A recent study, the Lyris EmailAdvisor ISP Deliverability Report Card for 1Q07, reveals that the content within an email message isn't the main problem in deliverability.
The report stated, “...two frequently triggered Spam Assassin rules generated content filter point scores of significance…. The first rule cautions against heavy use of images, which can increase spam scores up to a full point and render poorly in email clients with image blocking enabled. The second problem, sending messages with a ‘From Name’ composed of numbers or symbols rather than an actual name, can also increase the likelihood of the message being flagged as spam and ending up in users’ junk/bulk folders.”
Lyris added that other major contributions to poor deliverability rates are sender authentication protocols, mailing history of the sender, number of complaints toward sender and how the sender collects data. In other words the majority is related to things connected to the reputation of the sender; a caution to do things right. It's the quick and easy ability for email recipients to give immediate feeback that is the major challenge here. Again, doing it right in the first place is extremely important.
The top-ranked ISP for delivering email was Compuserve, with a 88 percent delivery rate. All of the top ten ISPs delivered over 81 percent of emails sent.
Internationally, ISPs in Europe performed the highest, then came Australia, Canada and in fourth was the U.S. Within these regions they all came within five percentage points of each other.
For the top-ten U.S. ISPs, overall deliverability was over 90 percent in every case.
It seems to me almost all of this is connected to thinking of the user when putting our email campaigns together, as far as deliverability goes. Before we even think of content, we need to have our thoughts together on what type of inner display our email should take.
The bottom line is we should send an email like we would to a family member or friend, in that we let them know who it is sending it right up front, and not clog the message with too much clutter. That and relevance should help to keep our reputations in a good place with those who have giving us permission to send them relevant emails.
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