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Controlling Messaging Costs

by Barry Abel, Vice President of Field Operations, Message Systems

The cost for developing and sustaining high volumes of ongoing, proactive communication with customers and prospects can be enormous. Yet, for every message that doesn't land in the intended recipient's inbox, the bottom line takes a direct hit.

The number one reason why mail doesn't get delivered is poor infrastructure. Infrastructure in the email world means MTA (Message Transfer Agent) and is the way your company presents itself to the ISP community. Do it right and you build a positive reputation and achieve your goals. Do it wrong and... well you get the picture.

Controlling Messaging CostsMost companies' sending infrastructures are not conducive to handling large volumes of outbound mail, especially those comprised of multiple campaigns and delivered to numerous ISPs. Common sending architecture falls into two camps. The first is comprised of open source solutions such as Sendmail, which requires dozens of servers to meet today's volume and speed requirements. The second is early-to-market spam engines intended to send high volumes of mail, but without the control features required to secure delivery and a positive reputation. Neither approach is optimal. Both require high investments in administration, integration and environment, and yet fail to achieve the desired result to reach and maintain high levels of deliverability.

There are, however, several ways companies can optimize their infrastructure to reduce costs and improve deliverability to achieve a higher ROI.

  1. Improve infrastructure performance - There is a tremendous cost to running servers, so if you can reduce the number you need to support, you automatically reduce costs. Adopting a solution that will allow each server to send millions of messages per hour with ability to maintain 100k concurrent connections, results in a 10:1 hardware reduction. For companies that need to send multiple campaigns to multiple ISPs simultaneously, this technology provides the bandwidth to prevent campaigns from stacking behind one another.
  2. Insist on virtual IP support - By adopting an infrastructure that supports virtual IPs — the ability to segment traffic by unlimited IP addresses on a server — you can optimize your throughput for each type of mail you send to each ISP. This gives you fine-grain control over your outbound mail processing and contributes substantially to improving deliverability.
  3. Cluster servers - To optimize throughput and reduce administration workload and cost, cluster your servers. This will allow you to configure, manage and support all servers from a single interface. Clustering also provides for versioning, automatic failover, consolidated reports, and the ability to set and change policies on all servers simultaneously.
  4. Establish bounce classifications and a list hygiene process - This will decrease mailing costs, because you've eliminated bad addresses by setting up an automated way to handle bounced mail.
  5. Obtain workflow and policy management capability - Being able to set mail processing policies in advance saves administrators time and processing power. Setting thresholds to alert administrators of deliverability problems will help catch problems early so they can be corrected.
  6. Prepare for authentication - To prevent messages from being blocked by ISPs using authentication technology, establish a policy to mark email with DKIM and Sender ID, depending on the technology adopted by each ISP.
  7. Maintain your reputation - Maintaining a good reputation is critical to deliverability. Do this by contracting with a third-party reputation service or by establishing an in-house ISP relations team.
  8. Adopt email monitoring - Email monitoring lets you know if your message landed in the inbox, a junk folder or was blocked by spam catcher. With this information you have a better chance of discovering what you can do to get more mail into inboxes, thus preventing lost opportunities.
  9. Insist on real-time reporting - Real-time analytics provides immediate insight into the deliverability of each mailing. Adjustments to improve deliverability can be made before subsequent campaigns are sent.

By putting together a cohesive strategy for streamlining infrastructure, ISP relations and reporting, companies can realize a significant rise in cost saving, deliverability and ROI.

Barry Abel, Vice President of Field Operations

Barry AbelBarry brings 18 years of enterprise software sales, product management and marketing experience to Message Systems. Previously, he was director of sales at Mindfabric, Inc., a supplier of enterprise-class natural language processing, knowledge management and business rule processing solutions. In this role, he was responsible for recruiting the company's first key reference customers, partnerships and venture capital initiatives. Prior to Mindfabric, Barry held executive sales, marketing and business development positions at high-tech companies including Critical Path, PeerLogic, International Computers Limited (ICL) and Cap Gemini America. He holds a B.S. degree in business management from the University of Maryland.

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