10 Must Have Features in your Email Marketing Software

Different ISP’s have different filters meaning getting your email into the inbox at every ISP can be a nightmare and time consuming exercise. For consumer marketers whose lists could be made up almost entirely of a few ISP’s, checking these before the send is essential.

At Emailcenter we utilised our Inbox Seeding tool to test 128 different email creatives at the major ISP’s to see how many were delivered into the inbox, junk mail folder or completely rejected. We also tested the different levels of filters at each ISP.

The emails were all sent from IP addresses that were whitelisted where applicable but had sender ID records set-up.

With a number of ISP’s 100% deliverability was achieved. This suggests that the filtering is minimal at best. Surprisingly this included various filters at AOL where only the enhanced junk settings caught 4 creatives in their junk folder.

Unsurprisingly Hotmail & Yahoo were the next difficult to deliver to. The Hotmail enhanced filter is the default setting for users of their service.

What actions does this suggest we take?

Sender ID Records

Hotmail & Yahoo, the worst performers are the main users of sender authentication technologies such as Sender ID. This suggests that had Sender ID records been set-up there would have been less likelihood of the email being classified as spam.

Utilise Inbox Seeding

The survey shows the benefit of inbox seeding tests. While we can see some trends and guess which emails were going to be classified as spam, some emails that contained no obvious spammy techniques still got placed in the junk mail folder. The impact this would have had on the performance of the campaigns would have resulted in it not being worthwhile sending.

Don’t rely on Spam Assassin tests

Most email providers will let you think that running a simple spam assassin score and keeping it under 5 will save you from all junk mail filters. Nothing could be further from the truth. We also recorded the spam assassin score of every email that got tested. While on occasions emails that got classified as spam did have a high spam assassin score there was no consistent trend. Indeed even emails that scored less than 1 in spam assassin got placed in the junk mail folder.

Spam assassin is used in a number of corporate filters and is the only major spam filter that has published rules. None of the major ISP’s utilise these rules so it is irrelevant when thinking about delivering to the likes of Hotmail.

Remember the basics!

It is noticeable that many marketers are not remembering the basics about spammy techniques. Emails that got classified as junk often used a from address such as sales@domain.com, had capital letters in the subject line or phrases such as ‘Free offer” liberally throughout the email.

Limitations of the survey

While this survey provides an excellent overview of each ISP it is important to understand what other factors an ISP looks at that cannot be replicated here. These are all things that happen during the send of your campaign including:

* Bounce rates at each ISP which ISP’s use to determine how accurate your list is

* Spam complaint rates

* The amount of email being delivered at any one time

Email Marketing Software