Best practices or required practices

What really are the best practices for email?

A year ago I wrote a post about best practices and how most of my best practices were different from what other people recommend. I don’t talk about rules for frequency or subject line length. I don’t focus on best practices for bounce processing or content length.
BestPracticesBallMy best practice recommendations are really about process.

  • Send only opt-in mail.
  • Send mail correctly.
  • Identify yourself in email.
  • Honor unsubscribe requests.

The rest is all about the relationship between senders and their recipients.

But what does that mean?

It means that every sender should know who their audience is. Send mail that audience wants. If they want mail daily? Send daily. If they want mail weekly, send weekly. You’re the expert on who your audience is. Without knowing more about that audience no one should be giving you advice on anything like content or cadence or call to action or subject line length or whatever. Those are really specific to each program.

That sounds complicated.

Well, it’s not intro level deliverability that’s for sure.
Really knowing your audience isn’t something every company can, or even should, do. For many companies email is a part of their business, but isn’t really what they do. Email is a tool, and as long as that tool is working and deliverability is good there doesn’t need to be a commitment to really figuring out how to use it. Other companies, though, are built around email. Email is vital to their sales process or their customer communication process. In these cases, it is a good idea to commit the resources to improving delivery and email processes to get the best results.

Does it work?

It does! Look at what Louis C.K. did with his marketing. He broke all the rules, but made his audience happy. He knows his audience and he knows his brand and he carries that into his email campaigns. Other folks who “broke the rules” include Groupon and other daily deal sites. They broke the “rule” of no daily email except those users want the daily emails. Do daily emails work for everyone? Nope. But they work for some.
Lately I’ve been working with clients who start out with good deliverability, but are looking for some assistance with tweaking their strategy. It’s a challenge to think about what tweaks we can do to make a good program better. I’ve also been talking with other experts in the field and realizing that there is a place for advanced deliverability recommendations. What works in one vertical may not work in another. In some cases, other restrictions (privacy laws in some jurisdictions) may make common best practices not work or a worst practice.

How are you going to help?

We’ve always had a lot of plans for sharing more information. The blog is a big part of that, but we’re looking at other channels and things. I think some good things are going to come out of this and am excited to share them with you over the coming year.
 

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Questioning standards

M3AAWG publishes documents summarizing and discussing current practices for stopping and preventing abuse. Some of these documents are focused on ISPs while others are focused on marketers. While M3AAWG is not directly nor officially a standards body, most of the documents have been written by members and reflect the best current practices for that document.
Members have been asked to leave the organization and some companies are denied membership because they are not in line with the organizational values. Some of these companies are ESPs or marketers, but some of these companies have been ISPs as well.
The standards written by M3AAWG are challenging for a lot of marketers to follow. These standards are written with the input of senders, but they all comply with the M3AAWG mission of stopping messaging abuse. Many ISPs believe that unsolicited email is abuse, thus M3AAWG standards say that all mail needs to be sent to recipients who request that mail. Purchasing lists, selling lists, and appending email addresses are all unacceptable activities for M3AAWG members.
I never really had much concern about the effectiveness of the M3AAWG process. Most of the big industry players are there and many of the ISPs have an aggressive anti-abuse attitude.
But last week I saw a blog post on a fairly major industry blog that listed a bunch of (made up, tasteless and sexist) things “overheard” at the recent M3AAWG conference (it’s been removed and I wouldn’t link to it anyway). The blog post made it look like no real work gets done at M3AAWG and that the attendees don’t work at the conference. I won’t claim that it’s a staid and quiet conference, but most attendees work very hard during the day.
The next day, the author tweeted:

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Authentication Cheat Sheet

There are a several approaches to authenticating email, and the different authentication methods have a lot of different settings to choose from (sometimes because they’re useful, other times just because they were designed by committee). It’s nice that they have that flexibility for the complex situations that might benefit from them, but almost all the time you just want to choose a good, default authentication approach.
So here’s some short prescriptive advice in no particular order for “how to do email authentication at an ESP well” without the long discussions of alternative approaches and justification of each piece of advice.

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Delivery challenges increasing

Return Path published their most recent Global Deliverability report this morning. (Get the Report) This shows that inbox placement of mail has decreased 6% in the second half of 2011. This decrease is the largest decrease Return Path has seen in their years of doing this report.
To be honest, I’m not surprised at the decrease. Filters are getting more sophisticated. This means they’re not relying on simply IP reputation for inbox delivery any longer. IP reputation gets mail through the SMTP transaction, but after that mail is subject to content filters. Those content filters are getting a lot better at sorting out “wanted” from “unwanted” mail.
I’m also hearing a lot of anecdotal reports that bulk folder placements at a couple large ISPs increased in the first quarter of 2012. This is after the RP study was finished, and tells me increased bulk folder placement is more likely to be a trend and not a blip.
One of the other interesting things from the RP study is that the differences are not across all mail streams, but are concentrated in certain streams and they vary across different regions.

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