A Quarterly Research Study That Monitors Deliverability Rates for Permission-based Email Marketing - Lyris EmailAdvisor

    That's the primary finding of the Lyris EmailAdvisor ISP Deliverability Report Card for Q1 2007, a quarterly research study that monitors deliverability rates for permission-based email marketing, is the evidence that to dispel the widely-held myth among marketers that message content is the key reason ISPs filter legitimate email marketing messages. The EmailAdvisor Report Card also reveals that a majority of the largest US-based ISPs have the lowest rates of delivering email to the inbox. The complete PDF report can be downloaded at http://www.lyris.com/resources/reports/deliverability_report_Q12007.pdf

    Stefan Pollard, Director of Consulting Services at EmailLabs, which along with J.L. Halsey's Lyris and Sparklist brands has integrated with the EmailAdvisor deliverability monitoring tool, stated: "The main message of this quarter's EmailAdvisor Report Card for email marketers is that there are no easy fixes to senders' deliverability challenge. "Changing a few keywords in the hopes of boosting inbox success rates is no substitute for adhering to email marketing best practices. It's an oversimplification to place blame primarily on content filters when a campaign has poor returns, when in fact most delivery challenges are due to subscriber feedback."

    He added: That's why both EmailLabs and Lyris have developed deliverability programs that build on EmailAdvisor and focus on the real issues that affect a sender's deliverability," such feedback typically takes the form of complaints by recipients who mark the message as "spam" in their respective email clients and problematic traffic patterns such as bounces and spam trap hits.

    According to the EmailAdvisor Report Card, message content is not a major cause of deliverability challenges for most email marketers. More than 1,705 unique emails were run through the EmailAdvisor content scoring application that includes the content scoring rules subset to the widely adopted Spam Assassin open source project. The average content point score of these 1,705 unique emails was 1.04 - well below the filter's generally accepted spam identification level of 3.0 or higher.

    Of the emails subjected to content scoring, two Spam Assassin rules that were frequently triggered - created content filter point scores of significance. According to Pollard, most marketers should find that easy to correct. The first rule cautions against heavy use of images, which can raise spam scores up to a full point and render poorly in email clients with image blocking enabled. The second problem, sending messages with a "From Name" composed of numbers or symbols rather than an actual name, can also increase the likelihood of the message being flagged as spam and ending up in users' junk/bulk folders.

For more informations visit http://www.lyris.com/products/emailadvisor/index.html.