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David Fowler is the Chief Privacy Officer of Marketfish, a 100 percent self-service lead generation platform for list marketing. His vast knowledge and extensive experience in e-mail privacy, marketing and deliverability spans over two decades with prior U.S. and European-based senior management positions at companies such as Lyris Technologies, Alterian, Blue Hornet/Digital River, Yesmail and MCI. As a seasoned industry leader and speaker, with both domestic and international engagements including: International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), InBox USA, Inbox/Outbox (London), American Marketing Association, TRUSTe, Privacy and American Business and the Email Insider Summit.

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Why Your Digital Reputation Is Important

Written on
Jul 16, 2008 
Author
David Fowler  |
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Why Your Digital Reputation Is Important

canspam2.jpgADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — If you look up the word “reputation” in the dictionary you will see the following definition; the estimation in which a person or thing is held up. Having a good personal reputation is a goal which we all strive to achieve and is also a direct reflection on us as individuals.

The same principles apply in the digital world, particularly when it comes to email deliverability. Every email you send is a direct extension of your brand. Brand management is now, more than ever, an important initiative for your brand to portray a positive reputation in the receiver communities. Read on to see how your online reputation may be affecting your ability to deliver email.

Email Reputation Building Blocks

It is well known in the industry that a good email reputation is critical in improving the chances of your message reaching your client’s inbox and is closely linked to delivery statistics. The following reputation metrics assist in the creation and ongoing proactive management of YOUR reputation:

Spam Complaint Rates: The percentage of people complaining that your email is spam. Spam complaints should be very low, and you should target for approx 1% of you file. Spam complaints should never exceed 1%. When Spam complaints start exceeding 1% at an ISP, you are in severe jeopardy of them blocking all your mail.

Unknown User Rate: The percentage of the mail you send that goes to addresses that no longer exist. Unknown user rate is easy to gauge by the number of messages that come back because the address is bad. This will allow you to delete the address from your file quickly so as not to impact future campaigns.

Spam Trap Delivery: ISPs sometime convert unused addresses into spam traps. A spam trap is an email address that technically has not signed up for any e-mail. It’s posted on the Web somewhere maybe on a chat board for example. So in the eyes of the ISP if the address is emailed too, it means that you, or possibly a business partner of yours, harvested the email address. This means that you should tighten up you acquisition activities. Unfortunately, spam traps are impossible to track. A best practice here is to retire old, inactive addresses and implement a confirmed opt-in permission process, where you send a confirmation e-mail to new registrants. As you can’t measure Spam traps you have to implement policies that allow you to avoid them.

IP Based Reputation: ISPs base some deliverability decisions, among other tools, on what’s called IP-based reputation, or the reputation of the sender’s Internet Protocol address. Therefore, if you are using an IP address that is shared among several entities, it is possible that your reputation could get tarnished by the actions of others.

Another IP-related area for consideration is range blocking. If a mailer’s IP is in the same ‘range’ as a spammer’s, they can find their email failing to get delivered because the ISP has blocked the whole range. A common misunderstanding pertaining to IP reputation is that you can buy one or contract a third party to change yours for a fee. If only it was that simple…
Blacklists and URL Blocklists: These lists are also factors that can impact your digital reputation. These public, private and paid IP and domain based lists exist for the sole purpose of third parties to make and publish reputation-based assessments of your brand.

Active monitoring of these resources would be a valued exercise for you to gauge what others are saying about you, and therefore affecting your online reputation. You can be sure that ISPs and other receiving entities are referring to these tools and using the metrics in deciding whether to deliver your mail, visit your website or purchase your products.

Summary

Happily, reputation is within your control. There are tools, for example, that most of the major ISPs offer to gauge the levels of complaints via ‘Feedback Loops’. A feedback loop is essentially a report that tells you when a recipient has hit the Spam button, so you know who is complaining.
List hygiene is an ongoing and relentless work in progress. To maintain the most effective, functioning lists you have to continually, proactively manage your reputation.

As I have outlined, your digital reputation is a key factor in the ongoing extension of your brand management. Developing a reputation assessment program for your brand and ongoing monitoring of your business partners – such as advertisers, affiliates and co-registration sites – to ensure they meet YOUR business standards and privacy goals, will ensure that you manage the complex world of online digital reputation.





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