What does good IP Reputation get you?

laura
Industry
March 8, 2018

Today I was discussing some mailing list posts with an ESP colleague. He was telling me some interesting numbers he’d collected from different IP pools they maintain. He was testing routing mail through IPs based on subscription process and routing based on engagement metrics. The data showed that inboxing rates were similar across the test groups. As he put it, “IP reputation didn’t have much impact on inbox delivery.”

I’m not surprised. I’ve been talking for a while about how IP reputation is less important in reaching the inbox. In fact, it was almost 5 years ago now that I wrote The Death of IP Based Reputation. I updated it in 2015 with Deliverability and IP Reputation. Overall, IP reputation is a much smaller piece of reaching the inbox now than it has been in the past. I’ve talked about the reasons for this in the above posts. The short version is:

IP reputation is a crude hammer;
IPv4 addresses are in very limited supply, in network terms more customers / IP is a good thing;
Spammers use botnets, sending large amounts of email across many IPs;
IPv6 is huge and IP based blocking will be challenging and of limited effectiveness; and
Better computing power makes content scanning more feasible.

IP Reputation Still Matters, a little

This doesn’t mean senders can, or should ignore IP reputation. Even Gmail looks at IP reputation a little bit. The place IP reputation is primarily used during the SMTP transaction. Good IP reputation does lead to less rate limiting. Senders with good IP reputation can send more mail faster than senders with poor reputation. But once the SMTP transaction is over, IP reputation is just a small factor in a large pool of variables.

IP Reputation Still Matters, a little more.

There are some places that heavily rely on IP filters. And some places that rely on certain types of IP filters. Most of the major providers will block mail from home users, dynamic IPs, and infected machines. Additionally, there is and will probably always be a long tail of domains that are still relying on IP based filters. It’s a crude hammer, but it’s an effective one. Typically, though, IP reputation in those cases is in the eye of the root user. The good news is, these are often private networks, and users have the option to use less restrictive free providers if they’re not getting the email they want.

You can't always get what you want

It’s a problem anyone who has done any delivery work has faced. There’s a client who is having blocklist problems or ISP delivery problems and they won’t pay any attention to what you say. They insist that you talk to the blocklist or the ISP or hand over contacts directly so they can “dialog with” someone internally. They don’t like what they’re hearing, and they hope that the answer will be different if they find a new person to talk to.
The reality is many of the people at ISPs and blocklists don’t want to talk to these types of senders. They may answer a friendly question from someone they know and trust, but sometimes not even then.
Some very large ISPs and major blocklists don’t even take sender questions. They won’t communicate with anyone about any delivery issues.
I’ve had to tell more than a few clients recently that various ISPs and blocklists weren’t interested in helping those clients with their delivery problems. There are two classes of reactions I get from clients. Some clients focus on moving forward. “OK, now what? How can we identify the issue, what data do we have and how can we figure out what the problem is?”
Other clients continue to look for ways to talk to whomever is blocking their mail. They’re convinced if they can just “explain their business model” or be told what they’re doing wrong, that all their delivery problems will magically disappear.
Needless to say those clients who focus on moving forward and looking at the information they do have have much better success resolving their delivery problems. What many senders don’t understand is the wealth of data they have that will help them resolve the issue. And even if they know it’s buried in their files, they don’t always know where to start looking or even what they’re looking for.
But that is, of course, why you hire someone like me who understands spamfiltering and email. I help senders understand how email filters work and identify what parts of their programs are likely to be responsible for delivery issues. I often find the most valuable service I provide to clients is a fresh set of eyes that can see the forest. With my help, they manage to stop obsessing unproductively about one particular symptom and focus on the underlying problems.
Senders who think the holy grail of problem resolution is speaking to the right person at an ISP or blocklist generally are disappointed, even when they hire someone who knows all the right people at the ISPs. They can’t always get what they want. But I can often help them get what they need.

Inbox rates and conversion rates

Jeanne Jennings published an interesting bit of research on open rates and inbox rates at ClickZ recently. Essentially she looked at two different industry studies and compared their results.
The first study was the Return Path Global Delivery Survey and the second was the Epsilon North American Trend Results. What Jeanne found is that while Return Path shows a decrease in inbox placement, Epsilon is seeing an increase in average open rate.

There are any number of reasons this could be happening, including simply different ways the numbers are calculated. I am not sure it’s just a numbers issue, though. Many of Epsilon’s clients are very big companies with a very experienced marketing team. The Return Path data is across their whole user base, which is a much broader range of marketers at different levels of sophistication.
I expect that the Epsilon data is a subset of the Return Path data, and a subset at the high end at that. It does hint, though, that when the inbox is less cluttered, recipients are more likely to open the commercial mail that does get in there.

ISPs speak at the EEC conference

Massimo Arrigoni has a great blog post up summarizing the final session of the EEC conference with representatives from major mailbox providers. This session a number of representatives from major mailbox providers spoke about what it takes to get to the inbox. They discussed what engagement really was, why you need to warmup and what the mailbox providers are measuring.
The short version is delivery is becoming more and more personalized. It’s not about if a mailbox provider thinks mail is spam, it’s about if a mailbox provider thinks this recipient thinks the mail will be spam. It’s all about connecting with each individual recipient.
None of this should be news to any of our regular readers. We’ve long talked about how ISPs measure things differently than senders. We’ve also talked about personalized delivery and how IP reputation isn’t the most important part of delivery.
Know your recipients. Make them want your mail and it will end up in the inbox. ‘
Edit: EmailCopilot also has more information on the ISP session at EEC.