Pete and Repeat were on a boat. Pete fell out, who was left?
I was searching the blog for some resources today and these were the first two posts that showed up on the search results. I often feel like I’m repeating myself, but sometimes I am.
Many of us are so used to email appearing instantaneous, we forget that the underlying protocol was never designed for instant messaging. When the SMTP protocol was originally proposed it was designed to support servers that may have had intermittent connectivity. The protocol allowed for email to be spooled to disk and then sent when resources were available. In fact, almost everyone who was around more than 10 years ago knows of a case where an email took weeks, months or even years to deliver.
These days we’re spoiled. We expect the email we send to friends and relatives to show up in their mailbox within moments of sending it. We expect that sales receipt or e-ticket to show up in our mailbox within instants of a purchase. We expect that our ISPs will get us email immediately, if not sooner.
But there are a lot of things that can slow down email delivery. At several points in the process an email may be spooled to disk. It stays on the spool until the next part of the delivery process can happen. Other points of slowdown include the various anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing protections that ISPs must implement. Then add in the extreme volume of email (around 10 billion messages a day) and all of a sudden email delivery is slower than many senders and recipients expect it to be. This delay is not ideal, but the system is designed so that mail is not silently discarded.
While individual emails may be delayed, most users will rarely see that delay in the email that they send. Bulk senders, who may be sending thousands or hundreds of thousands of emails a day, may see more delays in a single send than the average user sees in years of sending one-to-one email.
Email is store and forward, not instant. Sometimes that means there is a delay in getting email into the recipients inbox. And, sometimes there isn’t anything anyone can do to speed up delivery, except to adjust expectations of how email works.
There is a persistent belief among some senders that the technical part of sending email is the most important part of delivery. They think that by tweaking things around the edges, like changing their rate limiting and refining bounce handling, their email will magically end up in the inbox.
This is a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for bulk foldering and blocking by the ISPs. Yes, technical behaviour does count and senders will find it harder to deliver mail if they are doing something grossly wrong. In my experience, though, most technical issues are not sufficient to cause major delivery problems.
On the other hand, senders can do everything technically perfect, from rate limiting to bounce handling to handling feedback loops through authentication and offer wording and still have delivery problems. Why? Sending unwanted mail trumps technical perfection. If no one wants the email mail then there will be delivery problems.
Now, I’ve certainly dealt with clients who had some minor engagement issues and the bulk of their delivery problems were technical in nature. Fix the technical problems and make some adjustments to the email and mail gets to the inbox. But with senders who are sending unwanted email the only way to fix delivery problems is to figure out what recipients want and then send mail meeting those needs.
Persistent delivery problems cannot be fixed by tweaking technical settings.
I’ve been thinking lately that sometimes that what works for marketing doesn’t always work for delivery.
For instance in many areas of marketing repetition is key. Repeat a slogan and forge an association between the slogan and the product in the mind of the consumer. More repetition is better. Marketers can even go so far as using the same ad to drive consumer action. Television advertising is a prime example of this. Companies don’t create new content for every advertising slot, they create one or a few ads and then replay them over and over. The advertiser doesn’t even really care if the consumer consciously ignores the ads. The unconscious connection is still being made.
In the world of email delivery, though, having many or most recipients ignore advertising is the kiss of death. Too many unengaged users and filters decide that mail shouldn’t go into the inbox. These don’t even have to be ISP level filters, but Bayesian filters built into desktop mail clients.
Sending repetitive ads over email may be an effective marketing strategy, but may not be an effective delivery strategy.
Am I off base here and missing something? Tell me I’m wrong in the comments.