Think before you mail

I get quite a bit of unsolicited mail. I mean, sure, we all get a lot of spam, but that’s not the unsolicited mail I’m talking about. I’m talking about from people and companies in the email space. They want to make sure I’ve seen their new whitepaper or article about delivery. Or they have a question about something I’ve written here. Or they are looking to hire me.
All of these things are great. I love hearing from readers, either in comments or in email. We have a valid (unfiltered) contact address here on the blog. My email address(es) aren’t difficult to find. I want to talk to people.
Sometimes some of the people who contact me do actually send spam. It’s bulk, it’s impersonal, it’s not about me or my perspective it’s about them trying to sell something (themselves, their newest product, their company) to anyone who is buying.
If it’s clear it’s a one off I’ll generally just move the mail out of my inbox and forget about it. Sometimes, though, there are hints that this is more than just a one time mail. The email will have an unsubscribe link, or it’s the third or fourth time I’ve gotten mail from that sender or it will be from a PR company. I deal with them in different ways. Sometimes I’ll offer a different email address that I route better, or I’ll just filter the mail based on some unique bit of the header.
The ones that really get me, though, are when the senders argue with me that I should feel special to get their bulk mail. “It was individually sent to you!” “I sent it because you’re such a great resource and wanted to say thank you!” But it was bulk mail, mail dozens of other people got (hint: the email / delivery industry is very small. we talk to each other all the time, if you send mail to more than one of us, we’re going to talk about it).
I have no problem with you inviting me to your event. Or telling me about the latest or greatest thing you wrote. I don’t even mind the occasional one-off bulk mail. But if you are sending mail to a specific person, put in the 20 seconds to personalize it and make it feel like it’s special for me.
A few moments to think and personalize before you send that email will make your recipient much more open to your pitch. This is as applicable to one off mail as it is to bulk.

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Recipients are the secret to good delivery

Many, many people hire me to educate them on delivery and fix their email problems. This is good, it’s what I do. And I’m quite good at helping clients see where their email program isn’t meeting expectations. I can translate tech speak into marketing. I can explain things in a way that shifts a client’s perception of what the underlying issues are. I can help them find their own way into the inbox.
But…
Most of what I do is simply think about email delivery from the point of view of a recipient and help clients better meet their recipient’s expectations. This works. This works really well. If you send mail that your recipients want your mail gets to the inbox.
Here’s the secret: ISPs and most spam filters have a design goal to deliver mail their users want. They only want to block mail their users don’t want.
Filters are not designed to block wanted mail.
Sure there are complicated situations where senders have gotten behind the 8 ball and need some help cleaning up. There are situations where filters screw up and block mail they shouldn’t (and aren’t quite designed to). Spam filters are complicated bits of code and sometimes they do things unexpectedly. All of these things do happen.
But these situations happen a lot less than most senders think. Most of the time when mail is hitting the bulk folder, or is throttled at the MTA the issue is that recipients don’t care about the mail.
Recipients aren’t engaged with a particular sender or particular brand. So ISPs react accordingly and that mail ends up slowly delivered or bulked. This upsets the senders to no end, but the recipients? The recipients often don’t care that some mail shows up in bulk or arrives Wednesday afternoon instead of Tuesday evening.
When recipients are engaged with a particular sender or brand, though? Delivery is fast and reliable. Mail is rarely delayed or bulked. When recipients want mail, they interact with it. They look in the bulk folder. They miss it when it’s not there. They complain to the ISPs when they don’t get it. The ISPs react accordingly and prioritize or “red carpet” that email.
The secret to really good delivery is to get your recipients to handle your ISP relations for you. Send mail they miss when they don’t get it, and you’ll discover most of your delivery problems go away.
 
 

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Spam lawsuit guide

Mailchimp has released a guide to spam lawsuits with advice on how to not be a target.
I had the pleasure of meeting some of the Mailchimp legal staff last year when I was down there to do on-site training for their abuse desk employees. I was quite impressed with them and their understanding of privacy and email issues.

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Is there really one way to email successfully?

I’ve been watching a bunch of folks discuss someone’s mailing practices. The discussion has been fascinating to me.  I’m hearing from the conversation is that there are very specific rules regarding how every company should mail. And that anyone who deviates from those practices is heading down the path to failure. Doing it wrong.
This theme has come up before, when I’ve heard expert marketers comment that Groupon proved how wrong the “daily email is too much” advice was. My response to that is confusion. Who decided daily email was too frequent and wouldn’t work?
I come from a non-marketing background, so maybe I’m missing some essential bit of wisdom or context. But it strikes me that a lot of the rules (no daily email, never establish aggressive engagement metrics) are really stifling innovation. There seems to me to be an unwillingness to think about why it might work if a particular sender does something against the grain.
Of course, once something has proven a success, everyone jumps on the bandwagon. Half my potential clients over the summer told me they “want[ed] to be the next Groupon.” Most of them didn’t make it, though.
I look at email as having a massively diverse user base. There are lots of people who use email in ways I would never consider. There are lots of people who think the way I use email is wrong. Unlimited opportunities for smart marketers exist.
The more cynical part of my brain says that finding and developing an enthusiastic recipient base takes too much time. Companies want to be the “next groupon” or the “next facebook”. But they want to do it by copying the business model, not by being innovative and meeting some need that currently isn’t being serviced.
There are, of course, some models that are never going to work, like randomly harvesting addresses and sending spam. But I don’t think that means email marketing is dying, just that innovation and imagination might be.

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