To get on AOL’s enhanced
whitelist (EWL), companies will need to have lower complaint levels and
higher customer engagement.
In a move that signals the evolution of spam handling
techniques by ISPs,
AOL recently announced the creation of a new list that includes low
spam complaint
mailers where senders get their messages delivered with links and
design unaltered.
Known as the enhanced whitelist or EWL, this list will consider not
only spam
complaint levels, but also user engagement levels.
While AOL has not defined ‘user engagement’ with regard to
email,
we assume it will include criteria like how many recipients add the
sender’s
ID to their contact list, the number of people who respond to the
mailers where
applicable, open and click rates, and instances of when folks rummage
through
their spam folder to transfer email from the sender to their inboxes.
So why has AOL come up with this ‘new and improved’ EWL?
That’s
because they found spam complaint rates to be an unreliable metric.
According
to Laura Atkins, an email deliverability expert, spammers have begun to
manipulate
the rate of spam complaints to their advantage. She says spammers
primarily
use two methods to achieve this. Firstly, they register hundreds of
bogus email
accounts, send a lot of email to these IDs and then classify or tag it
as legitimate
email
communication. And secondly, they try and keep old and
non-responsive
email contacts on their lists to cut down on instances of spam
complaints.
With new developments like EWLs dependent on metrics like user
engagement,
marketers would do well to track engagement levels to get the most out
of their
email marketing. Benchmark
Email’s tracking and reporting feature helps
you monitor opens, clicks, bounces and forwards, all in real-time!
What’s
more, it even helps you compare these metrics to past campaigns so that
you
can track engagement levels over several campaigns.
Source: http://directmag.com/magilla/1201-egagement-train-coming-at-you/
