Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Black Friday-Cyber Monday: The busiest days for ISP’s

In the week leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year, our research showed a decrease in deliverability. There was a decline of as much as 15% email communication received for false positives. Deliverability was also affected via junk/spam box placement. Here at KobeMail, we have seen more and more of our clients flourish during the season, as a result of being proactive and strategizing ahead of time and planning for the Holiday season.

The rush before the holidays affects everyone and is not just limited to consumers- it also includes ISPs. Simply following best practices is not always the key to deliverability success. Email marketers are wise to send incentivized emails to subscribers. The major influx of emails sent during this period from companies causes ISP’s to get flooded. In obvious reaction, the floodgates come down to protect themselves. In order to deal with that digital mess, ISPs are forced to queue messages. When queued for a long time, some of these emails time-out and receives a false positive i.e. the ISP silently eats away the email without taking action of delivery.

ISPs deal with backlog and continue mitigating the millions of pieces of spam that are also inbound for the same inboxes that your email campaign is sent to. ISPs receive larger amounts of volume so they are forced to set their threshold lower. Spam thresholds also are lowered at this time and ISPs have a lower tolerance on how many spam complaints they will accept from a specific entity. More words are flagged as SPAM and overall deliverability becomes more challenging. This makes it even more difficult for email marketers to successfully send large quantities of emails in a short period of time. Throttling is one of the best options and planning a strategy to distribute out the send is wise to do – especially if you have a large list.

The ability to reach the inbox during these high traffic days is almost completely out of your control. KobeMail clients have an upper hand because of their whitelist status and the reputation they have built in the past months. As always, there are certain things you can do to better your chances of getting into the inbox. While utilizing tactics such as segmentation and subject line work, the real key to success lies in preparation. We will be doing an article soon on to do’s for the holiday season soon.

You need to take advantage of the days between Black Friday and Cyber Monday as you know for a fact your subscribers are most likely actively shopping. Stay tuned for tips on how to better your chances of making turkey day make you a lot of green.


Author: Peter Schirripa

Editor: Yasifur Rahman

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