The secret ingredient to successful e-mail marketing is a high delivery rate. Businesses that understand and manage their bulk e-mail campaigns will enjoy a higher than average delivery rate. Read on to learn about five secrets that will improve your delivery rate, taking your e-mail marketing to the next level.

Most importantly, you must know what your e-mail delivery rate is. Do you? I thought so. As it is with everything in business if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Your first goal in improving your delivery rate is that you must be able to put a number on it. In a perfect world, we would all expect a 100% delivery rate. The last time I checked we are far from living in a perfect world, so your e-mail delivery rate will be unlikely at 100%. What is a reasonable delivery rate? If your company has a 95% delivery rate, you are doing well, but if the delivery rate is at 40% you have to make improvements.

Your e-mail host should be able to provide you with the exact delivery rate of your bulk e-mail sends. The goal is not perfection, it is rather continuous improvement. If your current delivery rate is at 80% you have to work on getting the percentage as close to 100% percent as we can. Once you have a base line understanding, you can start with making improvements.

Use a static IP address for all of your e-mail marketing needs. What is an IP address, and why should you care? An IP address is a unique number identifying a computer on the Internet. Your mail server has an IP address. Many companies send their mass e-mails from mail servers with a shared IP address, but you should do everything in your power to avoid such practice. Imagine some telemarketer using your phone number to call somebody's house at dinner time to pitch their product. Sending your bulk mail from a shared IP address has the same effect.

Sending your bulk e-mails from a shared IP address could get your domain blacklisted by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Blacklisting means that your domain is marked as a spammer even if you are running a completely legitimate e-mail system.

Let's say your company is using a hosted e-mail service where hundreds or perhaps thousands of companies are sending e-mails using the same IP address. If one of the many companies manages to get on an e-mail blacklist, your company could suffer the consequences. The ISP doesn't differentiate between your company's e-mail and the spammers e-mail, and it will block your e-mails just the same.

Now that you know all this, you can demand a dedicated IP address for your company. When your company is the only entity that is using the IP address for e-mail, your chance of being marked as a spammer mistakenly are miniscule. Before you accept a dedicated IP address for sending e-mails, you need to check and make sure that the IP address is not currently on any e-mail blacklists. To check to see if an IP address has been blacklisted, use a service like http://www.spamcop.net, or http://www.spamhaus.org. Being on any of the above blacklists tends to indicate a real spam problem, and suggests you need to investigate what's going wrong, and you need to fix it. Your first step should be to get a dedicated IP address for your e-mail system.