Premiere Global Services' director of deliverability services breaks down email success-- explaining that domains are the first step.

As the ultimate gatekeepers of email, domains (the breakdown of the ISPs you deliver email to) have the power to make or break email marketing campaigns by supporting or hindering deliverability. Deliverability issues, primarily in the form of filtering by ISPs and corporations, are among marketers' biggest challenges-- costing untold millions in potential sales annually. Estimates indicate a 5 percent drop in email delivery rates can cost even a moderate-sized e-tailer $1 million per year. 

Most marketers are diligent about monitoring delivery rates and metrics such as bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints across an entire send. The problem is that far fewer are actually measuring delivery to key ISPs and the domains within them to see who may be causing the issues, such as blocking their emails with increasingly stringent filters and rules.

Know your domains  
A domain analysis is the first step to ensuring your email messages are delivered as intended. A few domains dominate the market, but your audience's usage could vary, so it's important to run a report to see exactly which domains are represented in your databases. Consumer lists are likely to be dominated by AOL, Yahoo!, MSN/Hotmail, while business lists may also contain large company domains.

Next, you'll want to assess how your content appears in each domain, and whether or not you have some ISPs where your message is breaking or images are missing. Using one of the many email rendering tools available is an important step to understanding how your brand and your messages are being presented to your customers. Analyzing reports that show previous campaign results by your top domains can allow you to compare metrics such as open rates and clickthrough rates to see if there are any potential issues as well. Once you've identified the domains delivering less-than-satisfactory results, you're ready to tackle each one's specific deliverability barriers. 

Improving deliverability
ISPs spend an inordinate amount of time trying to outpace spammers and protect their domain subscribers and legitimate emailers, which can lead to deliverability problems for even the most conscientious marketers. In fact, research, as far back as 2004 has shown that as much as 17 percent of permission email is erroneously blocked as spam, which is expected to drive the cost of wasted email to $419 million by 2008. It is essential, therefore, to develop good relationships with your ISPs and stay up-to-date on their requirements and processes.

Questions to address with domains that consistently under-perform include:

• Does this ISP suppress images?
• Do they have personal address book whitelisting options?
• Have their rate limits been tightened?
• Do they operate a feedback loop for permission email marketers?
• Have they recently changed their spam filters?
• Have they blacklisted/blocked your IP addresses in error?

Repeated bounces caused by email address changes and data entry errors can also raise ISP suspicions and trigger unwarranted spam filters. To alleviate the problem, revisit your bounce management process and set a threshold to remove bad addresses after they bounce three consecutive times. Using bounce-threshold solutions will not only help smooth the way with ISPs and domains, it can also lower incoming connections, which could eliminate the need to increase your inbound capacity.

Deliverability dos and don'ts
Domain analysis is an invaluable way to proactively address deliverability issues. Here are some quick tips to make the process even more effective:

• Do continually monitor your results by domain and watch for trends that point to specific issues with those that under-perform. Don't overreact based on analyzing a single campaign or message.
• Don't spend disproportionate energy trying to improve deliverability to domains that represent a small percentage of your list. Do focus instead on those that significantly impact bottom line results.
• Don't assume all subscribers of a certain domain are less valuable just because the overall results are below average. Do continue to segment according to behaviors and demographics to make sure you don't overlook loyal customers and hot prospects.
• Don't assume low performance is attributable solely to the domain's filtering or other deliverability hurdles. Do test message variables such as subject lines, content, formats and offers to see which ones generate better results.
• Don't assume your recipients see what you see. Do test your HTML emails with one of the many HTML readability programs available. By using these programs you will be able to view the message as the users will see it. The major ISPs can render HTML, but they may suppress images, or treat forms, navigation or other aspects differently, which could affect open and clickthough rates.

These simple hints will let you unlock the potential of your mailings and allow you to become the master of your domains.

Spencer Kollas is director of deliverability services, Premiere Global Services. Read full bio.