Bronto Blog

We came across a helpful article at Digital Web Magazine - The Seven Deadly Sins of Email Marketing Management - and thought we’d spread the word.

Enjoy

dj at bronto

We’re proud to announce the launch of our new Dedicated IP Address product!

A dedicated IP address optimizes your deliverability and positions your company to realize the benefits of your strong reputation by isolating your outgoing mail on a single, private IP address.

How does it work?

All email messages originate from an IP address, a unique number that identifies the computer that sent the message. As illustrated below, Bronto offers two means of message delivery – via our pool of shared IP addresses and, beginning today, via a dedicated IP address:

In a shared IP address scenario, your outgoing mail originates from the same group of IP addresses as other Bronto customers. Alternatively, a dedicated IP isolates your mail – and only your mail – to a single, private IP address.

How does it help?

Reputation – the history of good (and bad) email marketing messages that have originated from the sender’s IP address – continues to become an increasingly important deliverability factor. Return Path, a leading deliverability and reputation firm, estimates that 77% of delivery issues occur because of the sender’s reputation. (Return Path, 2006)

By choosing to send your mail through a dedicated IP address, you gain control of your reputation and ensure that it will be influenced only by your sending activity and history. In doing so, you position your company to realize the deliverability benefits of your strong reputation.

How do I get a dedicated IP?

A dedicated IP requires no special set-up or behavior on your part. Bronto will take care of the initial implementation and will establish feedback/whitelist relationships with major ISPs, including AOL, MSN, Hotmail, Juno, NetZero, and RoadRunner.

Give us a call to discuss - we’re happy to answer your questions and discuss the pricing and contract particulars.

As part of our commitment to email marketing best practices, many of us at Bronto plan to attend an upcoming webinar offered by Forrester Research, a leading technology and market research firm.

The webinar - How To Assess The Effectiveness Of Your Outbound Email Marketing Program - is scheduled for Tuesday, March 27th at 11AM EST. Here is brief description from Forrester:

This Webinar, hosted by Senior Analyst Shar VanBoskirk, will help you improve the user experience of your email marketing campaigns. In addition to sharing best practices, Forrester will provide an overview of its Email Marketing Campaign Review methodology, which will help you assess how well your email marketing meets your user needs overall and diagnoses particular areas for improvement.

This Webinar offers:

• Tactical advice for improving your email programs.
• Insight into best and worst email practices across a variety of industries.
• The skills to assess your company’s email programs using Forrester’s Email Marketing Campaign Review methodology.

Register for the webcast by emailing Forrester Research. We encourage you to attend - it should be good.

Bronto will next present our Bronto Intermediate training webcast on April 5 at 3PM EST. This recurring webcast covers advanced topics that will help increase your email marketing effectiveness, such as segmentation, surveys, and reporting groups.

To attend the webcast:

• Go to http://www.webdialogs.com/join a few minutes before 3PM EST on Thursday, April 5.
• Log in to the presentation with Conference ID #11396.
• Call 888.676.3315 and log in with Conference ID #11396.

Can’t make it? No worries. We present Bronto Intermediate every 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month at 3PM EST. We’ll post announcements in advance of the next presentation.

To “throttle” a message means to slow its delivery speed and thus spread your message out over time. Our next update will include a feature that allows you to define the delivery rate for your message - “as soon as possible”, “at least 2 hours”, “at least 4 hours”, etc. For example, instead of sending your mailing to 100K contacts as quickly as possible, you may choose to spread the delivery over a period of 4 hours.

Throttling - much like Heinz Ketchup - proves that the best things come to those who wait. Throttling your mail will offer three distinct benefits:

• Improves delivery. Quite simply, the slower you send your message, the less likely that you’ll be subjected to frequency filters or blocks. Many large ISPs and corporations are sensitive to mail density and tune their filtering systems to attribute a higher spam score to messages that come in large bunches. Thus, a throttled message - one that comes in spread over a longer period of time - is less likely to be impacted by these filtering methods.
• Lessens the impact of complaints. Similarly, many ISPs track a sender’s reputation based on the number of unsolicited email complaints that they generate over a certain period of time. Again, throttling your mail can help mitigate the impact of this issue. For example, 20 unsolicited email complaints received over 8 hours, though certainly undesirable, will be a softer blow to your sending reputation than the same 20 complaints received over 15 minutes.
• Mitigates web traffic spikes. Spreading your delivery over time also spreads the resulting web traffic over time, thus mitigating traffic spikes and ensuring optimal website performance for your potential buyers, donors, registrants, readers, etc.

Our Client Service team (also known as The Sherpas) would be glad to answer your questions and guide you in the application of throttling. In the meantime, I suggest that you watch the video of a young Matt Le Blanc’s illustration of how the “throttling” concept extends beyond email marketing to also bring culinary and romantic good fortune.

DJ Waldow
Account Manager at Bronto