Recipient Behaviour Set To Further Impact Your Email Reputation

In an effort to keep subscriber inboxes as spam free as possible, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) employ a range of tactics to determine whether or not an incoming message is allowed.

This spam filtering has, up to this point, been applied globally at the service level. In other words, the spam filter applied to each subscriber equally.

However, as George Bilbrey of Email Reputation and Deliverability experts ReturnPath (http://ReturnPath.com) recently reported, Microsoft is in the early stages of utilizing user-level behaviour monitoring to determine what get’s through to a user’s inbox and what doesn’t.

This means that an individual user’s behaviours within their inbox will help the spam filter monitor and learn from their actions, which will customize the filtering criteria for that particular user.

Bilbrey states that, “I believe this is mostly good news for email marketers, as now filtering can be done at the subscriber level in addition to the global sender level.”

I  agree, however, it doesn’t mean that email marketers need to be any less careful in how they craft their marketing campaigns, and, while all the metrics that Microsoft is considering are not fully disclosed, you can be sure that things like,

• Messages read, then deleted
• Messages deleted without being read
• Messages replied to
• Frequency of receiving and reading messages from a given source

and other factors that illustrate a recipients level of trust and acceptance of a particular source’s emails will play a major role.

Although other ISPs are less talkative about measure used to combat spam, we can be sure that email filtering methods will continue to evolve and I believe that, as time goes on, individual user actions will become a more and more significant determinant of how our email reputations are evaluated.

I’d urge email marketers to get in front of the curve on this. If recipient perception of your email isn’t at the top of your list of concerns, when developing email campaigns, you need to rethink your strategy. Otherwise, I believe your email reputation, in the long run, is sure to suffer.

If you’re interested, use this link to read Bilbrey’s article in full.

Don