Thanks to its ease of use and cost effectiveness, e-mail has rapidly evolved from an obscure communication tool used by the elite few to a daily communication tool used by hundreds of millions of people and both small and large corporations all around the world.
As the marketing world caught on to this phenomenon, high volume emails became easier to deliver and through the years this has resulted in over use and abuse (spam). However, 2005 has seen a major change in the email fabric of the world.
"There has been a distinct 'tightening of the screws' on email," says Mike Wright, Striata CEO. "The Internet community has actively adopted new email standards for email delivery. In addition Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and corporate network administrators have introduced various methods that prevent their clients from being targeted by spam."
As a result, delivering emails has moved from a simple process to a highly sophisticated science. Corporate communications as suffered as a result - due to the increasing rejection of mass marketing email. In the world of email marketing, deliverability has become an enormous differentiator when it comes to selecting a bulk email solution provider.
Striata, South Africa's award winning email marketing company, now offers a service that focuses on increasing the deliverability of emails.
"The South African market is owned by a few large ISPs and corporate networks. The ability to deliver through this network of mail servers is highly specialised, which has resulted in an increase of organisations outsourcing their bulk emailing requirements to specialists such as Striata," says Wright.
As the first bulk email marketing company in South Africa - providing services to the likes of M&G online, WOZA, Gadget and Car Today, Striata pioneered permission based email marketing in this country. As the market has grown and the use of the internet has increased, the use of email as a marketing medium has become a vital part of any communications campaign.
However, with the tightening of the policies on email delivery it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the mail through. Marketers are once again turning to the experts to assist with email delivery. With over six years of both local and international experience, Striata has the insight necessary to deliver emails, taking into account factors such as email architecture and standards, Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Keys and Bonded Sender.
According to Wright, Striata develops and runs its own high volume messaging engine and as such are able to quickly react to new requirements and incorporate it into their technology that further ensures the high deliverability of emails.
"An interesting phenomenon is that the South African ISP market differs to the USA market," he says. "It often happens that international mailing engines are unable to cope with the requirements of the South African market, such as splitting the recipients based on domains that block embedded images. In addition, bandwidth constraints from foreign servers means an increased number of undeliverable emails."
"Email deliverability is country specific and domain specific - you really need to be sending millions of emails and tweaking your delivery engine based on the results each week", says Wright.
Deliverability of emails relies largely on overcoming hurdles such as:
* Blacklisting - Certain domains and IP addresses are refused delivery by the recipient email server.
* Greylisting - The initial attempt to deliver is rejected, and subsequent attempts are accepted. This is particularly effective in the fight against spam as spammers typically only try once to send a mail.
* Tarpitting - The email system takes longer to accept each subsequent message, resulting in high volumes of mail to the same domain taking days to deliver.
* Throttling - The email server will only accept a certain number of simultaneous connections from any particular mail server
An important element of deliverability is whitelisting and automatic data scrubbing. Whitelisting is actively listing your IP addresses with major ISP's and corporate networks to ensure you are always allowed delivery.
Automatic data scrubbing is the practice of reviewing the email list of addresses for common errors prior to delivery, as well as splitting the list into different ISPs and domains. Typically, this is splitting into plain text linked or embedded formats. Delivering in the right format can increase your deliverability by double digits.
List cleaning once the campaign is complete is also important; an sms is sent to the recipients of any bounced email, requesting their correct email address. This 'self-cleansing' helps keep the database up to date.
"In addition, these more stringent email deliverability requirements have made it a necessity for many organisations to separate their bulk email requirements from normal day-to-day email," Wright says. "Standard delivery should not impacted by high volume mail delivery."
One of Striata's clients found that they could not deliver email to certain ISPs and an escalating number of emails were not arriving at the intended recipients. According to Wright, it eventually emerged that the marketing department was increasingly using email for mass communications.
"The department was sending thousands of emails without knowing or understanding the impact it would have on the IT infrastructure of the organisation. Eventually, the organisation outsourced its marketing emails to Striata, and this ensured that any future 'mail shots' had no impact on operational email. Increasingly this is becoming a worldwide phenomenon," he concludes.
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