Update on Deliverability - January 2007

I asked our Manager of ISP Relations Richard, to update us all on what's happening in the world of email deliverability. Take it away Richard...

Yahoo! and Hotmail's Cool New Email Browsers

Each of them is very similar in appearance and functionality to Outlook.  You can drag and drop emails into folders, easily mark email as spam or add the sender to your address book (just by clicking a button), personalize the color schemes and viewing windows, and so on.

Hotmail's Windows Live

But how will this affect deliverability?  Hotmail's Windows Live is, of course, still working on its "allowed sender unsubscribe feature ."  Currently the unsubscribe only works if you have an unsubscribe header and send the email from a Sender Score Certified IP Address.

From what I understand, Microsoft is still tweaking the unsubscribe feature so that it works properly for non-SSC senders that have been noted as "allowed" by the recipient as well.  The good news is that our unsubscribe header looks like it will work just fine once we fully implement it and once Windows Live is actually live.

Yahoo!

As for Yahoo!, they've implemented a more comprehensive whitelisting program (with which the VerticalResponse IPs have been whitelisted) and are also planning a feedback loop (Yahoo! routes all of those who click on "this is spam" to the originating ESP to mark as unsubscribe) which is apparently going to be available to members of their whitelisting program.  No word on when this feedback loop will become available.

Image-to-Text Ratio Becoming More Important By the Minute   

I know Janine just mentioned this in the New Year's Resolutions for Email Marketing blog post, but this really cannot be stressed enough.  An image-only email is far more likely to go to a spam folder now than it was at this time last year.  An email with a low-text-to-high-image-ratio will see a huge jump in their spam score, enough that it could easily cause the email to be filtered even if there are no problems with any other part of the email.

At the Jupiter Research webinar I attended at the end of November it was stated that filtering images and measuring the text-to-image ratio is now the number one method used to fight spam.

Thanks to Richard for this important info! Any questions for Richard? Chime in.

Comments

[Janine]

Hi Simon - Think of it more like text:image ratio in the HTML email. There is no hard-and-fast rule, but a good solution is to develop your email template so that "if" the image part of your email is stripped out, then your text rises to the top of the email and tells the story you're trying to tell.

One great way to test this is to set up a free email account, turn your images off, then send your email to this account to see what it looks like. Perhpas where you've place your image in the email (upper left, right) when it has been stripped out your email won't look broken.

It's a test-and-see approach for you to know what's going to work for your creative.

The bottom line is, does the text by itself, tell your recipients what they need to know in order to make a decision on whether to read more or not.

[Simon Short]

My question is relating to the old HTML:text ratio and what the best practice actually is right now. You mention that it's getting more important than ever to maintain a balance, but what is balance?? Should it be 50:50, 60:40 text HTML?? I'm really struggling to find some best practice, so any ideas?