Do you know where your signups are?

Here at Word to the Wise we sign up for a lot of email from our customers. There are multiple reasons we do this.

Engagement starts before the first email

These days the key to getting to the inbox is sending mail your users want and expect. We always recommend senders start the engagement process during signup. Why? Because it establishes the relationship even before email happens. People want to like the vendors and brands they interact with. A key part of that is making the recipient feel special and like they have value to you.
There are other benefits to engaging before email. The biggest is the opportunity for the recipient to look in the bulk folder for mail. When a user says “this is not spam” by moving mail to the inbox, that whitelists the mail for that user. Even better, that acts as a big positive for the email’s overall reputation. Positive signals feed into the machine learning engines and change reputation for the better.

Broken signup forms

One thing that always amazes me is the number of broken signup forms there are online. Even when the senders have effective email programs, sometimes there’s a problem with the signup.
We’ve found some recurring problems during our signup experiences.
Signup forms are hard to find. For some systems this is OK, the signups happen during checkout, for instance. But every company sending non-transactional mail to their customers should make it possible to sign up for mail without making a purchase. Make the sign up form visible!
“Rogue” signup forms. At some point site design changes and new forms are added. Occasionally an older signup form isn’t deleted and subscriptions sorta happen, but the welcome messages are sent from a system no one is aware of still being active. In other cases, the forms looked like they worked, but addresses were never added to lists. Check all signup pathways regularly!
Going through the signup process tells me a lot about an email program. Deliverability problems often start at the point of address collection.
When was the last time you signed up at your site?

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February 2016: The Month in Email

Happy March! Here’s a look back at our last month of email adventures.
Feb2016forBlogIt was a busy few weeks for us with the M3AAWG meeting in San Francisco. We saw lots of old friends and met many new people — all in all, a success, despite the M3AAWG plague we both contracted. Hot topics at the conference included DMARC, of course, and I took the opportunity to write up a guide to help you determine if you should publish a DMARC policy.
On the subject of advice and guidance, Ask Laura continues to be a popular column — we’ve had lots of interesting questions, and are always looking for more general questions about email delivery. We can’t tackle specifics about your program in this column (get in touch if we can help you with that directly) but we can help with questions like “Will our ESP kick us off for mailing purchasers?” or “Help! I’m confused about authentication.”
Continuing on the authentication front, I noted that Gmail is starting to roll out some UI to indicate authentication status to users. It will be interesting to see if that starts to affect user (or sender) behavior in any way. In other interesting industry news, Microsoft has implemented an Office 365 IP Delisting page. I also wrote a followup post to my 2015 overview of the state of ESPs and purchased lists — it’s worth checking out if this is something your business considers.
I wrote a post about security and backdoors, prompted by both the FBI/Apple controversy and by Kim Zetter’s talk at M3AAWG about Stuxnet. These questions about control and access will only get more complicated as we produce, consume, store, and share more data across more devices.
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The source of deliverability problems

Most deliverability problems don’t start where many people think they do. So very often people call looking for deliverability help and tell me all about the things they’re doing to reach the inbox. They’ll tell me about content, they’ll tell me about bounces, they’ll talk about complaints, engagement, opens and clicks. Rarely will they bring up their list source without some prompting on my part.

The reality is, though, that list source is to root of deliverability success and deliverability problems. Where did those addresses come from and what do the people who gave them think you’re going to do with them?
Outsourcing collection to a third party can cause significant issues with delivery. Letting other people collect addresses on your behalf means you lack control over the process. And if you’re paying per address, then there monetary incentive for that company to pad the list with bogus addresses.
Sometimes there are even issues with having your own employees collect addresses from customers. For instance, a retailer requires sales associates collect a minimum percentage of addresses from customers. The company even ties the associates’ evaluations to that percentage. Associates have an incentive to submit addresses from other customers. Or a retailer will offer a discount for an address and customers want the discount but not the mail, so they give a fake address.
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Address collection is the key to delivery, but too many companies just don’t put enough attention to how they’re collecting addresses and entering into the relationship with subscribers. This is OK for a while, and delivery of small lists collected like this can be great. But as lists grow in size, they come under greater scrutiny at the ISPs and what used to work doesn’t anymore.
The first step to diagnosing any delivery problem is to look at the list. All of the things ISP use to measure reputation measure how well you’re collecting addresses. Changing IPs or domains or content doesn’t change the reason mail is being filtered. It just means the filters have to figure out something new to key on.
Want great deliverability? Start with how you’re collecting addresses.
Want to fix deliverability? Start with how you’ve collected addresses, how you’ve stored them and how you’ve maintained them.
 

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