Chad White from The Retail Email Blog (a great place to get commentary on popular retailers’ email marketing efforts) posted some notes from a recent email marketing event.
Interesting tips re: email authentication (a free, built-in feature in MailChimp) and how it affects your deliverability:
Deliverability and Authentication:
- “If your mail is not authenticated, it will go through more filtering,” said Ken Takahashi of Return Path. “If you want less filtering criteria, get authenticated.”
- “We’re going to get to the point very soon where ISPs will just dump the mail if it’s not authenticated,” said David Daniels of JupiterResearch. He added, “Deliverability is usually the marketer’s fault. It’s your own list.” When choosing an ESP, marketers should put more emphasis on the ESP’s sender reputation than their deliverability.
- Email marketers should key code their [email address acquisition] data sources and invest in those that perform, said Takahashi. “Grade your partners on the quality of data they give you, not just the volume.”
- “A clean IP starts with a negative reputation,” said Matt Elliott of Listrak. So you’re better off rehabilitating your reputation.
The message to the email marketing community cannot be any more clear. If you are sending high volume email and not authenticating … what are you waiting for? There is a clear shift in the ISP community and you need to get ahead of it. Most of the new anti-spam solutions are being developed on top of authentication – the time is now.
~Ken Takahashi
Vice President, Global Channels
Return Path, Inc.
What do you mean by “aunthenticating” it?
It used to mean asking your IT group to do some complicated nerdy stuff on your servers, so that all your email would look more authentic. Now, we mean “check the box you see in this screenshot”
http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/authentication-for-mailchimp/
More accurately, it means “don’t un-check it” since it’s checked by default now.
I may not understand the concept very well Ben but let me ask you this question:
Are there any disadvantages of using the Authentication?
What I mean is that there must be some negatives to using Authentication in email campaigns if MailChimp does not authenticates the emails by default (without asking us) instead gives us the choice to either opt-in or not.
Since publishing this article, we’ve made it on by default.