Submitted by: denise cox on Mon, 11/06/2007 - 15:50

In real estate, the three most important things to look for in a property are location, location, location.

It seems from some recent studies and postings I’ve read that the three most important things an email marketer must have are: reputation, reputation, reputation. That’s a GOOD reputation, by the way – meaning you’re not black listed, you practice good list hygiene and your emails are recognised and known by the recipient servers, among many other elements.

ReturnPath’s George Bilbrey blogs about a just-released Lyris deliverability study that finds it isn’t content that causes emails to be filtered – it’s the reputation of the sender. George says ReturnPath had reached the same conclusion in a study they conducted in October, where they found that content matters only about 17% of the time – the rest is about reputation. In their own study, ReturnPath took messages that had failed to reach the inbox and resent them from a “clean” IP address. The majority of the resent messages did reach the inbox – which they say indicates it was the reputation of the IP, and not the message itself, which resulted in filtering.

Reputation is only the first step! There’s another “R” to contend with: Relevance. That’s the content. That’s the from, the subject line and the inside of the email. All the delivery tactics in the world designed to get your permission-based email right into the inbox (past the junk filter) will in the end be judged by a human – the recipient. They will decide – in seconds – if your emails are worth opening. If they do open they’ll form an opinion whether or not to open your future mailings.

Read more about Deliverability;
Email deliverability: what’s it all about?