Internet marketing tactics are affected by the battle being waged between spammers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who are trying their best to protect their customers from a deluge of unwanted messages that can quickly overwhelm inboxes. Unfortunately, businesses trying to get legitimate email marketing messages to their prospects and clients are often casualties of this conflict. I mentioned in an earlier post about the website design 80/20 rule of thumb, where it is good practice to limit images to a maximum of 80% of the email marketing piece. This helps avoid ISP filters that categorize any email that consists entirely of images as spam.
Something that is a necessity now is to ensure that the platform you are using for email marketing incorporates DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) as a protocol. It is a way for an ISP to authenticate that an arriving email message belongs to the domain that is sending it. We have observed that this functionality can make a significant improvement in reducing the bounce rate of an email campaign. It is important to note that for DKIM to be used, a “From” address must be used belonging to the same domain that is sending the email. In other words, if the email is being sent from mydomain.com, a suitable From address would be info@mydomain.com but not info@someotherdomain.com.
Lastly, remember to keep your mailing list current. This is a best practice in the world of internet marketing. Look at the results of previous campaigns and weed out the addresses that generated hard bounces. If the bounce rate is too high, the sending application can shut down a campaign before all messages are sent. Likewise, ISPs can blacklist the sending IP address if too many bounces are received or a campaign is otherwise perceived as spammy. That could negatively impact future campaigns and even other domains if they are sharing the same server.
