Bronto Blog’s exclusive “Email Industry Experts Speak Out” series continues with a great Q&A session with Deirdre Baird, President & CEO of Pivotal Veracity.  Deirdre launched Pivotal Veracity in 2003 to help email marketer optimize the deliverability, design and reputation of their digital communications.  I recently talked with her about some of the burning issues in the world of email marketing deliverability:

Chris - Q) How critical is authentication to filtering heuristics?
Deirdre - A) Heuristic Filters work by applying a series of rules to a particular message (message being inclusive of both sender/sending characteristics as well as the actual content and construction of the message). Each rule is assigned a score (positive or negative) typically based on that rule’s historical correlation with spam (these correlations or rule scores can be either positive or negative).  The sum of the scores for all rules hit are then compared against various cut-off total scores that determine what action the receiver should take (e.g. if the sum of the rule scores is greater than 5, mail is placed in the spam folder; if greater than 10, it is black-holed).

Both ISPs and commercial spam filters rely on heuristics as either part of a multi-phase filtering system or as their only filtering system.  However, what can and does differ from one receiver to the next is:  a) what rules are built into the heuristic filter (e.g. some may have a rule for authentication and some may not),  b) the score for the individual rules (e.g. one may have a higher score for the failing authentication rule than another receiver), and finally  c) what the cut-off scores are that determine disposition (e.g. one ISP may say anything above 5 is spam and another may say anything above 7 is spam). That being said, most ISPs and commercial filters check for authentication (SPF and/or DKIM;  SenderID for Hotmail) at some point in their filtering process.

Authentication has historically been used by ISPs to help determine whether a sender is a phisher (or not a phisher).  Now that ISPs are beginning to apply reputation at the authenticated domain level, authentication is also becoming increasingly important in helping ISPs identify whether a message is spam (or more accurately in this case, ‘not’ spam). Remember, authentication on its own says nothing about the quality of the sender but once you apply traditional reputation metrics such as spam complaints and unknown user rates, it can be used as both a phishing and spam delineator. The value of authentication for marketers is three-fold:

1. If you’re a well-known brand, the anti-phishing protection that solutions like DKIM provides is an absolute must. ISPs have upped the ante over the past year in aggressively using these solutions to reject all mail that fails and some – like Gmail – have started to use DKIM to visually indicate to end users that mail that passes is safe.
2. If your want to take advantage of the largest ISPs’ whitelisting and feedback loop programs—which are critical for maintaining a good reputation and inbox delivery—you must be authenticating.
3. Major ISPs such as AOL & Yahoo! are moving to Authenticated-Domain-Reputation and will place precedence on Domain-Reputation over IP reputation. IP reputation will not completely go away, it’ll be just another data point. However, if you change IPs, which happens on occasion, you can keep your reputation as it will be tied to your domain. This gives mailers more flexibility about who they want their provider to be and enables them to ensure that their brand’s reputation is strictly tied to their domain, their name and their actual mailings, instead of being polluted by a previous unscrupulous mailer that used the IP before them or by mailers who share an IP with them.

Chris - Q) Do you anticipate the industry trend towards a recipient engagement model instead of a binary complaint and/or bounce algorithm in the future?  How important is content in this role?
Deirdre - A) We are seeing a huge shift in how ISPs determine reputation and folder disposition.  This shift can be broken into two parts:

Shift 1:  Inclusion of Engagement Metrics into the concept of Spam / Not Spam
It’s no longer just about “explicit negative inputs” like spam complaints and hitting spam traps. ISPs have caught on to marketers who are gaming the spam complaint system by sending large amounts of email to dormant subscribers in order to lower their overall complaint rates.  In response, now many of them are also looking for “explicit positive inputs” and are going beyond explicit to learned preferences.  Engagement metrics like opens, clicks, forwards, add to address book rates, replying to emails, are all now helping ISPs distinguish legitimate marketers from spammers.  The best advice is one that AOL often repeats:   send relevant email to people that want to receive it.

Shift 2:  Customer-specific engagement and preferences ultimately determine folder placement!
Historically, an ISP would compute an IP or (as we’re now seeing) an authenticated-domain’s overall spam complaint rate, unknown user rate, etc.  These ‘aggregated’ metrics would be a primary driver of disposition baring any explicit filters at the customer level.  For example, provided your complaint rate was below X and unknown user rate was below Y at the IP or Domain level, the ISP would place your mail in the inbox.  That is changing!  ISPs are now moving toward customer-level adaptive learning filters and placing explicit and learned customer-level behavior over all other levels of filtering (with the exception of outright Port25 blocks).   This is an incredibly important shift with huge implications for mailers.  It means, for example, that it does not matter if you have 0 complaints and 0 unknown user rates – if customer X has negatively engaged with your mail (e.g.  historically ignored your mail, moved your mail to the spam folder, etc), it will be placed in the spam folder for that customer.  Conversely, if your spam complaint rates and unknown user rates when computed at the IP or Domain level are such that you’re designated as spam, your mail will still be placed in the inbox for those customers who have positively engaged with your email (e.g., opened, clicked, replied, moved you to inbox, personal folders, reported you as not spam, added you their address book, etc).    Effectively this means that IP & Domain-level aggregated reputation metrics are now serving as “default disposition” and are “over-ruled” by learned and explicit preferences and engagement behavior for each individual customer.

When you combine the use of new types of engagement metrics – to include NO engagement (no interaction with mailer), with the precedence given to the customer, this means mailers should:

1. Focus on engagement - which ultimately are many of the same metrics mailer’s use to measure campaign success now BUT means also they need pay a lot more attention to those who are unengaged instead of continuing to mail customers who clearly show no interest in their mail.
2. Recognize that deliverability is no longer black & white – you can no longer simply say you are in the spam folder or in the inbox for a particular mailing at a particular ISP. Instead your deliverability can and will differ from one customer to the next dependent upon that specific customer’s relationship with you.

Chris - Q) Are there any exciting and new innovations on your horizon that you would be able to give us a teaser on?
Deirdre - A) We recently released MailboxIQ – the first and only technology to track email deliverability and platform-usage at the customer-level, across social, mobile, search, software and web-based email platforms. There literally hasn’t been an advance like this in deliverability tracking in over ten years.

In addition to innovating with new platforms like MailboxIQ, Pivotal Veracity remains committed to supporting its clients with the most sophisticated and comprehensive suite of email deliverability, rendering and reputation tools on the market: We’ve made sure to add all the latest platforms to our award-winning eDesign Optimizer, including, most recently, the new MySpace mail and the Palm Pre and Android mobile platforms (we’re the only provider that offers this), and we will continue to roll out additional capabilities designed to help marketers succeed in an increasingly complex but exciting multi-platform digital universe.

Thanks Deirdre for offering your insight into these deliverability issues. Next up in the blog post series, I’ll talk with Whitney Hutchinson, Group Director, Strategy at Razorfish as she addresses multi-channel communication, the definition of an engaged recipient, and new innovations.  Then be on the look out for more posts from leaders from:

• Cloud Mark
• Return Path

Did I miss any questions?  Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments below. We’re listening.

Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability at Bronto
@ChrisAWheeler

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