E-business & Marketing Kamran on 11 Oct 2007 06:46 am
AOL’s Spam Filter is Bad News for Email Marketers
If you are marketing your products and services through email, AOL’s proprietary mail system is your biggest challenge, whether you are aware of it or not.
Why? Because AOL has the highest percentage of rejects or “bounce-backs” according to a survey conducted by Dot Email among email marketers.
38.4% of those surveyed said AOL has the lowest mail delivery rate, in contrast to the Gmail which has the highest: only 7.1% said they experienced any problems with delivery.
These managers said MSN/Hotmail had the second highest mail-reject rate (21.4% of those surveyed) followed by Earthlink (17 %) and Yahoo (16 %).
AOL’s high rejection rate reflects how tough its spam filter is.
Thus the challenge for the email marketers is finding a way to make sure their opted-in AOL subscribers do receive their mail.
The solution is to include a detailed and clear white-listing procedure in your autoresponder or subscription form copy so that the members of AOL and other ISPs (like Earthlink) will know exactly how to clear and assign your mail to their “friends” or “save sender” list.
The extra work you will do in the front-end by including a clear step-by-step description of white-listing your delivery will payoff a big dividend in the back-end in terms of a higher rate of deliverability.