I wrote a piece for the Only Influencers special Holiday Preparations edition about deliverability and the holiday email rush. One thing I like about the chance to write for other publications is the process often leads me down thought pathways and generate some new ideas.

One thing this post helped crystalize in my mind is the idea that every company doing email marketing needs a deliverability strategy. Senders really can’t just hope that if they send decent mail to people who gave their email addresses to the sender they can reach the inbox. Deliverability has gotten so much more complex over the last few years that following best practices is Just Not Enough to reliably get into the inbox.

What’s more, there are different deliverability strategies for different kinds of mail. Transactional mail has different delivery needs than marketing mail. First email to any address should be treated differently than the 50th mail.

There are also strategic decisions that need to be made about email Email marketing is well into it’s second decade of an important marketing channel. Address collection practices that were acceptable in the early days aren’t always acceptable now. The data is still valuable, so shouldn’t be thrown away, but can be a liability so should be dealt with carefully.

Deliverability failures can ruin the best planned and executed email campaign. But deliverability failures start long before a single piece of email is sent. Large senders need to consider deliverability as part of their overall marketing strategy, not just something that they can offload onto their ESP or technology team.

Deliverability