Zrinity Email Marketing Blog

There are a number of pitfalls that organizations can encounter when it comes to email campaign delivery. Each, however, can be avoided through careful maintenance and monitoring. The four primary perils that most organizations run into and ways in which your organization can avoid them include the following:

1. Every domain, or www.abccompany.com, has a corresponding IP address which is unique to that particular site on the Internet. All email also has a corresponding IP address. Your IP address(es) are your online identity. What organizations must understand is that it is possible for anyone within a firm to get his or her organization’s IP address on a blacklist. This method used to combat SPAM essentially blocks that IP address from ever being able to deliver email to recipients, essentially rendering email campaigns a lost cause.

2. By not respecting the delivery policies set forth by recipient organizations, your organization will likely be listed as a spammer, as unfriendly or ever as a hostile email distributor. Not only will your emails end up in a SPAM folder that will likely go unopened, but you can also be removed from what is called the ‘whitelist’, a term used to represent those email distributors in good standing, and in turn added to the blacklist. It is important to note that email that is dumped into a SPAM folder does not generate notification to the sender, so any resulting reports will also be erroneous.

3. Running SPAM checks is a practice with which you want to be particular cautious. Recipient firms might think that your message is SPAM and actually mark your organization as the unfriendly sender. If you maintain your standing on a whitelist, this check will prove to be unnecessary.

4. Although a scary thought, it is possible for your competitors to spoof your email address and either use it to send SPAM or to plant spyware on your computer, turning it into a SPAM email server. This latter action will result in your IP address being blacklisted by a large number of people rather than just one, wreaking havoc on any email marketing efforts.

There are ways to avoid all the perils listed above through a couple of simple, albeit critical measures. For one, your organization will want to ensure there is a system of checks and balances in place for email dissemination. Make sure that there is only a set amount of employees, or better yet only one employee, that handles this form of communication and that they and/or he/she understands the proper protocol to keep your organization’s name (and IP address) in good standing. Second, if outsourcing this function make sure to utilize the services of an ESP that is not only bonded but can provide you with assurances against their use of practices such as running SPAM checks. A good ESP can also assure that they abide by the rules of recipient servers, eliminating the possibility of being blacklisted.

Sources: Email Best Practices, Email Marketing Systems