Chapter Twenty-Five

Key Steps to Increase Delivery of Your Emails

By Ben Hart

Now, here are a few more key steps you can and probably should take to increase the all-important delivery of your emails.

1)      Ask your opt-in subscribers to include you in their email address book.  If the address of your arriving email is in your reader’s address book, your email will be delivered by AOL and many other ISPs.

2)      When your email turns up in a spam folder for AOL, Yahoo and other ISPs, ask your subscriber to click “This is Not Spam.” Your emails will then stop showing up in the spam folder and will make it directly to the main e-mail in-box of your subscriber.

3)      Ask your readers to put your email address and domain name in their list of preferred senders – sometimes called a “white list.” 

4)      Encourage your readers to answer your emails.  Ask for comments and feedback.  With many ISPs, this automatically puts your email address in their address book and on their friends list or list of “preferred senders.”

5)      Develop your own relationship with the big ISPs – such as AOL and Yahoo. Ask for their instructions on how to get on the ISPs “white list” of legitimate email marketers.  They will tell you.

Avoid Getting “Black Listed” At All Costs

What you never want to have happen is to be “blacklisted” by AOL, Yahoo, and the ISPs.

Once that happens, it’s very difficult to become “un-blacklisted.”

In that case, you might have little choice but to change your IP address, your email address, your email marketing server, your domain name and basically just get a new identity.  You’re mostly up the creek without a paddle at that point.

So all this should be incentive enough for you never to be tagged as a spammer, and to make sure those you are emailing have given you permission and know they have given you permission to communicate with them.

It’s just better marketing not to be an Interruption Marketer.  This applies to all your marketing. But it’s especially important on the Internet. Do you really want to bother people who have no interest in what you are saying or selling?

True target marketing is just as much about weeding out those who have no interest as it is finding those who do have interest in what you are saying or selling.

That’s why almost all of my marketing is multi-step marketing – whether I am marketing off-line or online.

The first step is to collect the qualified lead.  To collect a qualified lead, I put some kind of attractive free bait out there that causes people to call the toll-free number or go to a landing page on the Internet to fill out a form – perhaps to get their free book.

They raise their hand first. They contact me first. Then I have a license (permission) to follow up.

That’s the method I use.  That’s how I use classified ads, Yellow Pages ads and little print ads.  Those who answer my ads to get my free offer, then go on my list and begin to receive follow-up communications.

And that’s how I do it on the Internet.  This system works for just about any business.

It will work for your local business or your global business.

Certified Email Delivery

But there is one more development that you should be aware of in e-mail marketing.

AOL and Yahoo are enacting what they are calling a “Certified Email” program.  The company running this program is called Goodmail Systems (www.GoodMail.com ).

Under this program, each message will contain a “goodmail” code (what it calls a “coin”) embedded in the message that will allow the email to pass unmolested through AOL’s and Yahoo’s spam filters.

Emailers pay for this certification. You are charged a one-time certification fee of about $399 and also for each email you send – about 3/10ths or 4/10ths of a penny per email at this moment.  Your fee depends on your volume.

So your bill for this can get pretty high if you are sending a lot of email.  But the upside is, AOL and Yahoo will let your emails through.

Here’s how Goodmail describes the benefits of its certification program:

o       Reliable delivery. Accredited senders are carefully vetted so their messages are not subject to the same filtering methods and can be reliably delivered to the inbox.

o       Full message functionality. Images and links are enabled automatically. No need to censor language to avoid filters.

o       Certified in-box labeling. The Certified Email trust symbol protects against fraud and phishing.

o       Delivery confirmation and enahanced reporting. Confirms delivery receipt at the message level enabling accurate reputation monitoring.

So these are good benefits and might a good solution to the spam problem.

My concern is that AOL and Yahoo will begin to act more and more like the mafia (or the U.S. Postal Service). That is, the system will evolve in such away that no commercial email will get through unless you pay this toll to AOL and Yahoo – a toll that will certainly continue to increase over time. 

AOL and Yahoo claim this won’t happen.  Haaahhh!

Clearly, this will be a big moneymaker for AOL and Yahoo.  If you really think AOL and Yahoo will turn down an opportunity to make a boatload of cash, you are deluding yourself.  These companies are in business to make money.  And part of that is to stomp out competition, if possible.  Short of that, they would like to impose a toll on other Internet marketers – which they will call a fee to use to use their vast network -- no different in concept than the phone company.

You pay for service.

Free email service was the “loss leader” these ISPs used to build their vast networks of users of their email services.  It was a brilliant strategy. They knew the money for them was in building an enormous network of eyeballs for their ads – users of their free email services.

Free to consumers – but now really not free to businesses.

The strategy here is pretty clear.  Make non-delivery of email so painful and costly to business that we will have no choice but to buy into this Certified Email program.

In my view, AOL is also pretty hypocritical.

AOL is one of the very worst spammers out there.  Subscribers to AOL are hit with an avalanche of pop-up ads everytime they log on.

Most of the articles on AOL now are thinly disguised ads. So if you are an AOL subscriber,  you are paying AOL a monthly fee for the privilege of being swamped by ads.

Yet, AOL is eager to point the finger at everyone else.  I more-than-suspect their finger-pointing and war-on-spam fanaticism has less to do with their own virtue than with their strategy to stomp out competition.  Does anyone really believe AOL/Time-Warner is anti-advertising?

They are just anti-everyone’s advertising but their own.

So the two biggest Internet Service Providers – AOL and Yahoo – have teamed up to set up this Certified Email program that will allow these companies to make ungodly sums of money by charging a toll to email marketers. Four-tenths of a penny per email is a lot of money given the volume of email.

But the Certified Email program probably will cut down on the spam. 

And buying into their Certified Email program will become an increasingly important answer to email deliverability problems.    But it will dramatically increase the cost to big email marketers.

If the Certified Email toll imposed by AOL and Yahoo is 4/10ths of one penny per e-mail – which is about what it is now – sending your ezine or enewsletter to 100,000 opt-in subscribers will cost $400.

That’s about how many emails I send out every day.  That extra $400 per email broadcast will certainly change the economics of email marketing. 

It’s still a great deal compared to postal mail.  But if your ezine is daily (as many good ones are), and you have a big list, this will be a big toll indeed.

My guess is nearly all the ISPs will start to buy into this Certified Email concept – so they can also start making money from commercial and business emails.

The other two big certified email programs are www.BondedSender.com and www.Habeas.com. 

Bonded Sender has relationships with MSN, RoadRunner, Hotmail and many other ISPs that rely on Bonded Sender’s “white list” to let email through without extensive scrubbing by spam filters.

Habeas has a similar “white list” program. 

According to the folks there, Habeas receives more than 600 million requests each day from more than 4,000,000 messaging systems worldwide. 

If you are not on the Habeas “white list,” your email has less chance of being delivered.  AOL, Earthlink, Google, MSN, Cisco and many large corporations rely, at least in part, on the Habeas “white list” certification to determine whether an email should be delivered without a thorough going-over by the spam filter. 

You can also have your domain name “white listed” by these big white listing and certified email programs. This is important if your domain name is part of your email address, let’s say JohnDoe@IBM.com

This way, any email address that includes this domain name will be cleared by the “white listing” program.

None of these steps guarantees 100% delivery. Businesses, individuals and smaller ISPs have their own spam blocking systems.  But all these steps will help increase the delivery of your emails.

Your major ongoing project as an email marketer must be to get on everyone’s “white list,” friends list, preferred-sender list and in the address book of your prospects and customers.

DeliveryMonitor.com

www.Deliverymonitor.com is a low-cost service that tracks delivery of your emails by the world's top ISP's. DeliveryMonitor.com gives you a report showing the percentage of email arriving in a users inbox, bulk box, or that are not delivered at all.

The way this program works is DeliveryMonitor.com provides “seed” email addresses that are located at the top ISPs.  These seed addresses go on your email list. When you send out an email broadcast, DeliveryMonitor.com will then create for you a statistical report on the delivery success of each of your email campaigns.

This is critical information – different than tracking open-rates and click-through rates of your emails, which your email broadcast service should be doing for you. 

You will certainly notice your open-rates and click-through rates decline over time.

This happens naturally because a portion of your older names will stop opening your emails.  No matter how fantastic you think your emails are, a portion of those on your list will decide after a while that they just are not interested in what you have to say. So they stop opening your emails.

But another reason for disappointingly low open-rates is that your emails are not being delivered, for whatever reason.  DeliveryMonitor.com specifically tracks the delivery rate of your emails by ISP.  So your emails might be getting  through fine on many ISPs, but are getting blocked by others.  DeliveryMonitor.com lets you know what’s happening to your email so you can take steps to fix the problem.

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