Increasing engagement for delivery?

I’ve talked a lot about engagement here over the years and how increasing engagement can increase inbox delivery.
But does driving engagement always improve delivery?

Take LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn has started to pop-up a link when users log in. This popup suggests that the user endorse a connection for a particular skill. When the user clicks on the popup, an email is sent to the connection. The endorsement encourages the recipient to visit the LinkedIn website and review endorsements. Once the user is on the site, they receive a popup asking for endorsement of a connection. Drives engagement both on the website and with email. Win for everyone, right?
I get lots of these endorsements, but I’ve had a few that have made me wonder what’s really going on. Are these people really endorsing my skills? If they are then why am I getting endorsements from people I’ve not seen in 15 years and why are some of the endorsed skills things I can’t do?
This morning I asked one of my connections if he really did endorse me for my abilities in Cloud Computing. His response was enlightening.

yeah, i just click on those to make them go away. seems like a cloying ploy to get people to interact with the site more, harmless. the endorsements do add up into a little graph-like thing, fwiw.

but it is true that they are blind, and unsubstantiated. i’ve no idea if you know cloud professionally.Neil S.

I also talked to another individual who complained to me that you can only endorse people for things that LinkedIn has decided are skills. This person was trying to endorse a connection for a skill, but LinkedIn would not accept that skill as valid.
This isn’t the only thing that LinkedIn does to get people to click on links and visit their website. In fact, most things that happen on the site and generate an email require or encourage the recipient to log into the site and act. Even digests for their discussion groups don’t contain the entire discussion, just a teaser.
It’s a great ploy by LinkedIn to increase engagement.
But is it real engagement? I don’t know. I get the mails because I can’t figure out how to turn them off. “Unsubscribe” leads me to a login page and a preference center that has more choices than your average co-reg page. It isn’t clear which preferences will turn off the mails I don’t want to get any more. Some of the mail I get from LinkedIn I appreciate, so I don’t just want to turn off everything.
Interestingly enough, as I’ve been writing this post, I’ve seen a number of people complaining that LinkedIn is purging their subscriptions to group digests. Apparently, failing to visit a group in some period of time triggers LinkedIn to send you a mail that says LinkedIn has noticed the recipient has not visited a certain group, so they will be unsubscribing the recipient from future digests. I don’t have examples, because at some point in the past I’ve managed to unsubscribe myself from group mails.
I have to wonder if LinkedIn isn’t doing all this in an attempt to address some delivery issue. They’re opting users in to mail to drive clicks to the site. While at the same time, they are removing folks who don’t click on other emails.
Based on discussions on various mailing lists, it seems that both behaviours are upsetting some subset of their users. Some are upset that LinkedIn is opting them in to mail they didn’t ask for. Others are angry that LinkedIn is opting them out of mail that they want. LinkedIn are trying to increase engagement, but seem to be annoying people in many different demographics and in many different ways.
The irony is that if these actions are designed to increase engagement and solve delivery problems, it’s probably not going to work. While I don’t know for sure, I expect that many people use work or business related addresses when signing up there. Most of the filtering at business domains isn’t engagement driven. Engagement is really a metric only used by the large ISPs that control the interface.
This strategy is not going to improve delivery. Even worse the different tactics are actually annoying and angering users: those who get mail they don’t want, those who have to deal with pop-ups and those who aren’t getting mail they do want. From the outside it doesn’t seem like a way to win friends and influence people. And it is certainly not a way to get mail into the inbox.

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Ownership of the inbox

Marketers often treat recipient inboxes with a certain level of ownership. They talk about getting mail to the inbox with the underlying implication that inboxes are for use by marketers and they tend to forget that recipients use email for a lot of things, not just being marketing targets.
This was crystallized for me a few years ago when I was running a conference session. The session had a very diverse group of attendees and as part of the session they broke up into smaller groups to talk about various email related topics. One of the questions was how do people use email. Those groups with more ISP representatives produced a list with dozens of ways people use email. The groups dominated with email marketers, though, came up with a much more limited set of uses, all of them related to marketing or commerce. They didn’t mention mailing lists or one on one discussions or connecting with friends as part of the things people use email for.
Marketers seem to forget that email was not adopted by users so they could be marketed to. In fact, email is primarily used by people to interact with friends, colleagues, allies and family members. Most recipients really don’t really care about marketing in their inbox. They’re much more interested in the mail from mom with pictures of the new puppy. They’re looking for that mail from a friend linking to a silly video. They’re deeply involved in an online discussion with friends or colleagues about anything at all.
This doesn’t mean they don’t want marketing in their inbox. Every subscription is an invitation to visit the recipient’s mailbox. They are inviting a sales person to visit them at home or at work;  spaces where marketers are not traditionally invited.
The problem is that a lot of email marketers do not respect the space they’ve been invited into. They assume, usually incorrectly, they are being given ownership of that space. The marketer sees the inbox as their marketing space, not as space that the recipient feels ownership over.
When someone buys a magazine or watches TV, there are a lot of ads, but that’s OK because they don’t feel any ownership of those spaces. But when they subscribe to something in email, they don’t cede ownership of their inbox to the senders. It is still their inbox and marketers are there only because the recipient invited them. The recipient will kick marketers out if they start writing on the walls or otherwise disrespecting their space.
Many delivery consultants talk about engagement and sending timely, relevant email. All of those are really coded phrases meaning “when you’re invited into somebody’s house don’t scrawl on the walls or poop on the carpets.”

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The legitimate email marketer

I cannot tell you how many times over the last 10 years I’ve been talking to someone with a problem and had them tell me “but I’m a legitimate email marketer.” Most of them have at least one serious problem, from upstreams that are ready to terminate them for spamming through widespread blocking. In fact, the practices of most companies who proclaim “we’re legitimate email marketers” are so bad that the phrase has entered the lexicon as a sign that the company is attempting to surf the gray area between commercial email and spam as close to the spam side of that territory as possible.
What do I mean by that? I mean that the address collection practices and the mailing processes used by self-proclaimed legitimate email marketers are sloppy. They don’t really care about individual recipients, they just care about the numbers. They buy addresses, they use affiliates, they dip whole limbs in the co-reg pool; all told their subscription practices are very sloppy. Because they didn’t scrape or harvest the email address, they feel justified in claiming the recipient asked for it and that they are legitimate.
They don’t really care that they’re mailing people who don’t want their mail and really never asked to receive it. What kinds of practices am I talking about?
Buying co-reg lists. “But the customer signed up, made a purchase, took an online quiz and the privacy policy says their address can be shared.” The recipient doesn’t care that they agreed to have their email address handed out to all and sundry, they don’t want that mail.
Arguing with subscribers. “But all those people who labeled my mail as spam actually subscribed!!!” Any time a mailer has to argue with a subscriber about the validity of the subscription, there is a problem with the subscription process. If the sender and the receiver disagree on whether there was really an opt-in, the senders are rarely given the benefit of the doubt.
Using affiliates to hide their involvement in spam. A number of companies use advertising agencies that outsource acquisition mailings that end up being sent by spammers. These acquisition mailings are sent by the same spammers sending enlargement spam. The advertiser gets all the benefits of spam without any of the consequences.
Knowing that their signup forms are abused but failing to stop the abuse. A few years back I was talking with a large political mailer. They were insisting they were legitimate email marketers but were finding a lot of mail blocked. I mentioned that they were a large target for people forging addresses in their signup form. I explained that mailing people who never asked for mail was probably the source of their delivery problems. They admitted they were probably mailing people who never signed up, but weren’t going to do anything about it as it was good for their bottom line to have so many subscribers.
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