A recent whitepaper from the e-mail marketing firm StrongMail, called Mastering Your Email Reputation: Seven Strategies for Improving Deliverability, provides tips to multichannel marketers looking to improve the effectiveness of their e-mail campaigns. Among others, the whitepaper lays out best practices to improve sender reputation to protect against e-mails being filtered or blocked by Internet service providers (ISPs), preventing them from reaching consumers’ inboxes. Here’s a look at the whitepaper’s seven strategies.
1. Maintain a clean list. Sending to bad addresses not only skews response rates, it’s a core metric ISPs use to determine sender reputation, the whitepaper notes. To maintain a clean list, consider the following tactics:
* Bounce management: Have a system in place to automatically process and categorize varying bounce codes. To implement this system effectively, capture all data streams, including asynchronous and synchronous bounces; interpret the data by processing bounce data and the varying bounce descriptions that come from each receiving domain; organize the data into logical categories, such as hard bounce, soft bounce, block and technical failure; take action based upon the data, including creating reports that address the causes of failures; and update your rules continually to keep up with the dynamic e-mail environment, which causes ISPs to periodically update bounce codes.
* List hygiene: To keep deliverability rates high, scrub your list regularly by running it against a register of known bad domains and role accounts; remove and/or correct bad domains by reviewing failure reports, identifying bad addresses, and evaluating whether they’re the result of a data capture problem or a nonexistent domain; remove distribution accounts simply by adding “info@*,” “sales@*” and other common addresses to your suppression list; remove inactive addresses (customers without any opens or clicks within a 12-month period); and use data checkers on your Web site to help ensure e-mail addresses are properly formatted before accepted into the database.

Joe Keenan is the executive editor of Total Retail. Joe has more than 10 years experience covering the retail industry, and enjoys profiling innovative companies and people in the space.
