It really can be your email

Yesterday I wrote about activist groups getting blocked at major ISPs and how the ISPs don’t block mail because they don’t like the political viewpoints in email. This morning Mark Brownlow has a post up about delivery in general and the cause of many delivery problems.

Human nature is to search for a scapegoat when delivery rates crumble. Much ire is thrown at two suspected culprits…the ISP, webmail service or blacklist behind the email block, or the email services sending out the emails for you.
These scapegoats may be convenient, but are rarely the real source of the problem. The main reasons email gets blocked are all to do with the emailer’s own practices.

Mailers with blocking problems should look to their own practices before blaming others.
Al Iverson and Carl Hutzler also talk about this issue and address the truthout.org problem directly.

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Visiting customers through email

A few months ago I was working on a deliverability problem with a new client. They are a social networking site heavily branded with black background and pink text. One of the questions they asked me during the course of troubleshooting their delivery problems was if sending pink and black branded emails to match their site branding would decrease their deliverability.
That was actually a more interesting question than many I have received and led to the following analogy. A website is your showroom on the web. It is the equivalent of a brick and mortar store where people visit you and come to see what you have to offer for sale. Heavily branding the store is the right thing to do.
An email, be it marketing, transactional or relationship, is the equivalent of sending a traveling salesperson to someone’s house. That sales person is entering the customer’s space. In this case overly branding your presence in the customer’s space which can annoy or completely turn off your customers.
Branding emails to customers is a good thing; it builds brand recognition and customer relationships. Just remember, though, that you’re entering the customer’s space. Be respectful of that space.
As an aside, I did actually ask AOL about the color of email would decrease delivery. The nice folks over there did reply “AOL SAYS NO PINK!” But I’m fairly sure they weren’t serious.

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They’re not blocking you because they hate you.

Really. They’re blocking you because you’re doing something that is triggering their blocking mechanisms.
This has happened over and over and over again. Some political or activist website sends out an email that gets blocked by some large ISP and the political site turns it into a giant crisis that means the ISP hates them or is trying to shut them up or is trying to silence their message.
Except that’s not what is going on. The folks at the large ISPs who handle blocking and incoming mail are incredibly smart and conscientious . They take their jobs seriously. They, both personally and corporately, want their customers (the end recipients) to receive the email they want. Additionally, they do not want to deliver mail that the recipients did not ask to receive.
In almost no cases is the block a particular activist site encounters a result of the ISP not liking the content of the email. If an activist site is being blocked it’s due to complaints or reputation or something that ISPs measure and block on. Some person at the ISP didn’t read your email, decide they didn’t like what you had to say and then block that email. That email was blocked because something related to that email triggered the thresholds for blocking.
Of course, as with everything online, there are caveats. In this case it’s that the above statements really only hold true for large ISPs in free countries. There are some countries in the world that do block email based on content, and that is dictated by the government. Likewise, some small ISPs will block based on the guy in charge not liking the email.
Generally, though, if an activist site is being blocked by a large ISP in the US or other free countries it is because their mailings are somehow not complying with that ISPs standards. Instead of starting an email campaign or blog campaign to shame the ISP for suppressing speech, it is much more productive to actually contact the ISP in question and find out what went wrong.

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Solving delivery problems

“The only solution to our delivery problems isn’t double opt-in, is it?” A question I get quite frequently from clients and potential clients. In the vast majority of cases the answer is no, confirmed (double) opt-in [1] is not the only solution to delivery problems. In fact, there are delivery issues that confirmed opt-in will do nothing to solve.
Many other delivery sites and deliverability experts will tell clients that the solution to their deliverability problems is to switch to confirmed opt-in as a method to collect email addresses. This overly simplistic solution only treats one possible source of delivery problems, the collection of addresses. It does not address data hygiene issues, technical delivery issues or complaints.
While address collection is important, the best address collection processes on the planet cannot fix sloppy data handling, failure to unsubscribe recipients, or non-existent bounce handling. All of these factors play a role in delivery. It is critical to identify the underlying source of delivery problems before advising anyone on how to fix it.
Over the course of the next few blog posts, I am going to take a look at the various issues that affect delivery: permission, data hygiene, bounce handling, complaints and authentication. I’ll talk about what is important and what senders need to look for and be aware of when they’re trying to troubleshoot delivery issues.
[1] There is some disagreement between senders and anti-spammers about the correct terminology to use. Senders use double opt-in to describe the process, anti-spammers use confirmed opt-in. I am using both terms here to mean the same process.

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