How can ESPs increase delivery rates in email marketing?

Your email marketing software provider can do a lot to help ensure that your email is delivered. When it comes to email marketing there is always lots of discussion about what you can do to improve your own delivery rates (and that is important) but there is no doubt that your ESP should be supporting you. These are just a couple of things that an ESP should be helping with: Problems with your IP address: Your readers ISP decides if your email will be delivered so it is important that they rate the quality of your email. There is a great deal you can do to affect this rating as a marketer, best practice is key. If your email is classed as spam your readers will never see it, no matter how much you then improve it. While you need to be following the best practices it is important that your ESP ensures that you have your own unique IP address. If your ESP uses the same IP address for other clients you could potentially see your delivery rates effected by other marketers practices. The only time that you may want to consider this is if you are not sending many marketing emails. If you arent sending many emails then you wont build a reputation with ISPs and in these cases you may be better off with a shared IP address. Authentication of emails: This is the process by which ISPs check incoming mail to see if it is what it claims to be before it ends up in the users inbox. Primarily the ISPs are aiming to filter out phishing scams and spam. The growth of phishing scams in particular has increased the important of verifying the identity of senders as these scammers often pretend to represent banks. Help you authenticate your mail with the ISPs can be provided by web based email marketing software companies. Two main problems come from not authenticating email: Your email can be blocked by the ISP. It is more likely that you email will be classed as spam even if the ISP doesnt actively block it. Where emails are delivered the user is likely to be advised that sender hasnt been verified. The user is much less likely to actually read your email with either of these outcomes. Clearly there is a lot that web based email marketing software providers can do to increase the deliverability of your marketing email. I plan to write more articles on this topic as there are so many considerations.