Evening all

I've been a pondering how we get more people responding to communications in an ever increasing world of a zillion demands on our time and energy.

Any good marketing consultant will tell you to look internally first and I am.

Two years ago we knew that 40% of our communications were getting opened and figured that's a fair figure and was the "norm", so didn't worry too much about it. Knowing that personally I'll delete loads of stuff, without opening it, on busy days and will browse a little longer on quiet days, I was a happy bunny.

Today these numbers are shrinking. With Outlook automatically blocking images then this will naturally take a few points off our tracking.

What is starting to concern me is the number of people saying I don't seem to be getting your email anymore, have you taken me off your list? "Not unless you've asked us to!"

Check the major blacklists and all seems happy in the world. But look underneath and we have ISPs taking emails out of circulation, the corporate techies who only like plain text, blocking our materpieces and then the individuals spam filter is on hyper alert, blocking everything but the football results.

I understand the idea is to stop crap from getting through the system but I get over 1000 spam emails a day that get through, so why is it that some of our emails are getting taken out of circulation and we don't know about it until we have a chance conversation with someone who says "Not seen your news for a while!"

To manage it we need to monitor if someone has been sent the email but not opened any for say 4 weeks. We then need to get them to check their own spam filter, if nothing there touch base with their IT department and then onto the ISPs.

This is obvioulsy a full time job within even the smallest of companies and therefore it would make sense for all the little people to come together under a single banner to help smooth this process.

I could search the internet for days but it make sense to ask the question in the best UK technology forum I'm aware of, right here, right now!

Is anyone looking at, actively communicating with all the ISPs out there, offering the hand of friendship to say can we get on the same page?

Any observations or pointers that may seem obvious to you I am grateful for... thank you for your help.

I'm particularily interested in Berkshire as it's home ground but the wider UK issue is totally relevant.

Jonathan,

There is a lot you can do to increase deliverability of your emails without paying to be part of a bonded sender programme. I am sure you have all of this set up already but many companies haven't done the basics, from making sure your reverse DNS is set up correctly to sender profile forms. If you don't do this no bonded sender programme or email whitelist programme is going to help get your emails delivered.

As you rightly say working with a professional email marketing partner helps massively to keep you up to date with the hundred and one things you need to do to "get delivered". Cue shameless plug for our email partner - Lyris have done an amazing job for us not only in setting up the basics but also in looking at our entire email programme, increasing opens and clicks as well as delivery rates.

Good luck!

Martin