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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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:

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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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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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