eROI Days Email Agency

I attended Return Path’s Seattle Workshop yesterday and learned a lot more about “Email Strategies that Increase Deliverability and Response” than I expected. They even had a guest speaker from Microsoft Hotmail (now branded Windows LiveMail) - Product Planner Brian Holdsworth who shed light on Microsoft’s deliverability strategies. Apparently, over 50% of email browser use is MS Outlook, so maybe we should listen to what he has to say.

Here are my notes from the event (Return Path speaker):
Large ISPs getting significantly more email volume each day - recently showing 7.4billion emails per day.

What is Email Reputation?
1. Complaints (Informal)
2. High Unknown Users (unclean list)
3. Spam Traps (spamcop.com and other types of spam-catching email addresses)
4. Sending Infrastructure (IP address must be clean)
5. Sending Consistency (similar daily email volume)

Where you are sending from matters a whole lot more than domain reputation and email content.

Feedback loops are important - automatically unsubscribes people who complain. Added benefit of decreasing complaint rates up to 40% at Yahoo, Hotmail, when feedback loops are implemented by senders.

Strategies to Reduce complaints:

• Welcome email upon subscription 
• Link to sample newsletter
• Use double opt-in
• Always respect unsub requests
• Make it very easy to unsubscribe
• Content relevancy is key
• Conduct complaint analysis