Always on Offense

Wouldn't it be great to always have the ball and always play on offense? Every few minutes you could rush or pass your way down the field and score. The score would rack up and in a 60 minute game you could have hundreds of points. Of course that wouldn't be much of a game would it, but that is the ideal scenario for email marketing. There is a problem however, a big problem, there are 11 defenders on the field with you trying to take the ball away and prevent you from scoring. Like football, you must get past the defenders in order to convert your ultimate goal.

Defensive Line Blocking
The firt obstacle in email delivery is blocking your messages. There are many reasons you message may be blocked.

• It looks spammy (or is spammy)


• The SMTP is not properly configured


• ISP sending limits


• The mail server is blacklisted

It is important to test your email campaigning ability regularly to ensure that you can continue to get your emails through to your intended recipients.

Secondary
These are the guys that intercept your email message just before you get it into the hands of the receiver - corporate IT. In order to protect company resources, the IT guy is going to set up varying levels of filtering on incoming email. BtoB emails from recognized companies typically have a better shot of getting through to the recipient. Like defensive backs, some companies perform this task better than others, filtering out spam with low incidence of false positives.

Penalties
Nothing ruins the momentum of sending a large campaign than getting flagged during a send. There are several factors that can contribute to your campaign slowing down.

• Too many emails to one domain


• Too many failed email addresses in your list


• Too many spam complaints

More legitimate email marketers are finding their delivery performance slowed down because of these factors. Without your knowing it, you could have fallen off a whitelist, greylisted, or even blacklisted depending on how badly you are penalized. The fact that every ISP has its own delivery and whitelist standard does not help, you must account for them all.

Legitimate email markerters are always playing on offense, but there is a whole other team on the field trying to prevent you from scoring. Delivering your email message is the ultimate goal, after all, nobody can open or click through to your website if the message never arrives in their inbox. Services like Delivery Monitor can help keep track of this information for you so you can zip past the defenders and get touchdowns all day long.

Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting