More on delivery

A recent ClickZ white paper discussed “how to ruin deliverability in 10 easy steps”!
Deliverability is the single most important issue facing emailers, because if you cant get the message through, the rest really doesn’t matter.
In NZ we do not face the same challenges as those in the developed world – our incredibly unsophisticated email framework does not make delivery the issue it is in the USA, for example, but we have to assume that we will one day upgrade the wood-burning technology which currently manages email in this country, and plan that concepts such as authentication will eventually reach us.
Ruining deliverability is something most novice emailers do without trying. Sending out bulk emails with attachments, Html emails with a file size of 500k, sending to an uncleansed list with over 50% dead recipient addresses, that sort of thing.
Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to look at ClickZ’s 10 easy steps and see which applied in NZ.
Top of the list is Authentication – we don’t have that – too hard, according to Xtra and Ihug when we suggested it to them.
Then it’s a list of general design and best practice factors – dirty lists, poorly rendering content, spammy subject lines, unrecognizable sender Ids, untested links and messages etc – all the things that non-expert emailers do all the time.
So it’s good to know that the problems I see every day here in NZ exist elsewhere.