A few years back, an amazing thing happened to us. It was a respected, well established company that’s been around for a century. It’s not every day that you think of turning down business like that.
At the time, everybody’s junk email folders were filled with offers for knock-offs of various watches. So when we had the chance to help Rolex promote the real product to their customers you can probably understand our hesitation. Would we take on the client?
It wasn’t an issue of budget. Our rates are quite competitive and this particular client would have no trouble paying. It certainly wasn’t due to the size of their list as our platform routinely sends out millions of emails a day. The real reason was that we ran the risk of losing all of our other clients. Let me explain.
When enough people report an email as spam, the IP address your email is sent from gets blacklisted. If you’re on a platform where everybody shares IP addresses, spam from one company could render your emails useless. This wasn’t a problem in our case as every one of our clients has their own dedicated IP address for sending email. However, some blacklists will ban the entire IP address range if the volume of complaints is too high. Consumers, weary of the growing plague of spam, could inadvertently affect our entire customer base. The decision we made ended up changing our business forever.
It would have been really easy to turn away the business. At the time, we had just expanded our services to include online contests and sweepstakes, coupons, surveys, and a number of other solutions. After all, this was just email. Still, we’re not accustomed to giving up on challenges.
So, with resolve, we jumped in headfirst and the whole company brainstormed the best approach. In reality, giving Rolex its own dedicated IP address was just the tip of the iceberg. We setup additional policies to ensure that we’re not only protecting them and enhancing their reputation, but we’re protecting our system as a whole:
- Make sure they have proper SPF records, DomainKeys, and have both forward and reverse DNS setup for their IP address.
- Monitor volume levels to major domains to ensure deliverability issues aren’t triggered.
- Help them become fully compliant with CAN-SPAM and other legislation.
- Automatically unsubscribe bounces and spam complaints – if the address is invalid or the subscriber complains for whatever reason, we don’t want to send them email.
- Constant bounce monitoring – if a campaign’s bounce rate exceeds a preset threshold, we immediately investigate why and take corrective action.
- Monitor all major blacklists to ensure all our IP addresses are clean.
- Ensure emails render correctly in more than a dozen email clients, both desktop and web-based, by implementing compliant HTML design… before the email is sent out.
- Check whether it gets through nine different server-side spam filters and whether it gets marked as junk mail by desktop spam filters.
- Review subject lines and make recommendations on improvements for better clarity.
- Have established relationships with all major ISPs where we are notified immediately any time someone reports any single email as spam – and unsubscribe the complainers.
- Ensure automatic subscriber management –subscription changes don’t take days, they happen instantly.
Did it work? Yes, beautifully. Rolex’s emails were delivered problem-free and were well received by their customers. To be fair, all of the effort we went to worked because they started with a permission-based list. We don’t work with clients who harvest email addresses or use shady tactics. In addition, because of all the proactive measures, our other clients also noticed their delivery rates improving as well.
Since then the agency representing the client has moved on to other projects, but we’re extremely grateful for the chance this brought us. We now have a checklist with dozens of action items that must be taken, both when accepting a new client as well as before each campaign goes out. And our constant monitoring and attention to the entire platform’s delivery stats keeps us trusted with ISPs. However, it didn’t end there.
Strengthened by the success this produced for email, we’ve applied the same analytical approach to all of our services. For example, when it comes to online contests and sweepstakes, we ensure entries aren’t spoiled by building in numerous security features including CAPTCHA forms, IP address limiting, entry restrictions, and have detailed checklists on everything from rules and regulations to handling of prize winners.
I look forward to tackling more projects that give us pause and challenge us to improve our business.
The next time a client approaches you with an opportunity you almost want to turn down, think about how overcoming the obstacles will strengthen your company. We’ve certainly benefitted from it, and I think you will too.
