages have developed more accurate metrics that offer Internet marketers a quantified way to view and better understand their deliverability scenarios."

Lyris strongly encourages senders to adhere to email marketing best practices in order to optimize and greatly improve their overall e-mail deliverability rates.

For the period beginning Jan. 1, 2007 and ending Mar. 31, 2007, the Lyris EmailAdvisor service monitored the full delivery trajectories of 440,694 production level, permission-based email marketing messages sent from 69 different businesses and non-profit organizations to multiple accounts at 54 ISP domains in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia.

Messages were selected to represent an overall cross-section of typical email marketing and newsletter activities.

Examples of email message types monitored by the study include publishing, B2B, retail, travel, finance, among many others.

Surprisingly, in every single case, the recipients to whom the emails or newsletters were sent had made an explicit "opt-in" request to receive the messages at the specified email addresses.

Source: Lyris