Hidden cost of email blasts

Seth Godin has a post up today talking about how friction, that is the cost of sending marketing, is good for marketing. With more friction, marketers make choices about sending instead of sending to everyone.
The post touches on a point I’ve certainly tried to explain to clients and senders in general.

Email, of course, is free.
Except it’s not. The friction that slows down sending email to everyone all the time is the cost of all the people you’ll lose. You might lose them because they unsubscribe, or more likely, you’ll train them to ignore you. Worse still, you might just make them annoyed enough to badmouth you.

Yes! Not only do senders risk alienating subscribers, those non-responsive addresses can turn into a reputation liability. The reputation schemes at most of the major ISPs look at if recipients interacting with email. Training recipients to ignore mail trains the reputation filters that mail, and mail from that sender in general, isn’t wanted.
Senders must implement list hygiene programs and data segmentation to keep reputation high.
Mark Brownlow has more on why list hygiene programs are critical.

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Reputation

Reputation is the buzzword in delivery these days. Everyone talks about building a good reputation and how to do it. Makes sense, the ISPs are always hammering on reputation and how critical reputation is. The more I talk with delivery folks on the ESP side of thing, the move I realize that there is a fundamental disconnect between what the ESPs mean when they say reputation and what the ISPs mean when they say reputation.
Many people handling delivery think that the bulk of reputation is wrapped up in complaint rates and bounce rates. I think they know the ISPs measure more than just complaints and bounces (spamtraps!) but really believe that most of developing a good reputation is all about keeping those complaints low.
This perspective may have been true in the past, but is becoming less true as time goes on. There are a lot of very smart people managing incoming mail at the ISPs and they are constantly looking for ways to better meet the desires of their customers. Lest we forget, their customers are not the senders, their customers are the end users. Their customers are not senders.
Part of meeting the needs of end users means actually giving them a way to provide feedback. AOL started the trend with the this-is-spam button, and other ISPs (ones that controlled the user interface at least) followed suit. For a very long time, reputation was dominated by complaint percentages, with modifiers for number of spamtrap addresses and number of non-existent users.
The problem is, these numbers were easy to game. Spammers could modify their metrics such that their email would end up in the inbox. In response, the ISPs started measuring things other than complaints, bounces and spamtraps. These other measurements are strong modifiers to complaints, such that mailers with what used to be acceptable complaint rates are seeing their mail end up bulked or even rejected.
Recently, AOL seems to have made some subtle modifications to their reputation scores. The result is mailers who have previously acceptable complaint rates are seeing delivery problems. When asked, AOL is only saying that it is a reputation issue. Lots of senders are trying to figure out what it is that is more important than complaints.
Tomorrow, I will talk about what I think AOL could be measuring.

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Reputation: part 2

Yesterday, I posted about reputation as a combination of measurable statistics, like bounce rates and complaint rates and spamtrap hits. But some mailers who meet those reputation numbers are still seeing some delivery problems. When they ask places, like AOL, why their mail is being put into the bulk folder or blocked they are told that the issue is their reputation. This leads to confusion on the part of those senders because, to them, their reputation is fine. Their numbers are exactly where they were a few weeks ago when their delivery was fine.
What appears to have changed is how reputation is being calculated. AOL has actually been hinting for a while that they are looking at reputation, and even published a best practices document back in April. Based on what people are saying some of that change has started to become sender visible.
We know that AOL and other ISPs look at engagement, and that they can actually measure engagement a lot more accurately than sender can. Senders rely on clicks and image loading to determine if a user opened an email. ISPs, particularly those who manage the email interface, can measure the user actively opening the email.
We also know that ISPs measure clicks. Not just “this is spam” or “this is not spam” clicks in the interface, but they know when a link in an email has been clicked as well.
I expect that both these measures are now a more formal and important part of the AOL reputation magic.
In addition to the clicks, I would speculate that AOL is now also looking at the number of dead addresses on a list. It is even possible they are doing something tricky like looking at the number of people who have a particular from address in their address book.
All ISPs know what percentage of a list is delivered to inactive accounts. After a long enough period of time of inactivity, mail to those accounts will be rejected. However for some period of time the accounts will be accepting mail. Sending a lot of mail to a lot of dead accounts is a sign of a mailer who is not paying attention to recipient engagement.
All ISPs with bulk folders have to know how many people have the from address in their address book. Otherwise, the mail would get delivered incorrectly. In this way, ISPs can monitor the “generic” recipient’s view of the email. Think of it as a similar to hitting the “this is not spam” button preemptively.
This change in reputation at the ISPs is going to force senders to change how they think of reputation, too. No longer is reputation all about complaints, it is about sending engaging and relevant email. The ISPs are now measuring engagement. They are measuring relevancy. They are measuring better than many senders are.
Senders cannot continue to accrete addresses on lists and continue sending email into the empty hole of an abandoned account while not taking a hit on their reputation. That empty hole is starting to hurt reputation much more than it helps reputation.

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Reputation as measured by the ISPs

Part 3 in an ongoing series on campaign stats and measurements. In this installment, I will look a little closer at what other people are measuring about your email and how that affects your reputation at the ISPs.
Part 1: Campaign Stats and Measurements
Part 2: Measuring Open Rate
Reputation at the ISPs is an overall measure of how responsive recipients are to your email. ISPs also look at how much valid email you are sending. Anything the ISP can measure and use to distinguish good mail from bad is used in calculating reputation.
Some of the major metrics ISPs use include the following.
Invalid Address Rates
The ISPs count how much mail from any particular IP address is hitting non-existent addresses. If you are mailing a large number of email addresses that do not exist (550 user unknown), this is a suggestion that your address collection techniques are not very good. Responsible mailers do have the occasional bad address, including typos, expired/abandoned addresses, but the percentage in comparison to the number of real email addresses is low. How low is low? Public numbers suggest problems start at 10% user unknowns, but conversations with ISP employees show they consider lower levels a hint there may be a problem.
To calculate bounce rate ISPs take the total number of addresses that were for invalid accounts and divide that by the total number of addresses that the sender attempted to send mail to. Rates above 10% may cause significant delivery issues on their own, rates lower that 10% may still contribute to poor delivery through poor reputation scores.
Spamtraps
ISPs pay a lot of attention to how much mail is hitting their “trap” or “bait” accounts. There are a number of different sources of these trap accounts: old abandoned email addresses, addresses that never existed or even role accounts. Hits to a trap account tells the ISP there are addresses on your list that did not opt-in to receive mail. And if there are some addresses they know about that did not opt-in, it is likely that there are other addresses that did not opt in.
Spamtraps tend to be treated as an absolute number, not as a percentage of emails. Even a single spamtrap on a list can significantly harm delivery. According to the ReturnPath Benchmark report lists with a single spamtrap had nearly 20% worse delivery than lists without spamtraps.
This is spam clicks (FBL complaints)
Complaints from users are heavily used by ISPs. This tells them directly how many people are objecting to your email. In this case, permission is removed from the equation. Even if a sender has permission to send email, the recipient can say “no, I don’t want this, it is spam.” The ISPs put more weight on what their users tell them than on what the senders tell them.

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