“What should we tell the ISP?” is a frequent question from my customers. The answer is pretty simple. It doesn’t usually matter what you tell the ISP. What matters are your actions.
If a sender is having delivery problems then the solution is not to call the ISP and talk to them about why the sender’s mail should not be delivered to the bulk folder. Instead, the solution is to evaluate the email and the address acquisition process and the list hygiene process. Identify where potential problems are and then resolve those problems.
Typically, the ISPs won’t need to be contacted. The changes to the email will register and delivery will improve. In some cases, particularly when there’s been some major mistake, contacting the ISP and explaining the mistake and what steps have been taken to stop the mistake from happening in the future may help resolve the issue faster. But if nothing has changed, then there’s no reason for the ISP to expect anything to change.
It doesn’t matter what you say. It matters what you do.
It doesn't matter what you say
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I disagree. It DOES matter what you say. Here’s an illustration.
Suppose you’re a marketer, doing all of the right things. Still, you get blocked for some reason, so you call up the ISP and tell them the truth: “This isn’t fair! We don’t send spam! All of our mail is CAN-SPAM compliant, and confirmed opt-in! Our users are upset that they aren’t receiving the valuable marketing email they’ve asked for! We don’t understand why you’re doing this to us!”
An uncountably large number of people have already called the ISP and said exactly that, and while YOU might be telling the truth, the ISP has been able to figure out that the overwhelmingly large majority of the people who have said that in the past were, in fact, obviously lying. To an ISP postmaster desk, it’s one of those statements that’s going to sound false no matter how true it is, like “I did not have sex with that woman”. By telling the truth like this — in exactly the same way that spammers have lied — you actually damage your own position.
Not that I’m suggesting people shouldn’t tell the truth; I believe they should. Just don’t do it in a way that sounds exactly like a spammer telling lies.
Reputation is the dream of ISPs ( and mailing consultants ) but it’s not working. Or not as much as the ISPs would want it to work.
Everybody in the industry says that all major ISPs are adopting reputation based filters but I still get REAL SPAM in my yahoo,hotmail and aol ( gmail does a good job ) inboxes and some of my clients still get their confirmed opt in ( sometimes even their transactional and confirmation messages ) into the Junk folder.
Contacting yahoo and hotmail actually helped. The thing is they still have blocks on a lot of ip addresses and with the ip pool shrinking every day it’s very likely that when you lease a dedicated server you get some ips that were “blacklisted” by yahoo and other ISPs even if your ip is in no public DNSBL.
If that’s the case you can do everything well and your messages will still not get into inbox.
You can’t just make sure everything is well and wait/hope for your reputation to go up, your clients want “instant” results. When your open rate is 1% because the messages go in junk or to many subscribers don’t confirm because they don’t see the confirmation message you have a big problem.
Mihai,
I guess most of your recipients just don’t care enough to report that they are having problems with the mail your sending to their ISPs. 90+% must not seem to care enough to go find these emails and look at them. guess the recipients just aren’t that into the mailings anymore.
don’t worry I am sure sending them more mail will totally fix your problems.
Mark,
This is not o question of recipient engagement. Of course no one actually reports to the ISP that they’re not getting your precious messages but in some cases they do report back to you when they expect that confirmation message that gives them access to that ebook that’s really good, and they really want it.
But the deliverability experts teach us that ISPs are some kind of gods and we are not privileged enough to talk to them.
They all say do that, and that and everything will be good, but that’s just not true. A lot of people that are just starting to send mail ( or even months after starting ) are in trouble and they do all the good things that the experts advise. So what’s left for them to do? Hire a deliverability expert to talk to the ISP or buy email delivery service from an ESP?
Of course no one actually reports to the ISP that they’re not getting your precious messages
Well, why not? If they want your mail, they need to tell their ISP that the ISPs filters are blocking mail they want and ask for. Enlist your recipients to be partners and advocates for you. And, yes, I can tell you absolutely that ISPs get complaints about over aggressive blocking and filtering. I talked to multiple ISP employees this week who said they want users to have a good inbox experience and that includes making sure users get mail they want.
A lot of people that are just starting to send mail ( or even months after starting ) are in trouble and they do all the good things that the experts advise. So what’s left for them to do? Hire a deliverability expert to talk to the ISP or buy email delivery service from an ESP?
If the information provided by ISPs, blogs, wikis and all the other available resources isn’t enough for a sender to troubleshoot a delivery issue then bringing in an outside expert may be useful.
Ok, “no one” should be replaced by ‘very few’ 🙂 . Most of the time when users don’t get the messages they find them in the Junk folder and it’s much easier to just “mark as NOT junk” then write to the ISP about it. When you mark something as NOT junk the ISP is smart enough to deliver to inbox any further messages from that sender.
I don’t want to trash your business or anything like that but is it true that the deliverability expert will most likely just talk to the isp when all else fails ?
I wasn’t talking about the “not spam” button, I was talking about actual calls or emails into the ISP customer support desk. That happens and it happens enough that the ISPs have procedures in place to handle it.
As for talking to the ISPs, a decent delivery expert can tell you what needs to be fixed without involving the ISPs. I rarely have to talk to the ISP in order to resolve a delivery problem. In my experience, the vast majority of delivery issues are fixable without their involvement. Sure, there are the very unusual “uh, guys, I am lost here, I can’t figure out what’s going on…” contact but those are few and far between. These also tend to be issues where something is not-working as intended on the ISP side.
My clients often ask me if I will approach the ISPs on their behalf, and I will if I can’t identify the issue. But the vast majority of consulting I do does not involve any contact with the ISPs at all.