Controlling delivery

How much control over delivery do senders have? I have repeatedly said that senders control their delivery. This is mostly true. Senders control their side of the delivery chain, but there is a point where the recipient takes over and controls things.
As a recipient I can

  • report your email as spam
  • forward your email to another account on another mail system
  • file your email in a mailbox I never read
  • block all your images
  • delete your email before it ever hits my mailbox
  • forward your email to public or private blocklists
  • fold, spindle or mutilate your email
  • forward your email to friends
  • blog about your email
  • purchase something from that email
  • visit your website and purchase something else
  • reply to you

Some of these things are going to hurt your reputation as a sender. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t make a recipient accept your email. You can’t make a recipient ISP accept your email.
What you, as a sender, can do is send mail that your recipients want to read. Send mail that they expect, even anticipate. For instance, it’s now noon on Tuesday, I know I’m going to get Ken Magill’s newsletter in the next 2 hours. Then I will read it, chat about it with some other delivery folks and possibly comment on his blog. I may even get inspired and blog about something he wrote.
Influence and inspire your recipients. Send them mail they want, don’t just send mail they tolerate. Because they don’t have to just tolerate your email. They can react in many ways, some of them positive, some of them negative.
Senders need to remember they only control one end of delivery, but they can influence the whole stream.

Related Posts

Bad subject lines

I tend not to blog too much on subject lines as they are really a marketing issue and a subscriber relationship issue. The subject lines a particular mailer uses should be directed and developed with an eye towards making the mail relevant and useful to the recipient.
What subject lines shouldn’t be is deceptive, either intentionally or inadvertantly. How can a subject line be inadvertantly deceptive? Take this: “Today only! One day sale!” The email in question was a printable coupon to get a discount at a bookstore. Unfortunately, the sales was not “Today” – the day the email was received.
On the one hand, I can sympathize with the sender. Sometimes email takes a while to get delivered, particularly for large mail drops. So you want to send before the mail needs to be in the inbox and in front of the recipient. But, that means that some of your recipients may get the email before “Today.” A much better subject line would have been “Friday only! One day sale!”

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Dealing with blacklists

Al has a good post listing the top 5 things senders should remember when dealing with blacklists.
One of the critical things to remember about blocklists is that they are an early warning sign. Sure, some of them are one crank and his cat and will not hurt your overall delivery. A sender may be listed for totally spurious reasons . On the other hand, many of the widely used public lists and the private lists at the big ISPs, list IPs that they see as doing something wrong.
The challenge for anyone listed on any IP based blocklist is to look inside and determine what it is that they’re doing that caused the listing. The first step is to look at the technical issues, does your mail look like something coming out of infected bots? Is there a configuration problem? If the answer is no, then senders have to look at their practices. Are they sending mail to people who don’t expect it? Are they sending mail to people who didn’t ask for it? Most listings that will affect large numbers of recipients fall into the above 2 categories: technical or practices.
Technical problems can be fixed easily, once they’re identified. Permission or practice problems can also be fixed, but may require a sender reassess how they are using email and what value email brings to the business.

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AOL changes bounce behaviour

A couple other bloggers have commented on the recent AOL blog post talking about changes to the MAILER-DAEMON string on bounce messages.

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