Delivery and engagement

Tomorrow is the webinar Mythbusters: Deliverability vs. Engagement. This webinar brings together the ISP speakers from EEC15, plus Matt from Comcast, to expand on their comments. There’s been some confusion about the impact of engagement on delivery and whether or not senders should care about recipient engagement.
My opinion on the matter is well known: recipient engagement drives delivery to the inbox at some providers. I expect tomorrow we’ll hear a couple things from the ISPs.

  1. ISPs do monitor engagement, even if they do it differently than senders thought.
  2. Engagement is important for inbox delivery at some ISPs.
  3. Different ISPs have different ways of making inbox decisions.
  4. Engagement will matter more in the future.

But what is engagement? Engagement means recipients are interacting with emails. Senders measure engagement by watching users load images and click on links. ISPs measure engagement by looking at what users do with emails (file, reply to, save, open, delete without opening, spam). The engagement measures are different, and they give each group different data.
Measurements by the ISPs also apply to many factors inside the email. Most of the big ISPs have some mechanism to allow recipients to identify an email as spam. Some ISPs provide this information back to senders in the form of a feedback loop (FBL). FBLs are tied to IP addresses (or in some cases d= values in the DKIM signature) but complaints count against other parts of the email, too. Yahoo, for example, keeps track of complaints against specific URLs in a message and will block mail that contains a URL that gets too many complaints. I’m sure they’re not the only provider that tracks complaints and URLs.
Senders are much more limited in what they can track for engagement: image loads (opens) and clicks. These measurements have always been proxies for what the ISPs are measuring, but they’re what senders have to work with.
 

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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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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.

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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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