Email marketers failing to survive tougher ISP filters

Email marketers with poor sender reputations are increasingly getting caught in ever-tightening ISP filtering methods, according to a new report.

Email reputation monitoring company Return Path tracked the reputation rate of more than 130m IP addresses and nearly 20 trillion messages and found 85% of messages were regarded as spam.

However, businesses with Sender Scores above 90, an index used to measure an email sender’s reputation, saw 95% of their emails delivered.

The report outlined the major factors affecting deliverability as being unknown user rates or those email addresses no longer in active use, compliant rates – when email recipients mark a message as spam – and spam traps set by ISPs to deliberately catch spammers.

Social networking sites also logged a high frequency of 20 spam traps on average, compared to the global average of 1-3.

Matt Blumberg, CEO at Return Path, said: “Great strides are being made in the industry to take down botnets – ISPs are using much more stringent metrics to filter spam making it harder than ever for marketers to get into the inbox.

“Businesses must monitor their reputations fiercely and continuously. Whether you are marketing daily or monthly, it’s easy to look like a spammer and get blocked as a result. Having a high reputation is the single most important factor for getting into the inbox.”