Delivery is about helping you succeed

I was talking with another delivery person today who’s dealing with a customer struggling with some issues. As most of these discussions go, we get to the part where we have to tell the customer that what they’re doing looks problematic from the outside. And then the customer gets all upset and angry and starts complaining to account reps or managers or executives.
The challenge of delivery is working with clients who don’t want to hear they have to change what they’re doing. Some senders deflect better than a 3 year old caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
I think all of us in the delivery space, or at least most of us, want our customers and clients to succeed in their email goals. We want you to have a great mailing program. But when your delivery is having problems, getting to a great mailing program means doing something differently.
These changes can be hard, both in terms of thinking differently about email and how it works and about business models. Some business models make it extremely difficult to use emails. We understand that. We don’t make the rules, we just explain them.
We want your mail to work.

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Compliance vs. Deliverability

Most people I know handling delivery issues for senders have some version of delivery or deliverability in their job title. But as I talk to them about what they do on a daily basis, their role is as much policy enforcement and compliance as it is delivery. Sure, what they’re telling customers and clients is how to improve delivery, but that is often in the context of making customers comply with relevant terms and conditions.
Some delivery folks also work the abuse desk, handling complaints and FBLs and actually putting blocks on customer sends.
I think the compliance part of the delivery job description that is often overlooked and severely downplayed. No one likes to be the bad guy. None of us like handling the angry customer on the phone who has had their vital email marketing program shut down by their vendor. None of us like the internal political battles to convince management to adopt stricter customer policies. All of these things, however, are vital to delivery.
Despite the lack of emphasis on compliance and enforcement they are a vital and critical part of the deliverabilty equation.

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Spam illustrated

Portraits of Spammers
It’s been a long week, so enjoy some art (and spam). Next week we’ll get back to discussing the many faults of Gmail. And senders. And receivers. And, well, everyone has faults. And email is Dead. Tabs killed it.

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Inbox rates and conversion rates

Jeanne Jennings published an interesting bit of research on open rates and inbox rates at ClickZ recently. Essentially she looked at two different industry studies and compared their results.
The first study was the Return Path Global Delivery Survey and the second was the Epsilon North American Trend Results. What Jeanne found is that while Return Path shows a decrease in inbox placement, Epsilon is seeing an increase in average open rate.

There are any number of reasons this could be happening, including simply different ways the numbers are calculated. I am not sure it’s just a numbers issue, though. Many of Epsilon’s clients are very big companies with a very experienced marketing team. The Return Path data is across their whole user base, which is a much broader range of marketers at different levels of sophistication.
I expect that the Epsilon data is a subset of the Return Path data, and a subset at the high end at that. It does hint, though, that when the inbox is less cluttered, recipients are more likely to open the commercial mail that does get in there.

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