Send pepper / office autopilot email deliverability?

Hey Sarah,

I'm the postmaster for OAP and thought I'd chime in here.
These days we're seeing delivery rates be based more and more on the content of messages (things like domain in the from field, domains used in the body, and copy) and list hygiene practices rather than on IP reputation as it used to be.

After running a few tests to the same list on the same IP group we saw delivery fluctuate nearly 50% depending on what copy we use, and up to 65% when including unengaged users in the mailing.

More and More we see poor affiliate promotions ruining the reputation of many legitimate offers and mailing programs.

That being said, there's definitely the possibility of getting 100% inbox with OAP, it just all depends on an individuals practices. As an ESP there are only a few things we can do to help mail to the inbox - these things are:

• Coaching users with high spam complaints/hard bounces
• SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication
• Update SMTP bounce definitions frequently
• Run seed tests via Returnpath to identify potential problems

The rest is up to the marketer, we've expanded our delivery team so that we can spend as much time as needed with each customer addressing their delivery concerns. If you have any specific questions feel free to shoot me a message, you may also benefit from a search of the forums for OAP/OfficeAutopilot there have been a few threads similar to this around.

This is very interesting information.
No I wonder, with sendpepper/OAP, mails are sent from our own personal moonray address, so the 'from' domain is shared by everyone. Isn't that a disadvantage?

Also, links are all ontrapport links...so they do share the same domain for every single campaign by every single customer (still didn't find how to turn this off by the way).

and a final note about "After running a few tests to the same list on the same IP group we saw delivery fluctuate nearly 50% depending on what copy we use, and up to 65% when including unengaged users in the mailing."

Do you mean the E-mail goes straight to junk for unengaged readers? (In the end, I don't care if it does, they are unengaged anyway, but this means hotmail for instance tracks user behavior on a personal level).

thanks for your insights, they are appreciated!

Never tried autopilot....But why not get a simple ol' Aweber? It worked for very successful marketers and I believe it still works for them... Is it like reinventing the wheel again???

Because Aweber is quite restrictive, often slow to send out emails, doesn't have a lot of features it really should have and Send Pepper is a lot more advanced.

OP did you make any decision regarding this? Did you use sendpepper, how was the experience?

thanks

sarahstaar,

I used Sendpepper for awhile before I went with a self-hosted autoresponder solution. Their deliverability was just fine and I found them to be a cut above the AWs and GRs of the autoresponder world.

I particularly liked their tagging feature which makes it easy to segment subscribers onto different lists.

Hope that helps!