Bronto Blog

Email authentication is an attempt to prove that the person in the from address is who they claim to be. It’s not a guarantee of deliverability in any way, it just ensures you are really you. So if email authentication is not going to ensure your message is delivered, then why bother?

Let’s look at it like a license plate on your car. You should have one on your car when you drive, it’s a good practice. Now, it doesn’t provide a 100% assurance that you should be allowed to drive, but it’s a good start. If a cop sees you driving down the road without a license plate they will pull you over for sure. You may be authorized to drive, but they are going to look at you at lot more closely. So you should have a license plate no matter what, even if you are a law abiding driver.

If you were speeding, you wouldn’t expect a license plate to get you out of a ticket, would you? It just proves that you were the one speeding, and not some one else.

Both of these scenarios translate over to sender authentication. You should be using authentication as it can help to show that you are attempting to be a law-abiding email marketer. But if you are sending out bad emails then you can’t expect authentication to get your emails into the inbox.

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Jeanniey Mullen of the eec recently posted “Email - The Battle Never Ends” on the eec blog. In the article she voices her frustration with the bad rap that email has taken over the years. As Jeanniey puts it, “email has been battling for respect since day one, like one of those little toy soldiers battling their way through the real (and very large) world.”

On this day - Thursday, April 10th, 2008 - I join Jeanniey and the eec in addressing the “email battle.” I’ve heard some refer to email as the “digital glue.” Think about email in the context of new technologies, widgets, killapps, fads, trends, etc.

For example, the interplay between email and…

1. Facebook/LinkedIn/MySpace
2. Email Marketers Club
3. Twitter (quickly becoming my new addiction)

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Our latest Bronto poll question asked, “Have you ever used the SPAM button in Yahoo! to mark all messages as SPAM even if they were not?” We uncovered that 46% stated they have not used the spam button to delete messages in mass. You can see below that users can easily select all messages and then deem them as spam with the click of a button.

However, 21% did in fact admit that yes they have clicked the spam button and knowingly marked messages that were not spam as spam. (Our poll also found that currently 38% don’t use Yahoo! as their email provider). You can see below the message that a user receives after they mark a message spam, clearly indicating their actions and assuring that Yahoo!’s spam guard will improve through their actions.

The option consumers are given within Yahoo! to deem messages as spam does indeed affect the deliverability of email marketing campaigns – thus consumers should take this option seriously. Consumers need to accurately use the tools Yahoo! has given them in order to receive the messages they want. My motto is “play fair” – don’t tamper a sender’s reputation by bad consumer behavior.

Kimberly Snyder
Account Manager at Bronto

The latest Ask The Expert question is about email load time:

What do you think is the optimal for image loading time in an email?

It’s hard to pin down the ‘optimum’ load time for an email; to truly define this number would require a fair amount of research into your recipient list. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go off some good rules of thumb. For a long time people went by a rule that 8 seconds was acceptable, and more recently 4 seconds has been thrown out there, but all these numbers are mired in controversy.

Faster Is Better

So let’s simplify things: faster is better. I’m going to give you some unscientific numbers that are easy to remember and just as good as much of the other data out there.

• 8 seconds or more - Too slow, you need to address this
• Around 4 seconds - Doing good, but it could be better
• Under 1 second - You are sitting pretty

If you aren’t happy with your current load times then let’s look at some easy things you can do to get that number down.
Keep reading for several easy steps…

I’ve always said that relevancy is key - it’s a major factor in recipient satisfaction. You need to know who your recipients are and what they want - no small task. Understanding this on a macro scale is a necessity for your business, but understanding each individual is where you need to be for email marketing.

In order to do this you will need to have data for your customers - accurate data. Once you have data for your customers you can start to segment them into meaningful groups. With your customers broken down into groups, you can begin to market to them on their own terms, which makes perfect sense, right?

Although getting that data can be tough, it’s maintaining it that’s the trick. The data that is creating relevant emails today will be creating stale, out of touch messages in a few weeks. You don’t want to send a renewal notice to some one who renewed their contract last week. So you not only need to identify and import useful data, you need to keep updating it - but how? Read the rest of this entry »