SocketLabs Email Delivery Blog » Uncategorized

New “Quality Score” in Email On-Demand

John Alessi — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:16:59 +0000

Each SocketLabs Email On-Demand account has a new “Quality Score” which is now displayed prominently on the control panel dashboard.

The Quality Score is a measure of how well we think your email is performing on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

It is important to note that the score is based solely on factors relating to your email lists, content and practices. At SocketLabs we are doing everything that can be done from a technology perspective to improve your deliverability, however deliverability is also based heavily on the quality of your lists, content and practices. We (at SocketLabs) can not do anything to increase your Quality Score. It is based solely on factors exclusively under your control.

The Quality Score is based on a number of factors including:

How many invalid vs good email addresses you have tried to deliver to
How often your email is marked as spam
How often people complain about your email

The score is recomputed every day and takes into account a variable window of activity extending into the past.

This is a beta feature for now as we are continually working on improving the algorithm which computes the score.

Follow me on Twitter: @johnalessi

New Deliverability Boosting Suppression List Feature Now In Beta

John Alessi — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:46:10 +0000

(edit 2009-12-16, this feature is now in the production release)

I am very excited to announce that our new suppression list feature is currently in beta. This new feature goes way beyond what is normally thought of when we think of suppression lists. Typically, suppression lists are used to prevent future mailings to addresses that have unsubscribed. Our suppression lists can do that, but also much, much more. Please read on…

This feature will skyrocket your deliverability, and cut loads of administrative work out of the process.

It Will Dramatically Increase Deliverability

How will it increase deliverability? Because, in addition to giving you the ability to specify and block addresses which have unsubscribed, this new functionality will:

Automatically block email to addresses which have previously hard bounced
Automatically block email to any recipient which has previously complained about one of your mailings

Two things which will kill your deliverability are 1) repeatedly sending to invalid addresses and 2) sending to people who have complained about your email. Imagine how deliverability will soar when Hurricane MTA Server takes charge and ensures that neither of these things will ever happen again!

This is really monumental release for us because it is the cumulation of so many things we have worked towards over the years. We have had cutting edge bounce handling in Hurricane MTA Server for years. (btw, it is going to get even better soon, but you did not hear that from me) Earlier this year we rolled out automatic feedback loop report processing. Now the new suppression list feature harnesses the power of the bounce processing and feedback loop handling to protect your reputation and catapult your deliverability to new heights.

By maintaing lists of all hard bounce addresses, and addresses associated with feedback loop complaints, Hurricane MTA Server can automatically suppress redelivery to those same addresses.

It Will Reduce Development and Administration

How will it reduce development and administration? Because…

It will no longer be necessary for you to do your own list hygiene – Hurricane MTA Server will do it for you – automatically, and accurately.

That is right. This is fully automatic suppression lists on steroids!

Suppression lists can be set at the account level, globally, shared between accounts, etc… It is all very flexible and very automatic. Suppression lists are stored as standard CSV files, so it is easy to interface them with your existing data. Our suppression lists support both plain text and MD5 encoded addresses for extra security.

This new feature is currently available in our latest beta build.

If you are a SocketLabs customer, and would like to participate in our beta program, please log into your support console and create a ticket, requesting beta access.

If you are not a SocketLabs customer, but would like to be, please contact us to discuss it.

Be sure to check out the video above for a walkthrough.

SSL Support is Here

John Alessi — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:06:07 +0000

SSL support for outbound connections has been added to Hurricane MTA Server and can be enabled on a per-domain basis. Using SSL for outbound connections is required in certain circumstances for regulatory or policy compliance, usually in B2B mailings. For example, some institutions that deal with sensitive data (i.e. healthcare, financial) may require that all mail into their domain be sent over an SSL channel.

Using the new features in Hurricane MTA Server, you can customize a Delivery Rule for that domain so that SSL is used when delivering email to that domain. You have two options: try and force. The try option, will attempt an SSL connection to the domain, but if the remote server does not support SSL, it will revert to a standard non-SSL connection. The Force option will force SSL connections to the domain, and if an SSL connection can not be properly established, the email will defer.

This feature is in the current beta, which will be promoted to production before the end of the month.

July 10, 2009 Update: this feature was released into production on June 30, 2009.

How would your subscribers rate your marketing email?

John Alessi — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:05:49 +0000

On a scale of 1-10 how would your subscribers rate your marketing email? Take a step back and think about it. Are you providing them with information that they would consider useful or just a sales pitch?

When your subscribers see your message in their inbox, what emotion do you think they feel?

What content could you provide in your messages that would be truly helpful or useful to your subscribers – so much so that they anticipate your next message?

People are getting more selective every day about what messages they allow into their world. If you want your messages to get in – you need to offer something useful each and every time you communicate with them – to create a following.

And when your followers are ready to buy, they will be more than happy to send the business your way.

Customer Feedback is King

John Alessi — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:22:56 +0000

I have been helping companies build bulk email applications for over 10 years. During that time, the feedback and suggestions provided by customers has been critical to our understanding of their needs and the needs of the market as a whole.

Hurricane MTA Server is a great product because of our customers. Our customers are the ones on the front line, in the trenches, dealing with email deliverability every hour of the day. They report back to us, what they need, and as I see it, it is our job to provide exactly that.

We have been considering different ways to more efficiently communicate with our customers, gather and process their suggestions, and get their feedback on the innovations we are cooking up in the lab.

Starting today, we are repurposing this blog to serve those efforts. Although we will continue to post articles on all things about email delivery and deliverability, expect to see much product related information in this blog, such as tips and tricks, what we have released recently and what we are working on.

We have added a new comment section powered by Disqus and even the ability to subscribe to this blog via email.

We are hoping that you (our customers and fans) will use the comments to provide that valuable feedback that makes our products great, and that we can open some discussions on how to make them even better.

Thank you for all the feedback!

Surviving the down Economy – Communicating with your Customers

Bill Volz — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:51:54 +0000

There are many articles out there that will tell you what to do to help your business survive a down economy but one item that seems to make most of the lists is communicating with your customers. When starting a new marketing campaign it is import to focus on what will give you the best ROI. Most marketing professionals will tell you that e-marketing is at the top of this list.

In today’s computer age sending promotional emails that include special offers is a great way to spark some sales, keep your company’s name fresh in your customer’s mind and at the same time inform your customers of new products and services. In addition to regular promotional mailings you should have corporate newsletters that highlight your products and services with emphasis on the benefits to customers and how you have an expertise in meeting their needs. Blogs and white papers can also be used to establish credibility and build reputation as an expert in your field.

One thing you should be doing personally is sending individual e-mails to refresh old business relationships. Keep in mind that it’s not just the quantity of communication it is the quality. Make sure you are listening to your customers and allow them to provide feedback so that you can adjust your products and services to the changing needs.

Thoughts from the Email Evolution Conference

Chris John — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:45:53 +0000

This past week I attended the Email Evolution Conference held this year in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Westin Kierland resort. It was obvious from the attendance that the economy has taken it’s toll on the conference this year. About half the number of people attended the conference this year than last. The biggest gap in attendees came from the battered retail and financial services industries. A lot of the attendees this year were in the email marketing industry, i.e. ESPs, marketing agencies and vendors.

Although attendance was down significantly, those that I spoke with at the SocketLabs booth had good things to say about the content. Many of the attendees were first timers and felt that they learned a lot from the various speakers in the industry.

Here are a few things that came out of the conference that I thought were worth sharing with our readers:

Stan Rapp in his keynote address on Tuesday highlighted the fact that spending on every category of advertising and marketing was forecasted down for 2009 except email marketing. Although flat, email marketing remains one of the smallest categories in spend from a marketing and advertising perspective. He went on to say “It’s shameful that email—marketing’s most profitable channel—gets so little respect. Email is the tightest link ever forged between buyer and seller.” The good news is that email marketing will not get hit like the rest of the market.
Everything you learned about email marketing back in 2006 and 2007 is wrong. The market is ever changing with the advent of social networking and the increasing email deliverability issues that exist. Make sure you keep up with best practices for optimum results.
Email marketing is moving away from large broad email blasts to small, highly targeted campaigns.
Larger corporations are moving toward consolidation of email marketing platforms. Examples from the conference were Alaska Airlines from 5 down to 1 platform and Bank of America from 30 down to just a few.
On average, companies that instituted event driven, triggered based email over promotional broadcast emails saw a 3x+ increase in click rates.
The Great Email Debate on the issues of double vs. single opt-in and checked vs. unchecked permission checkboxes continues. For each issue the attendees were split almost 50-50 as to the practice they felt was the correct “best practice”. One rule I heard said, if you leave the box unchecked then you should single opt-in. If you leave it checked then you only need to incorporate double opt-in. What do you think?

Those companies that I talked with that are in the business were optimistic about 2009. That is certainly the case here as well!

New CAN-SPAM Provisions

John Alessi — Mon, 19 May 2008 22:09:33 +0000

On May 12 the FTC announced its approval of four rule provisions to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. These provisions are summarized as follows:

Opt-out Requirements Clarified
To submit a valid opt-out request, a recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her email address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply email message or visiting a single page on an Internet website.

Definition of “Sender” Modified
The definition of the term Sender has been modified to make it easier to determine who is the Sender of an email message when it contains content from multiple companies, advertisers, marketers or other parties. The Sender has certain responsibilities such as listing their physical address, processing opt-outs, etc…

PO Boxes OK
A post office box or private mailbox established pursuant to United States Postal Service regulations may be used as the valid physical postal address of the sender.

Definition of “Person” Added
A definition to the term “person” was added to mean “an individual, group, unincorporated association, limited or general partnership, corporation, or other business entity.”

The effective date of these provisions will be 45 days after date of publication in the Federal Register, which should happen any day now.

It is highly recommended that you read the official FTC Press Release and FTC Detailed Notice to find out more about these changes and how they may affect your current practices.

Increasing Deliverability by Reducing Complaint Rates

John Alessi — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 15:17:30 +0000

Most, if not all of the large ISPs judge your reputation largely based on the feedback they receive from their users regarding your mail. Generating too many complaints over a period of time puts you on the fast track to getting blacklisted.

Lets look at Yahoo. Getting email to Yahoo recipients is always challenging. If you are getting any one of the following errors it is most likely due to user complaints:

451 Message temporarily deferred - [numeric code] 421 Message temporarily deferred - [numeric code] 421 Message from (x.x.x.x) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50

Yahoo seems to be dynamically blocking IPs based on user complaint rates, however the good news is that they have been automatically releasing these blocks in relatively short time, i.e. a few hours. Other ISPs might not be so quick to forget. And in any event, even a few hours can really set you back.

Solving this problem, is really no different than what email marketers should be thinking about anyway, and that is how to lower user complaint rates. There are several things you can do right now to reduce your complaint rate and I will cover them in this post.

Frequency / Content

Many studies have been conducted in this area and user complaint rates seem to be controlled by two factors: a) the content of your message b) the frequency of your message. And there is a relationship between the two factors: the message content will affect the frequency one is willing to accept.

If you are sending out a coupon to your entire list every day this is most likely going to generate complaints. If however you are sending important alert messages – alerts which are deemed important and valuable by the recipient – this may be perfectly ok.

The bottom line here is not to annoy people – it is that simple.

Removal Process

Another item you should always consider is the removal process you provide to your recipients. You can lower your complaint rate by simply providing an easy to use removal link in your message. Also include your mailing address and phone number. Not only does this help you comply with CAN-SPAM but it also signals to your recipient that you are not trying to conceal your identity, or misrepresent yourself.

Recognition & Relationship

Send email only to people that will recognize who you are and recognize their relationship with your or your business. If you have no relationship with a recipient, they will most likely consider your email spam. Furthermore, in this situation they have no basis for trust and are far more likely to report your mail as spam rather than follow your removal instructions.

Slow Down Your Delivery

There are always going to be some complaints no matter what you do. Complaint rates are usually based on the number of complaints over a period of time, Slowing down your delivery will spread the complaints out over a longer period of time and therefore reduce the overall complaint/time ratio. Products like Hurricane Server and SMTP Express Pro enable you to shape traffic to specific domains and you can use this functionality to throttle back delivery to certain domains like yahoo.com to instantly reduce your complaint/time ratio.

Spread Out

Complaints rates are usually aggregated by the IP address that generated the email. By spreading out your messages over multiple IPs you can decrease the number of complaints per IP overall.

One issue you should take into consideration however is the effect this will have on greylisting. Greylisting systems will often whitelist your IP/sender/recipient combination once you get a message through. This goes a long way to increasing future delivery rates, however if you send the same sender/recipient combination over a different IP, that whitelist may not apply and your message will be greylisted once again. You simply have to weigh the pros and cons of this approach.

All of the Above

Each one of these tips will decrease the complaint rate and thus improve your deliverability and reputation. When they are all used together they become synergetic and will go far to increasing your deliverability by reducing your complaint rates.

Tracking Opens and Clicks

John Alessi — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:25:32 +0000

The latest build of Hurricane Server includes native support for tracking opened mail messages as well as click-throughs. Not only that, but it is fully automated and so simple to use. To make this happen, two main pieces had to come together: 1) we needed to include a web server dedicated to catching open and click events sent from HTML email messages and 2) we needed to automatically encode the HTML email sent through the server so that open and click events would be directed back to Hurricane Server.

To get open and click tracking working all you need to do is to enable and configure the tracking options and put a special tag in the HTML of your outbound email.

Global Configuration
In the global server level configuration you enable the tracking system and server, and also specify the base url (the URL back to this Hurricane Server), and the IP and port to listen on.

Account Configuration
In the account level configuration you enable open and/or click tracking for each account you want to use this feature.

How Does Open Tracking Work?

When the global tracking system is enabled, and the open tracking option is enabled on an account, Hurricane Server scans HTML body parts of injected email from that account for an tag. When it encounters one, it rewrites the tag like this:

Original Tag:

Rewritten Tag:

[hurricane server address]
This value is specified in the global Click/Open Tracking configuration and should be the public internet address of your Hurricane Server.

[encoded information]
This value is encrypted and will contain the account id, system message id, custom message id and mailing id for this message.

When the message is loaded into an HTML email reader that displays remote images, a request is sent to your Hurricane Server for the image. Hurricane Server decodes the encoded information, adds the details into its logs, updates its statistical database and calls any plugins which handle the tracking events. Hurricane Server then returns a 5×5 pixel transparent gif which is displayed in your message. The image display should not affect your message since it is transparent and sized at 0×0 pixels in the tag created by Hurricane Server, however it is recommended that you put the tag just before the closing body tag to decrease the chance that it will affect the display of your message.

How Does Click Tracking Work?

When the global tracking system is enabled, and the click tracking option is enabled on an account, Hurricane Server scans HTML body parts of injected email from that account for anchor tags with a HsTracking attribute. When it encounters one, it rewrites the tag like this:

Original Tag:
Click Here

Rewritten Tag:
Click Here

[hurricane server address]
This value is specified in the global Click/Open Tracking configuration and should be the public internet address of your Hurricane Server.

[encoded information]
This value is encrypted and will contain the original href, as well as the account id, system message id, custom message id and mailing id for this message.

When someone clicks the link in their HTML email reader, it sends them to your Hurricane Server which decodes the encoded information, adds the details into its logs, updates its statistical database and calls any plugins which handle the tracking events. Hurricane Server then redirects them to the destination specified in the href attribute of the original anchor tag.