More on Yahoo and Engagement

A friend of the blog contacted me earlier today and pointed out that the news that Dan posted about Yahoo and engagement that I blogged about last week was actually reported by George Bilbrey in a Mediapost article on August 1.

We’d contacted Yahoo about a number of sender issues since seeing inbox placement rates drop by roughly 3% this summer, and poor user response was cited as a cause of bulking. More recently, the company warned that as it improves its ability to analyze behavior to determine what users want delivered to their inboxes, some senders — even responsible mailers — may face deliverability challenges. When Engagement Began to Matter

My apologies to the fine folks at Return Path, especially Christine and Melinda who did all the hard work, for missing their initial report on this.

I am, after all, a geek
Outlook.com in practice

Related Posts

Delivery reflects recipient desires

Ken has an article today about how Pro Flowers managed to get their mail out of the bulk folder at Gmail by asking their recipients for help.

Read More

Spamhaus rising?

Ken has a good article talking about how many ESPs have tightened their standards recently and are really hounding their customers to stop sending mail recipients don’t want and don’t like. Ken credits much of this change to Spamhaus and their new tools.

Read More

Yahoo looking harder at engagement

In a post this morning, Dan Deneweth from Responsys says he’s received confirmation from Yahoo that they have increased the value of engagement metrics when making delivery decisions.
The really great thing, for the ISPs, about engagement metrics is that they directly measure how much a particular email is wanted by recipients. There’s no guessing about it, it measures how engaged the recipient is with a mail. Even better is the fact that, unlike proxy metrics, engagement metrics are extremely difficult for the sender to manipulate. As a sender I can artificially lower complaints and bounces without improving the mail I’m sending. But I can’t improve engagement metrics without actually engaging my recipients.
As I wrote back in 2010:

Read More