Maximising e-billing delivery rates

In the old days, billers were at the mercy of the efficiency of the Post Office in getting their bills through to customers. Remember not knowing whether your invoices would ever reach customers during the days of postal strikes, mail delays and outright theft?

While the Post Office is far more efficient these days in delivering physical post, technology has enabled billers to choose even faster routes for delivery. The fastest being e-mail.

Getting bills through an increasingly complex e-mail landscape is today`s version of the old postal challenge. E-billers and their outsourced e-billing providers need to jump through new hoops to ensure the delivery of their e-mail bills. These hoops come in the form of various spam filters that are implemented to reduce the amount of unwanted e-mail coming in to the organisation.

In short, billers want to get their legitimate e-mail bills delivered and e-mail administrators want to block any potential spam. This conflict of interests has spawned a whole new set of processes and relationships that are required to realise the benefit of e-mail communication, while minimising the frustration.

The Internet was initiated as a network of machines. Now it`s also a network of individuals who need to form relationships in order for their organisations to work efficiently. The e-mail administrators of an organisation need to have relationships, not only with each other, but also with the many Internet service providers in order to ensure the right kind of e-mail gets delivered and the rest does not.

There`s "whitelisting", "greylisting" and "blacklisting" going on in server rooms all over the world. There are accreditation and sender authentication processes being developed in IT departments worldwide. There is content scanning, firewall rules and e-mail monitoring systems all being used in the bid to relieve networks of unwanted e-mail. All these development contribute to an increasingly complicated e-mail landscape.

How does the e-mail biller stay on top?

E-billers and their outsourced e-billing providers need to jump through new hoops to ensure the delivery of their e-mail bills.

Alison Wright, MD, Striata

When sending out regular e-bills, it`s imperative to have someone checking delivery reports. This is the easiest way to see what domains are blocking messages from the server. Look for a high instance of e-mail failures to a specific domain. Have an e-mail administrator assigned to contacting those organisations and getting your e-mail servers onto their whitelist. Remember that this is not a once-off process. You may have to repeat the exercise regularly with the same domains depending on their rules.

Although different spam filters use different rating systems, there are a couple common words that e-mail senders should stay away from. These are words that are popular with spammers, such as "free" and "click". The best way to check e-mail for words that result in a high spam rating is to send the e-mail through to yourself, and ask your system administrator for the spam rating report.

In the business-to-business environment especially, bills with masses of transactions can become quite sizeable. Be cognisant of the common limitations on mail size set by system administrators, and build rules into your e-billing process to deal with these exceptions. Most businesses allow e-mails of up to 2MB, but no larger. In the consumer environment, be aware that some of your customers might be on dialup. That means that files over 100KB take a while to download and can cause frustration.

Pretty pictures and nicely formatted text might look good, but in some instances, HTML formatting will be the reason an e-mail doesn`t get delivered. If a system administrator has decided that HTML coding or embedded graphics are potentially harmful, then an e-bill attached to an HTML e-mail might not make it through. Experiment with your recipient base to see if delivery rates improve if you send the e-bill attached to a plain text e-mail. There might need to be a compromise between cosmetics and deliverability.

While e-mail billing provides many benefits, such as faster billing cycles, customer self-service opportunities and measurable delivery statistics, it still needs to be nurtured and monitored to achieve maximum success.