How email security is affecting your results
If you are sending out emails, you are doing so with the intention of the recipient reading it, otherwise what is the point?
Not only do you want people to read your emails but ideally you want them to act upon the content of the email. All pretty common sense stuff so far?
If you are interested in statistics and use the results to analyse what did and didn't work, then you will be looking at tracking reports, who opened the email and who clicked on what links. Ideally you also want to know as much as you can about the location of the recipient, whether they used a mobile, or a pc to access the email and what application they used. Of course all this information is readily available when using email service providers.......or is it?
If you do not have a return path email address (different to from email address and reply to email address) setup with the provider, then you have a 30% chance (and growing each day) of your email ending up in spam/junk, or not being delivered to the recipient at all. This will be due to DMARC security, which occurs after the recipients mail server has accepted your email and hence it will be recorded as delivered. How many of us actually read what is in our spam/junk folders?
To add to the fun, some mail servers are now checking the links in each email before passing it on to the recipient, to see if they are ok based on their defined rule-sets. So now not only has the email been reported as delivered, but its also reported as opened and all the links clicked. Yet the recipient has never set eyes on it. Your reporting and statistics are now far from accurate.
Because Apple are Apple, they have made life more interesting with their new privacy rules. Part of this new rule-set is the ability to surpress the in depth information that we've grown used to getting. This includes the location, device and application used by the email recipient. In all fairness the accuracy of the location data has always been a bit hit and miss, as cloud based services such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo can use a server in another country to provide the recipient email services.
With all of this, if you are relying on the data from opens and links clicked to automate follow up communications, you could well be sending follow up emails to recipients who have never seen the email, let alone opened it, or clicked on a link.
But.....
We do things a little differently and this not only improves deliverability into inboxes and the accuracy of the reporting, but also is more likely to get you the results you are after.......
Do it right, get results!
This is a philosophy we have built our platform on. While some email service providers have used the spoofing technique when delivering emails, so they do not have to help you set things up right in the first place, we have done it the right way from the start. We do not use spoofing.
- We will work with you to get your DNS settings correct.
- We will work with you to get a Return Path Email Address setup to use with our system.
- We check the statistics on the emails opened and links clicked. We use an algorithm to look at the results and determine if the opens and clicks were done by an email server, or an actual person.
These simple things will get more emails into inboxes and more accurately report the results achieved. There really is a science of emails. To read more about this topic, you can download "The Science of Emails" pdf from the link below.
If you are going to send emails, why waste your time and money...do it right and get results!
