What We Do

Occasionally when we meet longtime readers of the blog at conferences and industry events, they are surprised to learn that we are not just bloggers. We actually spend most of our time consulting with companies and service providers to optimize their email delivery. Though we try to avoid using the blog as a WttW sales pitch, we thought it might be useful to devote a short post to explaining a bit more about what we do.

Most of the companies we work with have strong email marketing and technical expertise, but face challenges beyond normal “best practice” recommendations. To get started, companies often engage with Word to the Wise in one of two ways:

• Technical Audit: a short-term engagement designed to identify and resolve any underlying issues that may be causing delivery problems. We will look at message and header structures, content issues, and sender reputation or authentication problems.

• Strategic Consulting: Some of our clients have dubbed this “email therapy”, and these engagements are structured a lot like that – we speak once or twice each week for several months about our client’s specific challenges and collaborate closely to work on larger programmatic and technical issues around optimizing email programs. We really enjoy this type of deep forensic work and helping clients create more sustainable programs.

That said, we very much believe that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to this sort of work. We are also happy to work with companies that don’t have established expertise in-house, or who are in the process of developing email programs. We have a wide range of additional services we provide, from data analysis to ISP/ESP relations to blocklist resolution.

In general, we want to provide support for email program managers and systems administrators to create and manage meaningful and valuable customer communication. Our experience working with a broad range of senders over many years, as well as our close relationships with ISPs, ESPs, spam fighters and blocklists, policy and governance bodies, and other email consultancies gives us both broad and deep insight into the current landscape of email. If you think your company could benefit from this type of support, please get in touch!