Everyone ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns? I know many retailers are already mailing, my inbox is exploding with offers. For me, this is often a quiet time of the year. As a strategist, most of my worked happened months ago. Now, it’s time for execution.
I wish everyone a successful week of mailing.
May your deliverability be high.
May your subject lines be correct.
May your personalization work.
May your strategy rock.
Those of you who have seen some of my talks have seen this model of email delivery before. The concept is that there are a host of factors that contribute to the reputation of a particular email, but that at many ISPs the email reputation is only one factor in email delivery. Recipient preferences drive whether an email ends up in the bulk folder or the inbox.
The individual recipient preferences can be explicit or implicit. Users who add a sender to their address book, or block a sender, or create a specific filter for an email are stating an explicit preference. Additionally, ISPs monitor some user behavior to determine how wanted an email is. A recipient who moves an email from the bulk folder to the inbox is stating a preference. A person who hits “this-is-spam” is stating a preference. Other actions are also measured to give a user specific reputation for a mail.
Seed accounts aren’t like normal accounts. They don’t send mail ever. They only download it. They don’t ever dig anything out of the junk folder, they never hit this is spam. They are different than a user account – and ISPs can track this.
This tells us we have to take inbox monitoring tools with a grain of salt. I believe, though, they’re still valuable tools in the deliverability arsenal. The best use of these tools is monitoring for changes. If seed lists show less than 100% inbox, but response rates are good, then it’s unlikely the seed boxes are correctly reporting delivery to actual recipients. But if seed lists show 100% inbox and then change and go down, then that’s the time to start looking harder at the overall program.
The other time seed lists are useful is when troubleshooting delivery. It’s nice to be able to see if changes are making a difference in delivery. Again, the results aren’t 100% accurate but they are the best we have right now.
August was a busy month for both Word to the Wise and the larger world of email infrastructure.
A significant subscription attack targeted .gov addresses, ESPs and over a hundred other industry targets. I wrote about it as it began, and Spamhaus chief executive Steve Linford weighed in in our comments thread. As it continued, we worked with M3AAWG and other industry leaders to share data and coordinate efforts to help senders recover from the attack.
In the aftermath, we wrote several posts about abuse, blocklists, how the industry handles these attacks currently, and how we might address these issues going forward. And obviously this has been on my mind before this attack — I posted about ongoing problems with internet security, how open subscription forms contribute to the problem, and other ways that companies inadvertently support phishing operations.
I posted about the history of email, and recounted some of my earliest experiences, when I had a .bitnet and a .gov address. Did you use email before SMTP? Before email clients? I’d be curious to hear your stories.
Speaking of email clients, I did two posts about how mail gets displayed to the end user: Gmail is displaying authentication results, which should provide end users with a bit more transparency about how authentication is used to deliver or block messages, and Microsoft is partnering with Litmus to improve some of the display issues people face using Outlook. These are both notable — if this is not your first time reading this blog, you know about my constant refrain that delivery is a function of sending people mail they want to engage with. If the mail is properly formatted and displayed, and people have a high degree of confidence that it’s been sent from someone they want to get mail from, that goes a long way towards improving engagement in the channel.
On that note, I spoke at length with Derek Harding about how marketers might change their thinking on deliverability, and he wrote that up for ClickZ. I also participated in the creation of Adobe’s excellent Teaching the Email Marketer How to Fish document (no, not phish…).
Steve was very busy behind the scenes this month thinking about abuse-related topics in light of the SBL issues, but he wrote up a quick post about the Traffic Light Protocol, which is used to denote sensitive information as it is shared.
Finally, for my Ask Laura column this month, I answered questions about delivery and engagement metrics and about permissions with purchased lists. As always, if you have a general question about email delivery, send it along and I’ll consider it for the column.
I was chatting with folks over on one of the email slack channels today. The discussion was about an ESP not wanting to implement a particular change as it would hurt deliverability. It led me down a path of thinking about how we think of deliverability and how that informs how we approach email.
The biggest problem I see is the black and white thinking.
There’s an underlying belief in the deliverability, receiving, and filtering communities that the only way to affect sending behavior is to block (or threaten to block) mail.
This was true back in the ancient times (the late 90’s). We didn’t have sophisticated tools and fast CPUs. There weren’t a lot of ways to handle bad mail other than to block. Now the landscape is different. We have many more tools and the computing capacity to quickly sort large streams of data.
At most places these days, blocking is an escalation, not a warning shot. Many places rate limit and bulk folder questionable mail as a first strike against problem mail. Sometimes the mail is bad enough to result in a block. Other times, it’s not bad enough to block, so it disappears into the bulk folder.
There’s a corresponding belief in the sending community that if their behavior doesn’t result in blocking then they’re acting acceptably. This isn’t true either. There are a lot of things you can do (or not do) that don’t help delivery, but will actively harm delivery. Likewise, there are things you can do that don’t actively harm delivery, but will help. All of these things add up to reaching the inbox.