Want to get your emails seen? Lyris Technologies' strategic account manager spells out four steps to romancing ISPs.

Roses are red, violets are blue, deliverability is great when ISPs love you! 

When faced with deliverability problems, some email marketers rail that the ISPs are fickle, that they hate all email marketers.
 
But ISPs are trying to protect themselves from cold-hearted spammers that have threatened to break their networks and to render email useless for everyone. Good deliverability is the result of good relationships, both with your recipients and with the ISPs who deliver their mail. ISPs are telling you all the time what they think about your email marketing practices, but you need to pay attention. Here are four tips to have great relationships with the ISPs and ensure deliverability.

1. Clean up your act
You wouldn't go on a date without at least showering and brushing your teeth first. The ISPs won't be smelling your breath, but they will be monitoring if your list hygiene stinks and your bounce rate is high. A high bounce rate occurs for several reasons, none of them good. For legitimate marketers, the most typical reason for a high bounce rate is neglect. If a sender neglects to scrub the list of bouncing addresses, the bounce percentage will increase over time. Sometimes, this neglect is due to inaccurate reporting or poor bounce-management by their email marketing software. 

But more often, the failure to remove bounces lies squarely on the shoulders of the list owner who resists anything that reduces the size of their list. Bouncing addresses may also be addresses that were never any good to begin with. If users on your website need to register with an email address, they may provide a bogus one if they don't trust that you'll respect their mailing preferences. Some ISPs have identified what they consider to be a high bounce-rate. AOL considers a 10 percent bounce rate excessive, but I have seen mail blocked by other ISPs for much lower bounce rates. A frequently mailed and well maintained list will have a bounce rate in the low single digits

2. Be a good listener
When you're sending email, you're not only having a conversation with your customers, but with your customers' ISPs. They're telling you how things are going, but you have to know how to listen so you don't end up getting dumped. Several ISPs have established feedback loops or whitelisting programs to inform you when recipients are labeling your email messages as spam. By participating in these programs, you may be able to send higher volumes of email to these ISPs before being rate-limited or slowed down. 

But if the complaint rate gets too high, they'll block your email. Microsoft Live Network, which includes hotmail.com and msn.com addresses, advises complaints should be lower than 0.3 percent. AOL is even stricter; it reportedly is looking for a complaint rate below 0.1 percent. When an ISP blocks due to complaint levels, they're just alerting you to what your recipients are saying about your email. Ignoring the message or blaming the messenger won't reduce complaint rates by themselves. Senders who change their practices to reduce the percentage of complaints can ultimately restore their deliverability. 

3. Don't fall into traps
When your email hits a spam trap, the ISPs think you've been up to no good. A spam trap is a defunct email address. Spam trap addresses may have been legitimate at one time, but have been abandoned by the user. Or, they've never been used by anyone. Theoretically, no one "owns" these addresses, so they should never be subscribed to an opt-in list. After all, a spam trap can't confirm a subscription and will never open, click, or buy. 

ISPs see spam trap hits as evidence of your cheatin' ways. Instead of getting interested people to opt-in, you may be buying lists or working with questionable co-reg sites. If you have good subscription practices but find you're still hitting spam traps, it could be that you have an old list that needs some purging of non-responders. Give them one last chance to confirm their interest in your mail, then let them go.

4. Be steadfast
It's hard to have a relationship with someone who's moving all the time, and ISPs are no exception. Senders with deliverability problems often try to run away from them. Rather than changing their practices to resolve blocks, they think the problem will go away if they change networks, email service provider, or even their own domains. They can run, but if they don't change what they're doing their past will eventually catch up with them. If nothing else, the practices that got them blocked on one network will cause blocks elsewhere. Nobody likes to be played for a fool. When ISPs detect a sender who keeps moving in order to evade their spam filtering, they'll block again and with a vengeance. ISPs are looking for senders who stick it out when times get tough. If you find your email is getting blocked, don't panic and switch IP addresses. Look at what you're doing, what the ISP is telling you, and see where you need to make a change. Communicate that change, and you may find that you're back in that ISP's good graces again.

Ultimately, commitment is the most important element in cultivating long-term relationships with ISPs. Fixes for deliverability problems are rarely easy or quick. If you're willing to work with the ISPs, you'll find they'll be your willing partners in ensuring their customers get the email they want. 

Wendy Roth is strategic account manager, Lyris Technologies. Read full bio.