Engagement, it's not what you might think

Most delivery experts will tell you that ISPs measure recipient engagement as a part of their delivery. That’s absolutely true, but I think there’s a language difference that makes it hard for senders to understand what we mean by engagement.
ISPs, and other filtering companies, profile their user base. They know, for instance, who logs in and checks mail every day. They know who checks mail every 20 seconds. They know who gets a lot of spam. They know who hasn’t logged in for months. They know who accurately marks mail as spam and who is sloppy with the this-is-spam button. They know if certain recipients get the same mail, it’s likely to be spam.
Engagement at the ISPs is more about the recipient engaging with their email address and the mail in their mailbox then it is about the recipient engaging with specific emails.
 

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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.

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ISP Relationships

Delivra has a new whitepaper written by Ken Magill talking about the value (or lack thereof) of relationships with ISPs. In Ken’s understated way, he calls baloney on ESPs that claim they have great delivery because they have good relationships with ISPs.
He’s right.
I get a lot of calls from potential clients and some calls from current clients asking me if I can contact an ISP on their behalf and “tell the ISP we’re really not a spammer”. My normal answer is that I can, but that there isn’t a place in the spam filtering process for “sender has hired Laura and she says they’re not a spammer.” I mean, it would be totally awesome if that was the case. But it’s not. It’s even the case where I’m close friends with folks inside the ISPs.
I’m pretty sure I’ve told the story before about being at a party with one of the Hotmail ISP folks. There was a sender that had hired me to deal with some Hotmail issues and I’d been working with Barry H. (name changed, and he’s not at Hotmail any more) to resolve it. During the course of the party, we started talking shop. Barry told me that he was sure that my client was sending opt-in mail, but that his users were not reacting well for it. He also told me there was no way he could override the filters because there wasn’t really a place for him to interfere in the filtering.
Even when folks inside the ISPs were willing and able to help me, they usually wouldn’t do so just because I asked. They might look at a sender on my request, but they wouldn’t adjust filters unless the sender met their standards.
These days? ISPs are cutting their non-income producing departments to the bone, and “sender services” is high up the list of departments to cut. Most of the folks I know have moved on from the ISP to the ESP side. Ken mentions one ISP rep that is now working for a sender. I actually know of 3, and those are just employees from the top few ISPs who are now at fairly major ESPs. I’m sure there are a lot more than that.
The reality is, you can have the best relationships in the world with ISPs, but that won’t get bad mail into the inbox. Filters don’t work that way anymore. That doesn’t mean relationships are useless, though. Having relationships at ISPs can get information that can shorten the process of fixing the issue. If an ISP says “you are blocked because you’re hitting spam traps” then we do data hygiene. If the ISP says “you’re sending mail linking to a blocked website” then we stop linking to that website.
I have a very minor quibble with one thing Ken said, though. He says “no one has a relationship with Spamhaus volunteer, they’re all anonymous.” This isn’t exactly true. Spamhaus volunteers do reveal themselves. Some of them go around openly at MAAWG with nametags and affiliations. A couple of them are colleagues from my early MAPS days. Other do keep their identities secret, but will reveal them to people they trust to keep those identities secret. Or who they think have already figured it out. There was one drunken evening at MAAWG where the nice gentleman I was joking with leaned over and says “You know I am elided from Spamhaus, right?” Uh. No? I didn’t. I do now!
But even though I have the semi-mythical personal relationship with folks from Spamhaus, it doesn’t mean my clients get preferential treatment. My clients get good advice, because I know what Spamhaus is looking for and can translate their requirements into solid action steps for the client to perform. But I can think of half a dozen ESP delivery folks that have the same sorts of relationships with Spamhaus volunteers.
Overall, relationships are valuable, but they are not sufficient to fix inbox delivery problems.

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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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