These digital natives are often derided for willingly sharing so much personal information. But truth be told, one doesn’t need texts and tweets, or Facebook and Tumblr for that. Indeed, with one innocuous transaction online, details on buying preferences, location and personal information are all tracked (contributing, by the way, to the overflow of unsolicited email in your in-box). It’s called behavioral targeting, and although it’s the surest way of delivering relevant promotions to the right individuals, it also seemingly invades our privacy.

So, does privacy have to be a casualty of this technology? Perhaps not: By proactively managing expectations with the brands you have a digital and business relationship with, consumers can take back control and reinstate a level of privacy that anyone can be comfortable with.

Read the Fine Print

However careful some of us are to keep personal information under wraps, merely existing in the 21st century alongside sophisticated technology forces us to relinquish at least some privacy, like it or not. Take, for instance, the typical grocery store rewards card, which can likely be found in every wallet on earth. In essence, it exchanges the deal of the day for your personal information: You use it every time you shop, and in turn, it takes note of your buying behaviors. That’s why, along with your receipt, you get a slew of unsolicited (albeit sometimes welcome) coupons customized to your preferences. It’s  behavioral targeting at its best.

Although these club card-generated coupons may be a welcome result of behavioral targeting, spam and otherwise unsolicited email, byproducts of behavioral targeting, are not. That’s why it’s important to manage your relationships with the companies you patronize, and read the “fine print.” Customers can do this by “flagging” and by opting-out of information-sharing, both of which exist to assure customers that no personally identifiable information is taken, and that any unscrupulous parties breaching privacy are monitored and subject to sanctions. Also, it is worth noting that unless you proactively opt-out most companies will share you PII. Completing an annual opt-out request online is ideal as a paper submission may take a while to complete.

Marketers: Commit to ‘Clean’ Lists

But the onus to fine-tune behavioral targeting and eradicate spam should not fall solely on the consumer. For although they must take care to opt out of sharing information, marketers, too, must commit to doing business with only those list-rental vendors that offer permission-based email lists. Alternately, they can count on “clean” lists from self-service lead-generation platforms. Either of these will ensure marketers reach the right targets, and therefore find a greater return on their campaigns and fewer complaints of spam.

Another benefit: The commitment to data integrity through demand for permission-based email lists will also likely spur widespread change in the list marketing industry as a whole, pushing out list-rental vendors that refuse to conform to industry best practices.

It may seem that privacy is a casualty of technology and convenience. But we do, in fact, have the power to recapture at least some of it by managing our relationships with our preferred brands. Using this approach, we can coexist with technology while sparing our private lives.

A good reputation can take months or even years to build, but only seconds to destroy. Following, we offer four ways to preserve your sender reputation and avoid the spam folder or, worse yet, an ISP blacklist.

Use a Dedicated IP Address

It is a common myth among email marketers that a company’s reputation is based on its name. In truth, as far as your sender reputation is concerned, credibility is based on your IP address. Think of an IP address as a unique identifier such as a home address, Social Security number or passport — if stolen or used illegally, there can be serious ramifications for your personal credit or reputation.

You don’t share your Social Security number with just anyone — the same rule should apply to your IP address. If you share an IP address with one — let alone hundreds — of companies, you are putting your credibility score at risk.

Many ESPs will provide a dedicated IP address for a fee, which gives you complete control of the messages you send, safeguarding your sender reputation. A dedicated IP address is essential to high deliverability rates.

Build a Current, Up-to-Date Mailing List

If you are using a list of email addresses that have not been contacted in at least 12 months, the recipients have more than likely forgot who your company is and why they are receiving emails from you — even if they subscribed themselves. As a result, emails sent to inactive addresses are highly likely to end up in the spam folder, which drastically effects your sender reputation and deliverability rates.

Purchased lists can be even more of a gamble depending on the quality of the broker. Many include “spam-trap addresses” that are placed on the Web, just waiting to be picked up. The CAN-SPAM act makes it illegal to apply these addresses to lists for purchase. If you use them your IP address may be blacklisted, making it extremely difficult for your messages to be received.

The best practice for list-building is to do it yourself through a transparent opt-in process. Should you decide to purchase a list, be sure to remove obvious illegitimate emails such as thumbs@down.com and watch@out.com before you send.

Authenticate Your IP Addresses

In order to curb spam, IP addresses require authentication to determine the sender of an email. In order to determine whether Business X truly sent an email, ISPs use a variety of authentication protocols such as SPF, Sender ID and Domain Keys. To assist the process, an IT person or webmaster is needed to update domain name system (DNS) records.

Updating these records with the addresses that are permitted to send emails from your company is vital in order to keeping your sender reputation intact, as ISPs will block emails that do not come from an approved IP address. Without the authentication process ISPs may interpret your message as spam, negatively impacting your credibility.

Welcome New Subscribers

Not only is sending a welcome email to new subscribers a best practice, it can be the key to ensuring your next email message lands in the inbox instead of in the spam folder. A welcome email reminds subscribers who you are, clues them in to the design of your email templates so they’ll recognize them in the future and it alerts them of when to expect your emails.

To ensure continued deliverability, encourage new subscribers to add your company email address to their address books of safe sender lists. This will guide your messages directly to the inbox, rather than the spam folder. Knowing who you are makes all the difference between reading your email and reporting it as spam.

Follow these simple rules to avoid irreparable damage to your email reputation. Using dedicated and consistent email lists, a unique and devoted IP address, authenticating your email address and welcoming new subscribers, can put you on the path to a better reputation, and protect your company’s good name.

Many factors come into play for design reputation if you are sending a sub-par designed email the following can become an issue:
Unsubscribe Rates: Over 53% of people unsubscribe if your offer and/or content isn’t compelling.
Spam Complaints: 26% of consumers unsubscribe from email by clicking on the “This is spam” button.
Customer Relationship: If the customer adds you to the address book, it improves your delivery AND turns images back on in AOL 9
ISP Whitelisting: If you are on the AOL Enhanced Whitelist images are turned on. If you are on the Yahoo Whitelist and get into the inbox, images are on. However to remain on whitelists your unknown user rates (bounces) and spam complaints must be kept very low (for AOL EWL spam complaints must remain below 0.25%).
ISP Blocking: If as little as 0.5% – 1% of your customers complain you are spamming them, the ISP may block ALL your mail.
You have to consider your total client experience and rendering plays a big part of that engagement.
Here are some final thoughts on Design Tips:
Recognize your customers read their emails in a variety of environments and your QA should reflect that. (Verify your message looks and functions right across email readers; a single view of your message in your local email reader – how most folks QA their design – is misleading and not representative)
Recognize the importance of images on and off, and what off means in the different email clients.
Optimize your brand and calls to action to display in the preview pane and above-the-fold view. This view may indeed be what differentiates a response vs. none.
Don’t forget about your ‘From and Subject.’ They may be the only thing that looks right and should identify who you are and, in most cases, the point of your message.
Don’t design in a vacuum. Your design affects your delivery and your delivery affects your design. Your design affects your credibility and your credibility affects your reputation. Your reputation affects whether you’ll have the privilege of continuing to communicate with your customers.

I thought this would be an appropriate opportunity to reflect on the deliverability marketplace, and to share some insight with you on some of the basic deliverability principles you need to consider and adopt when sending commercial email. We have come along way since 2003 but the deliverability market has matured, and that is good news for all of us. What follows are 10 Golden Rules of deliverability that are still important and critical to consider when engaging in email marketing:

1. IP Reputation

Your IP address and appropriate activity from your mailing history begins to establish your “Sender Reputation” in the eyes of the recipients. IP reputation has become extremely important in deliverability related matters – both positive and negative.

2. Permission

Confirm and re-affirm the wishes of your audience. Relevance is the key for your customer; provide options to change preferences again in every email you send.

3. Consistent and Recognizable “Friendly From” Address

Ensure you always send your email messages from the same From Address. Customers are more likely to open messages and enable links from companies they recognize and with whom they have a direct relationship. Adding your address to their Address Book is easier if it’s the same one every time and could allow your email to bypass certain ISP filters ensuring better deliverability.

4. Ensure Every Email is a Wanted Email

Fundamental, but important: If customers want your email, they are more likely to add you to their address book. If customers routinely read your emails, they are less likely to be fooled by Phishers. If customers want your email, they won’t report it as spam. If customers don’t complain about you spamming them, or do so at very low rates, your email reputation will improve with the ISPs and you will encounter less aggressive filtering from the ISP as a result.

5. Recognizable Branding

If the images are stripped or turned off in your HTML email, will your recipient still be able to identify your brand in the body of the email? Always develop HTML versions that convey your most important points even without the images and be sure to always include a full link to your site.

 6. Validate Your Email HTML

Rendering does not end with the email client. Most rendering issues are due to poorly constructed HTML. Some ISPs will filter mail into the spam folder because of this. Always ensure your HTML is validated against current industry standards. Ensure that you also review what your emails look like across the top ISPs and Desktop clients. Just because you sent the right format (e.g. text versus html) does not mean it renders properly.

 7. Test Text vs. Rich Text vs. HTML

Consider the implications of different formats based on your customer preferences and behavior. Many mailers are text emails which may outperform HTML. Test different formats against different customer segments as well as different types of communications.

8. Monitor the Delivery to the Inbox and Spam Folders

Consistent monitoring of your campaigns will provide you valuable insight into the performance of your messaging strategies.

9. Manage Your Hard and Soft Bounces

Know hard and soft bounce rates. Track hard bounces by source. Hygiene matters, both soft & hard bounce notices, can provide invaluable information regarding the ISP’s treatment of your mail.

10. Acquire and Remove Names Responsibly

To ensure your URLs are not irreversibly damaged, and deliverability severely impacted by complaints and bad addresses, be smart with appends, list rentals, blind/generic co-registration programs, affiliates and sponsorships. Verify the name sources, vet source reputation and delivery, and verify addresses prior to adding to your house-file. This is particularly critical in B2B marketing. Opting out should be as simple as opting in; don’t be tempted to put in extra steps or send ‘just one more email’. If you use specific campaign opt-outs, these should be accompanied by an option to unsubscribe from all communications.

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.