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Company
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E-mail
Deliverability Gets a Big IDEA
ClickZ News
By Kevin Newcomb | August 11, 2005
E-mail deliverability firm Pivotal Veracity and e-mail list
broker Eclipse Direct Marketing have teamed to offer a new
auditing service for list owners and e-mail service providers.
The Independent Deliverability E-mail Audit (IDEA) assesses
factors that affect the deliverability of a marketer's e-mail
campaigns, including the marketer's and service provider's
infrastructure, reputation, permission polices, messaging
practices, inbox penetration, and advertiser/partner policies.
"We look at their policies and practices to see what
they're doing with online communications, and identify the
potential problems," said Deirdre Baird, president and CEO
of Pivotal Veracity. "Our goal is to assess all these
things holistically, and then provide detailed guidance on the
best practices to resolve any problems."
IDEA reports provide a scored analysis of current e-mail
practices, systems and methodologies, as well as detailed best
practice, legal, technical, and strategic guidance on resolving
any issues that are identified. Pivotal Veracity and Eclipse DM
are already offering the service to existing clients of each
company's services. Eclipse DM will be the exclusive reseller of
the product to the marketing community, outside of Pivotal
Veracity's current clients. Pivotal Veracity will conduct the
audits.
The audit can benefit both in-house mailers and marketers who
outsource their e-mail efforts to an e-mail service provider
(ESP), Baird said. The difference, she said, is that in-house
mailers often have issues with their system configuration --
such as reverse DNS or bounce management -- while outsourcers
tend to have more problems with things like opt-out policies.
"There's an unfortunate misconception in the industry that
if a mailer outsources their e-mail to an ESP, they'll
automatically take care of all of these deliverability issues.
That's just not true," Baird said. "Mailers are often
not as involved as they need to be."
Even an ESP with the best intentions cannot guarantee inbox
delivery at various ISPs, said Tim Marusich, president of
BlueHornet. A mailer on an ISPs whitelist can still be impacted
by spam complaints, repeated bounces, and other factors, he
said.
"If you do not address the fundamental problems and
policies that resulted in your being blocked in the first place,
that whitelisting won't last no matter whom or how much you
paid," Marusich said. "Our goal with IDEA is not to
perpetuate the false and opportunistic notion there is a quick
fix, but to empower our clients with the knowledge, policies and
processes they need to effectuate a long-term solution."
Pivotal Veracity clients include ESPs such as Blue Hornet,
Digital Impact, Exact Target, Responsys and Silverpop. Each ESP
plans to use the IDEA service in varying degrees to either help
current clients improve their deliverability, or to attract new
clients by showing prospects the issues with their current
setups.
"In the past when we've had a prospect with deliverability
issues, we've done our own review of their practices. With IDEA,
we're able to provide them a detailed snapshot of issues with
their current system," said Chip House, VP of
deliverability at ExactTarget.
Baird said the service goes beyond what accreditation and
reputation service providers like Habeas or Bonded Sender offer.
Pivotal Veracity competitor Return Path is currently testing an
approach similar to a consumer credit score, called Sender
Score, to rate a sender's reputation and deliverability issues.
While ESPs could be opening themselves up to exposing
shortcomings if they offer the service to their clients, Baird
says that's not likely. Many of the issues that may be revealed
in an audit will have come up in Pivotal Veracity's work with
its ESP clients in the past, but have not been addressed in such
a standardized way.
"The goal here is to start an open dialog with clients in
respect to what policies the ESP enforces, and why," she
said. "It creates an opportunity for clients to learn about
these issues."
For list owners, the service can enhance the value of their
lists in marketers' eyes by showing third-party verification of
deliverability, said Jane Kaiser, president of Eclipse DM.
"It's like a stamp of approval. A good score on the audit
will bring their list to the top of our recommended list,"
Kaiser said. "As a broker, I'd love to see an IDEA ranking
become like a BPA audit, where we won't even have to look at a
list that hasnt done it."
Kaiser expects most legitimate list owners to embrace the IDEA
ranking, since it will not only identify any problems, but help
the list owner fix them to improve the quality of their list,
and garner a higher rental fee. Some push-back might come from
list owners who know they have problems with their list that
they'd rather not have exposed.
"My first question to any list owner that would question
the quality of an audit would be, if they can't put their list
to the test, why should I rent it?" Kaiser said.
Currently the full IDEA service may be executed in one to two
weeks and costs an average of $1,500 to $2,500.
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