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If you're following best practice in email, how valuable is being 'whitelisted'?
This question came from the Email Marketing Gurus group on LinkedIn.
Please post your thoughts here so that I can share them on LI. Much appreciated!
Best Answer
- Recommended by:
- Brian Phelps,
- Dennis Dayman
First and foremost, if you are following best practices you are merely redefining mediocrity.
That said, I think whitelisting has its place and while I will challenge you Christina on your numbers, they mean nothing to me. To me..I think email marketers and companies get caught up in this whitelisting thing and think if they put it at the top or bottom of their email it will provide them with some secret weapon for success.
I have a hypothesis that the most subscribers really don't know the value of whitelisting and quite frankly don't really know how to do it. Call me naive or wrong (and I hope I am) but I think we need to "SHOW" them how to do it. The best thing you can do if you ask them to add you to their address book is the show them. Provide a link on your site to give them step by step instructions on a multitude of popular email clients on how to get it done. On the landing page, explain the value and test rewarding them for their actions.
Asking someone to do something and assuming that they know how to do it could negate the best practice in the first place.
Andrew Kordek
Co-Founder, Trendline Interactive
A Email Marketing Agency
Twitter: @andrewkordek & @trendlinei
Email: andrew@trendlineinteractive.com
- Recommended by:
- Jackie Nagel
Based on what we have seen, being whitelisted can increase delivery rates from 60% to 80% or more (depending on the servers that process the email). Certainly worth the time when you have a large list.
Asking them to whitelist is a common practice, but very few people actually take the time to do it (or know how to do it). I don't recommend this path because the end user isn't who you need to worry about anyway - it's their network or ISP.
There is a big difference between the delivery rates of something like an iContact or Constant Contact versus a professional level service like Lyris. Since a lot of small folks send a bunch of messages through the former services, their servers are often blocked by the major ISP's or bigger company network email servers keeping your messages from reaching your targets (though you'll never know). The enterprise class services have a big team of people who work with the major ISP's and networks to whitelist their servers so that your mail is allowed through. The price is a big difference, too. The iContact type places charge as little as $10/month versus the $1,200 a month that we used to pay with Lyris.
I have to call that increase into question. How is it being calculated?
To increase delivery 60%, you would have to have a dismal delivery rate to begin with. If you delivered at 50%, a 60% increase gets you to 80%, which is still a poor deliver rate.
If you're delivering to less than 90%, there is a big problem with the data and the IP reputation. That said, going from 90% to 96% is only an increase of about 6.5%.
Also, while I agree that iContact is different than Lyris, you need to clarify that iContact probably uses shared IPs, not dedicated IPs, and Lyris is often a hosted solution (so, you're using your own IPs).
We should also clarify for Jackie that whitelisting is not asking a customer to "add to address book". As Christina mentions the whitelisting is to be completed at the ISP level.
The best thing to do, per Scott above, is to have your email house in order as well as deploy ONLY from a dedicated IP. Even the smaller ESPs support dedicated IPs, so you're not forced to use the "big guns" that are out there (however, even a dedicated IP can be blocked if it's part of a larger range of very bad IPs).
Good Luck!
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Related Activity
Whitelisting can be very valuable. But you need to make sure your email marketing house is in order first.
Are you sending relevant messages? Are you handling your from name and from email address with consistency? Does your subject line match the content of your message? Are you sending email only to those who have specifically requested to receive them? Are you signed up for the ISPs' feedback loops to monitor complaints? Are you keeping your lists clean?
These are the questions the ISPs will ask themselves (and you) when they evaluate whether to whitelist you or not.
My suggestion: Whitelist AFTER you're doing other things right. It will give you the final push over the hump you need. It's not something to do first.
A prime example: In a previous life, I got the email marketing house in order at the company I worked for, maintaining solid list hygiene, and pushed up inbox delivery from 70% to 85%. Then I went through ReturnPath's Sender Score Certification (which acts as a sort of whitelist--particularly for Hotmail), and after their rigorous requirements, inbox delivery went up to 97% almost overnight.
RP's SSC is a sizeable cost, but something to look into if you can't push things over the top yourself. Also, something worth noting, some ISPs don't whitelist at all. Just keep that in mind.