StrongMail's director of delivery services disputes assertions that good delivery rates are nearly impossible to achieve without an ESP, and he explains how to get them yourself.

Recently, I have read a number of whitepapers and articles that describe how hard deliverability is to manage if you're not relying on an ESP to do it for you. Needless to say, I have debated this position quite a bit.

While there are many factors a company's marketing team should consider when deciding if it wants to bring the email program in-house or use a hosted ESP model, deliverability concerns should not be one of them. If you know and follow best practices, good delivery rates will follow.

Within these recent papers and articles, I have seen everything from how impossible it is to get whitelisted at some ISPs, to how you will never know what to track without an ESP's guidance. But for the past year or so, I have shown how you can handle deliverability yourselves if you want to. Whether you are sending your emails from an in-house solution or using an ESP, it shouldn't matter. If you are following best practices you will have good delivery rates.

Since it's beginning to be that time when one reflects on the past year, I thought I would take this opportunity to review what we have learned this year -- and remember, no matter what anyone else says, you can handle deliverability yourself.

In all the time I have been in this industry, one thing has been constant: ISPs don't hate you; they are simply listening to their customers. Of all the conversations I have had with the folks at the ISPs, they almost always come back to the same thing: "If the customers think the message is SPAM, it probably is SPAM."

The other thing I usually hear is, "Send email to the people who want it, not to those who don't." This is all about doing the right thing. Sending email is important to your business, but you need to think of it as if you were the customer. How often do you sign up for an email and then realize that it wasn't what you expected? What do you do with those messages? Most likely, they're from senders who haven't been following all of the things that I've been talking about for the past year.

So let's review the important things that affect deliverability:

Data collection and list hygiene
Understanding how and where you collect your data is the first step to making sure you are sending to the right people. One of the biggest mistakes I see marketers do is either not ask for a clear opt-in or not ask the customer to re-enter their email address. They think that if they ask a customer to re-enter her email address, they might not get that person to sign up. What they don't realize is that they are getting more bogus email addresses by not doing this than they might lose by doing it.

Once you have the data from your customers, you must make sure you are keeping your list clean. To do this, you must make sure you are signed up for every possible feedback loop offered. Another important item is to make sure you are properly processing all bounces. As I mentioned in a previous article, signing up for feedback loops is a pretty simple process, and any good email solution or ESP can process your bounces.

Authentication and reputation
If you don't care about your brand, no one else will. By making sure that you are publishing all forms of authentication, such as Domain Keys, DKIM, Sender ID and SPF, you are protecting your company brand as well as your sending reputation.

Reputation is based on a number of things, and you need to monitor them regularly to keep your delivery rates high. Make sure to check black/blocklists, senderscore.org and other resources that are available.

Testing
Remember, always test as much as possible. Without testing multiple aspects of your email programs, you will never know how to improve your ROI.

Reporting
You can test all day long, but if you don't have the data and reports to look at afterwards, no amount of testing will improve your ROI. It is the reporting capabilities you have that will determine how you track your success and what trends and goals your company should look at.

So for all the people out there who are telling you that you can't manage deliverability on your own, remember it is not that difficult; it just comes down to best practices. By following the steps above, you will not only increase your delivery rates, but you will also increase your ROI during this critical shopping season and throughout the rest of the year. So, hopefully, you have been incorporating the best practices I covered this past year into your marketing efforts. And, if you have, I think you'll agree that you can do it on your own.

Good luck and have a great holiday season.

Spencer Kollas is director, delivery services for StrongMail Systems. Read full bio.