January/February 2005

Ask the Expert: Your Questions Answered

Question:
As we move into 2005, what new issues should our organization understand regarding email deliverability?

Answer:
by David Crooke, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Convio

As online communication evolves with increasingly sophisticated tools that address current needs such as spam filtering, organizations must consider the email deliverability issues that arise as a result. Following are some key issues and changes in today’s Internet landscape that will be important to email marketers in 2005.

Legislation
A lot of discussion in 2004 centered around anti-spam legislation, notably the federal CAN-SPAM law that went into effect last January. As many people predicted, this has not significantly improved the spam problem.

In 2005, expect to see further attempts from lawmakers to fight spam and the businesses it supports. Email marketers should continue to keep abreast of legislative changes and to comply with any regulations affecting them. Visit the Web site for the Direct Marketing Association Nonprofit Federation, which stays abreast of spam laws that may affect nonprofits.

Image Suppression
For privacy and convenience, a growing number of email clients now have an option to display HTML-formatted email without fetching the images from the Web. Notably, Microsoft Outlook 2003 and Google Gmail both do this by default. This defeats open rate measurement tools — the intended privacy benefit — but also affects how emails appear.

Email marketers should make the following allowances to account for image suppression:

• Include a link at the top of each message where recipients can go to view the contents on a Web page (Convio’s email marketing tool has built-in capability for this).
  
• Format the content so that if images are suppressed, the message still displays well. This technique also is a good practice for low-capability HTML clients such as Lotus Notes and AOL. Separate images vertically from text; if an image is placed alongside text content and is suppressed, the message layout will be compromised. Also, omit image size specifiers, so that white space is omitted if images are not loaded.
  
• Never use an image as the primary or sole link. Instead, use text for links.
  
• Be aware that this will contribute to a slow decline in measured message open rates. Open rate detection is not an exact science, and the systematic error in this measure continually varies with technology trends. Rely on click-though and action rates for more accurate and consistent metrics of message success.

Challenge-Response Systems
Challenge-response services like SpamArrest are becoming more popular. When a recipient who uses one of these services receives an email for the first time, the email is held from delivery and a "challenge" message goes back to the "Reply-To:" or "From:" address, with a task designed to be comprehensible only to a human so that it can defeat spammers' attempts at automation. Typically, this requires the sender to click on a link and transcribe a word on a Web form. Once the sender completes the task, the original email is delivered, as are all subsequent emails from the same source.

Most email recipients who use these services forget to add permission for email newsletters to which they subscribed. Email marketers, therefore, can expect to receive a growing number of challenge emails from such systems.

At this time, challenge-response service providers are fragmented, and this young industry lacks standards for operation. The only recourse available to email marketers is to manually respond to the challenge messages. How an organization handles these challenges depends on the lifetime value of an email address. In a typical nonprofit email file, this value is more than $1, so it may be worth having a staff member spend 60-90 seconds to respond to each of these challenges. Any organization responding to these challenges must ensure that all outgoing email messages use the same “From” email address. If it varies by newsletter, the organization will get multiple challenges for each recipient.

If these challenge-response systems continue to grow in popularity, they might adopt standards for whitelisting email marketing services, offering automated response mechanisms to authenticated senders.

Sender Verification Schemes
Two proposals for verifying the identity of an email sender, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Microsoft's proprietary alternative, Email Caller ID, got a lot of attention last year. There was hope that the SPF team could get Microsoft to come on board and unify the standards, but that effort fell through, stalling deployment of this technology.

SPF is still slowly gaining favor, and continues to be the subject of experimentation. Later in 2005 it will become worthwhile for organizations using email marketing to set up SPF for their domains. Look to your email service provider (ESP) for advice on how to do this.

Conclusion
Managing mass email communications is increasingly complex. Expect your ESP to keep you informed about major changes in the landscape, but also consider subscribing to newsletters from organizations like the DMA Nonprofit Federation and Marketing Sherpa to stay informed.
 

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