There are three areas to focus on when optimizing your email marketing campaigns:

• Deliverability
• Open rate
• Interaction

In upcoming posts we will discuss tactics that address all of these areas.  In this post we are focussing on one deliverability issue…the IP address from which you send.  First let’s review why this is important and how it can impact your campaign.  Then we will point you some websites you can use to see where your IP address ranks.

ISPs typically assign a rating of positive, neutral or negative to IP addresses and domains from which they receive a large volume of email. The best situation is for your IP address to be rated as positive.  This assures that there will be no spam filtering at the ISP level.  Of course this still does not tell you what happens when your email gets to its destination and encounters spam filters on the client side that have their own rules.  We’ll deal with them in another post.

A rating of neutral can oftentimes result from an ISP simply not having enought data on your domain or IP address because you do not send a large enough volume of email for it to have registered on their radar screen.  For smaller volume senders, this can be a strong argument in favor of using a quality email service provider so that you essentially “piggyback” on their reputation.

If you find that your IP address has a negative reputation this may not have to do with spam reports concerning your email marketing.  If you use an email service provider it could be that others of their clients are misusing their service and they need to do a better job of policing that.  In the meantime, you might want to switch providers.  If you send from your own domain it could mean that someone else in your organization may have sent out bulk email in a non-compliant way that resulted in spam complaints.  They may have done this unknowingly but it will impact not only your marketing emails but everything that comes from anyone in your domain.  Ick.

So what’s next?  Test you IP address using any of the tools listed below.  If you are neutral or negative, it’s time to take some steps to increase the percentage of your email that actuall reaches the mail servers of your intended recipients.

• BarracudaCentral
• Reputation Authority
• SenderBase

In our next piece we will discuss spam scoring and how you can use a knowledge of it to increase the deliverability of emails through your recipients’ filters.

And oh by the way, new stats have come out from the Pew Internet and Research Project that indicate that the percentage of people using mobile devices to access the web and email is rising rapidly.  I put a post up here. This has big implications when it comes to readability and accessibility of your html emails.  Just thought I’d sneak that little pill in there in case your hair does not hurt enough already.