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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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.
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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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