I suspect that the answer is yes and you are not alone. More and more
social services that encourage their users to invite friends via email
are facing email deliverability problems. It’s one thing when I send an
email to my friends from my personal mailbox, but it’s quite another
when I do it via a new and relatively unknown social networking
service. Spam filters were built to filter out that kind of thing and
they are doing a good job at it. Except I really do want to invite my
friend to this new photo sharing service I like.
Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem and it’s called Return Path.
I’ve been an investor and board member of Return Path since 2000 and I
have watched them slowly but surely grow into a large and important
company which is all about making email work better for everyone.
Return Path helps email senders get their mail practices right so they
can get their mail through filters, Return Path helps email receivers
make their filters better so the right mail gets blocked and the right
mail gets through. And in the end, Return Path helps email users get a
better experience with email.
About three months ago, I was at a Twitter
board meeting and Jason Goldman was explaining that most of Twitter’s
users’ “invite a friend” emails were ending up in junk folders. I told
him about Return Path. I said, “they help you get mail through spam
filters” and he said “that sounds sketchy.” I then explained that they
do it by measuring your mail sending reputation and helping you
fix/improve your reputation so that you can get your mail through
legitimately. Jason wasn’t totally sold, but he agreed to try it out. I
think he’s glad he did.
Two month’s ago Twitter had a Sender Score reputation of 30/100. That’s bad. Today they have a Sender Score of 70/100. That’s good. As a result, they have increased their deliverability by about 100%.
How did they do it? Well it was a lot of little things, not one big
thing. The whole case was written up by Return Path and is available
via pdf here.
If you have this issue, I suggest you contact Return Path.
You can try to solve it yourself and you may get good results that way.
But this is what Return Path does for its clients and they are the best
at it. I am sure they can help.
For more on Fred, visit his blog.
