The Question

Mark Brownlow has a list of 12 questions every email marketer should ask about their marketing program. Buried in the middle is the most important question for delivery.

Do you worry more about what ISPs think about your email than what subscribers think about your email? If you take care of the latter, won’t the former take care of itself?

My answer is if a sender is worried more about what the ISPs think than what subscribers think that sender is going to have ongoing and continual delivery problem. However, if a sender focuses on sending relevant, expected and wanted email then they will have almost zero delivery problems.

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Appropriating reputation

One of the thing savvy spammers are doing these days is appropriating the reputation of someone else. Reputation appropriate takes many forms. Some spammers hijack windows machines, turn them into bots and send spam through major ISP smarthosts. “Legitimate email marketers” buy service from mainstream ESPs to send their permission-challenged email that they cannot get delivered through their own IP space.
There are different strategies for companies to prevent bad groups from appropriating their  reputation. For the ESP, the prime defense against reputation appropriation is screening new customers and new lists.
When screening potential customers, there are three broad categories that customers fall into. One is the legit prospect that is exactly whom they represent to you, these are the easy guys. Another is the naive mailer, who really does not have any clue about email but wants to move into the digital age. This mailer is often extremely small, but knows nothing about email. The final category is the subversive prospect. This is the company who knows exactly what they are doing, and who is actively working to hide their practices from the ESP. They are attempting to subvert the process.
Over the coming weeks I will be talking more about screening new customers and how to distinguish the naive customer from the subversive one.

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Disposable or Temporary Addresses

Mark Brownlow has a really good post up today about disposable and temporary addresses and how they affect marketers trying to build an opt-in list.
I use tagged addresses for all my signups, and have for more than 10 years now. It lets me track who I gave an address to and if this mail is contrary to what I signed up for or the address has leaked, I can shut down mail to that address entirely.
Tagged addresses also have another function. One of our local brew pubs has a rewards program, spend money there, get points. As part of the signup process, they requested an email address. All the email I have received from them has been clearly branded, well designed, they are an example of how to use email right. That is until last week. Last week I received an email to the tagged address from some survey company. The survey company provided no branding, nothing.

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Report spam button broken

Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa published a press release today about how fundamentally broken the “report spam” button is. They call for ISPs to make changes to fix the problem. I think the study on recipient perceptions is useful and timely. There is an ongoing fundamental paradigm shift in how ISPs are handling email filters. ISPs are learning how to measure a senders collective reputation with end users, and, more importantly integrate that reputation into the equation used to determine how to filter and deliver incoming email.
Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa acknowledge this change in the report:

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