Thoughts from #EEC16

EEC16 was my first Email Experience conference. I was very impressed. Dennis, Len, and Ryan put together a great program. I made it to two of the keynotes and both took me out of an email focused place to look at the bigger picture.
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Patrick Scissons discussed his experiences creating marketing and advertising campaigns for good and to share messages. Some of the campaigns were ones I’d seen as a consumer, or on the news. One of the campaigns he talked about specifically was for the group Moms Demand Action, looking at sensible gun control in the US. The images and symbology used in those campaigns were striking and very effective.
Kelly McEvers talked about her experiences as a correspondent in the middle east during the Arab Spring. She is an engaging speaker, as one who does radio should be. Her overall message and theme was that sometimes events are such that you need to throw the list away and go with it. As someone who lives by “the list” and tries to make sure I’m prepared for every eventuality I found that a very useful message. Particularly when throwing away “the list” turned into some massively successful stories.
In terms of sessions, I found the email content session fascinating. I blogged about content in email last week and did some live tweeting, too. What really hit me after that session was that good marketing drives deliverability. Everything that Carey Kegel was talking about in terms of better marketing, sounded like things I recommend to clients to drive deliverability.
Back in 2012 I was writing posts about how delivery and marketing were somewhat at odds with each other. The premise was that marketing was about creating mindshare, and repeating a message so often a recipient couldn’t forget it. In email, repetition can cause recipient fatigue and drive delivery problems. But what I’m hearing now, from the leading minds of email marketers, is that email marketing works better if you send relevant and useful information to consumers. Recipients are key and you can’t just keep hammering them, you have to provide them with some value.
It seems marketing has finally come around to the delivery point of view.
 
 

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Tell me about your business model

talkingforblogI posted Friday about how most deliverability folks roll their eyes when a sender starts talking about their business model.
The irony is that one of the first things I do with a client is ask them to tell me about their business model and how email fits into their business plan. Once I know that, I can help them improve their email sending to meet the requirements of ISPs, blocklists and recipients.
While most deliverability people don’t care about your business model, for me it’s essential that I understand it. I want to hear about it, all the details. Tell me about what you’re doing and together we’ll craft a strategy to make email work for you in your unique situation.
We have one goal for every client: their email gets to the inbox. But no two clients have the same problems so we tailor our advice specifically for their unique situation. We don’t have a 3-ring binder that we read a standard answer from when clients ask for recommendations for their email strategy. We use our own knowledge of email and our history in the industry to craft unique solutions to deliverability problems.
Your business model is disruptive? Great! We can help you get those disruptive emails into their inbox.
You have a niche social platform that uses email as part of your growth strategy? We’ll make sure users and future users see your email in their inboxes.
You have a SaaS platform and you want customers to be able to use email to communicate with their customers? We’ll help you craft the right policy for your business.
You’re a retail company and struggle to reach the inbox consistently? We’ve helped dozens of companies navigate email challenges. We’ve helped clients figure out how to effectively capture addresses at point of sale in brick and mortars. We’ve helped clients restructure their entire data flow.
We can help you too.
You bring us your business model and we’ll create a comprehensive strategy that gets your email into the inbox. What’s more, we’ll help you understand what factors relate to inbox delivery and train you how to handle most issues on your own. Once we’ve got you set up, a process that takes 3 – 6 months, you have everything you need to run an email program. Even better, when those rare, complicated issues come up we’ve got your back and can get your emails delivering to the inbox again.
 

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March 2016: The Month In Email

Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned!
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Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March:
On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and Steve offered some advice for ESPs and software developers on methods for handling this gracefully. I also answered an Ask Laura question about making the decision to publish DMARC. Look for more on that in this month’s Ask Laura questions…
Our other Ask Laura question this month was about changing ESPs, which senders do for many reasons. It’s useful to know that there will generally be some shifts in deliverability with any move. Different ESPs measure engagement in different ways, and other issues may arise in the transition, so it’s good to be aware of these if you’re contemplating a change.
In industry news, I wrote a sort of meta-post about how the Internet is hard (related: where do you stand on the great Internet vs. internet debate? Comment below!) and we saw several examples of that this month, including a privacy debacle at Florida State University. Marketing is hard, too. I revisited an old post about a fraud case where a woman sued Toyota over an email marketing “prank”. As always, my best practices recommendation for these sorts of things (and everything else!) really boils down to one thing: send wanted email.
Steve wrote extensively about SPF this month in two must-read posts, where he explained the SPF rule of ten and how to optimize your SPF records. He also wrote about Mutt, the much-loved command line email client, and marked the passing of industry pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who, in addition to his many accomplishments, was by all accounts a very thoughtful and generous man.
Finally, I occasionally like to take a moment and follow the twisty paths that lead to my spam folder. Here’s a look at how Ugg spams my email doppelganger, MRS LAURA CORBISHLEY. In other spam news, there’s a lot of very interesting data in the recent 10 Worst list from Spamhaus. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

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Troubleshooting delivery is hard, but doable

Even for those of us who’ve been around for a while, and who have a lot of experience troubleshooting delivery problems things are getting harder. It used to be we could identify some thing about an email and if that thing was removed then the email would get to the inbox. Often this was a domain or a URL in the message that was triggering bulk foldering.
Filters aren’t so simple now. And we can’t just randomly send a list of URLs to a test account and discover which URL is causing the problem. Sure, one of the URLs could be the issue, but that’s typically in context with other things. It’s rare that I can identify the bad URLs sending mail through my own server these days.
There are also a lot more “hey, help” questions on some of the deliverability mailing lists. Most of these questions are sticky problems that don’t map well onto IP or domain reputation.
One of my long term clients recently had a bad mail that caused some warnings at Gmail.
We tried a couple of different things to try and isolate the problem, but never could discover what was triggering the warnings. Even more importantly, we weren’t getting the same results for identical tests done hours apart. After about 3 days, all the warnings went away and all their mail was back in the inbox.
It seemed that one mailing was really bad and resulted in a bad reputation, temporarily. But as the client fixed the problem and kept mailing their reputation recovered.
Deliverability troubleshooting is complicated and this flowchart sums up what it’s like.

Here at Word to the Wise, we get a lot of clients who have gone through the troubleshooting available through their ESPs and sometimes even other deliverability consultants. We get the tough cases that aren’t easy to figure out.
What we do is start from the beginning. First thing is to confirm that there aren’t technical problems, and generally we’ll find some minor problems that should be fixed, but aren’t enough to cause delivery problems. Then we look at the client’s data. How do they collect it? How do they maintain it? What are they doing that allows false addresses on their list?
Once we have a feel for their data processes, we move on to how do we fix those processes. What can we do to collect better, cleaner data in the future? How can we improve their processes so all their recipients tell the ISP that this is wanted mail?
The challenging part is what to do with existing data, but we work with clients individually to make sure that bad addresses are expunged and good addresses are kept.
Our solutions aren’t simple. They’re not easy. But for clients who listen to us and implement our recommendations it’s worth it. Their mail gets into the inbox and deliverability becomes a solved problem.

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