Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Hi Salt,

The biggest determining factor to deliverability and minimizing bounce backs is the quality of your subscriber list.

The content and layout also effect bounceback due to filtering techniques, but that is too long to cover here, contact me offline for more info on that, but if you follow the tips on the bottom they will minimize that problem.

Here you go:

1) Have your subscribers given you permission to communicate with them?

2) Are they confirmed double-optin?

If not then you need to go back and either verify their subscription or confirm it (the former is less stringent and doesn't require them to do anything, it is more opt-out).

And if they have given you permission, you still might want to ask them to confirm double opt-in because although you will lose subscribers, the quality of your list and delivery rate percentage will go up dramatically.

Here are reasons and solutions to minimize bouncebacks:

Non-existent addresses: Make sure all email addresses are correct.

Technical Problems: Outgoing and incoming email servers aren't communicating - usually temporary only.

Full mailbox: Self-explanatory

Email Blocking - Email blocking occurs when the receiving email server (e.g. Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail etc.) prevents an inbound email from reaching the inbox of the intended recipient. Most of the time the sender of the email receives a "bounce" message notifying the sender that their email has been blocked.

Filters - Filtering is a technique used to block email based on the content in the "from:" line, "subject:" line, or body copy of an email. Filtering software searches for key words and other indicators that identify the email as potential spam. This type of blocking occurs on a per email basis.

False Positive - A false positive occurs when a legitimate permission-based email is incorrectly filtered or blocked as spam.

Blacklist - It is common for an ISP to a use a blacklist to determine which emails should be blocked. Blacklists contain lists of domains or IP addresses of known and suspected spammers. Unfortunately, these blacklists also contain many legitimate email service providers. Just a few spam complaints can land an email service provider or IP address on a blacklist despite the fact that the ratio of complaints to volume of email sent is extremely low.

Whitelist: This is where you want to be. A whitelist is the opposite of a blacklist. Instead of listing IP addresses to block, a whitelist includes IP addresses that have been approved to deliver email despite blocking measures. It is common practice for ISPs to maintain both a blacklist and a whitelist. When email service providers, say they are "whitelisted" it means that their IP addresses are on a specific ISP's whitelist and are confident that emails sent using their service will be delivered.

How to prevent: The easiest thing you can ask your subscribers to do is add you to their email software program "Whitelist" - AOL, MSN, Outlook, whatever, you need to ask them to please add you to their address book or "do not block" list within their email program.

I hope that helps.