More on Relevancy

Al Iverson comments on information from Craig Spiezel at the Exacttarget customer conference this week. Craig confirms that MSN/Hotmail is also looking at user engagement, opens and moving mail out of the spam folder as part of their delivery metrics.

Ultimately, engagement is the key to mitigating delivery issues when sending to Hotmail.

  • Stop mailing to subscribers that never open or click on your email messages.
  • Don’t reactivate old, bounced addresses just to see if they’ll go through…today. (A few might, but most won’t, and Hotmail will notice.)
  • Stay true to permission. Don’t buy lists, stick to clear opt-in (not opt-out). Don’t bury the “we’ll send you email” notice in a privacy policy or legal notice.

I expect that more ISPs than AOL and MSN/Hotmail are looking at recipient engagement or are investigating how to measure it and incorporate it into their delivery decision process. It does reinforce my earlier blog post about relevancy and how important it is for delivery.
Hat tip: Mark

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Mailing to corporate domains

One of the struggles of delivery consulting is doing ISP relations and problem resolution for clients attempting to mail to corporate domains. The rules for getting mail into ISPs are generally pretty clear, and if they’re not I can typically find someone there who will give me the time of day. At corporate domains, though, all bets are off.
While ISPs strive to deliver wanted mail to their customers while protecting them from spam, businesses have different goals for email. For most businesses email is a tool. Mail boxes belong to the business, not the employee. In many cases, businesses do allow personal use of email so some marketing mail to employees is acceptable. However, if a corporation blocks personal marketing email, they are less likely than commercial ISPs to let even legitimate email through.
Large corporations typically run their own mail systems. Once a sender is blocked, however, the corporation will not unblock their email unless the sender can demonstrate that the mail is business related.
Smaller businesses typically use commercial appliances or filtering services. In these cases there is less need to justify the business related nature of email. Unfortunately, some commercial filters do not listen to senders or provide block resolution. At least one filter claims that the only way you can deliver mail to their users is for the users themselves to whitelist the sender.
Businesses of all types are much more security conscious than home users. Some “spam” blocking may be more related to security than actual spam. Finally, there are workplace and environment issues. Companies may be liable under the hostile workplace laws if they allow porn or other offensive emails into their employee mailboxes. One company I know of blocks any email with the word “viagra” in it. The email administrator of said company says that in the years this block has been in place there has only been one false positive… and that employee was told his wife should not use that word when emailing him shopping lists in the future.
All of these issues make it difficult to troubleshoot delivery problems at corporations.

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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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Marketing and Delivery blogs

Mark Brownlow links to a number of marketing and delivery blogs over at his website. Different perspectives and different thoughts will give you the tools to create the best email marketing campaign for your business.

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