Where to get deliverability help

There are lots of places to get deliverability help, I thought I’d list some of them here so I have a post to point people to.

Of course, we provide deliverability consulting services and have done since 2001. Our customers are mostly large companies sending millions of emails a month. I focus mostly on complex problems that other deliverability folks haven’t solved. Overall I focus on understanding client programs and business needs as well as current deliverability situation. Once I have a picture of a client’s program, I craft solutions that work with their business processes and get mail to the inbox. We don’t sell tools or certification. Instead, we work with our clients to help them fix delivery and teach them how to analyze the data they already have.
The nature of the work I do is intensive and I limit the number of clients I have in order to provide personalized service. But that’s OK! We have 2000+ blog posts to answer questions. And, there are lots of other companies that provide deliverability help. Here’s a partial list of places to look for resources.

Your Service Provider

Many (most?) ESPs and MTAs provide deliverability help for customers. In some cases, this is primarily self serve through their website support pages, blog posts, and knowledge bases. Other ESPs have dedicated deliverability support staff to answer questions and help customers answer questions. MTA vendors and SaaS SMTP providers also provide deliverability support.

ISPs and Filtering Companies

Many ISPs and commercial filtering companies also provide deliverability advice in their blogs. Sometimes the information on these sites is not presented in as sender friendly a way as the third parties and the ESPs. I know some of my clients have visited these websites and bristled at the tone. Nevertheless, the information is good and it’s written by the people who block mail. It’s worth looking past the tone and seeing the content.

Email Associations

Most email adjacent organizations provide deliverability resources. The EEC, M3AAWG, and the ESPC are organizations we belong to that provide free deliverability resources, many of them developed through member collaboration. Other organizations, too, have deliverability sections, I’m sure.

Governments

Many governments provide information about local laws. Not necessarily deliverability advice, but vital for successful businesses.

Third Party Tools

Gone are the days when Return Path was really the only game in town for monitoring inbox delivery. There are multiple players in the market including 250OK, GreenArrow, Postmastery and eDataSource. But not everything in email is about monitoring inbox delivery. Many other companies have email focused products and provide information on delivery and email issues including (in no particular order) places like InboxPros, Litmus, Sendforensics, dmarcian, ValiMail, Agari.
I know I’ve missed some resources, this wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive list. Just some information about where to look for deliverability help besides yours truly.

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State of Email Deliverability

I had other posts in the pipeline, but saw a link to the Litmus 2017 State of Email Deliverability Report and decided that deserved a mention here.
There’s all sorts of interesting data there, and well worth a download and read. I was, of course, interested in the “most problematic subscriber acquisition sources.” Senders having blocking issues or blacklist problems in the past 12 months use list rental, co-reg and purchased lists more often than senders that didn’t have problems.

Senders acquiring addresses through list rental are 104% more likely to be blacklisted than senders not using list rental. And they’re 47% more likely to be blocked.
These stats are the primary reason that most ESPs don’t allow list rentals, purchased or co-reg lists. They cause blocking and blacklisting. The ESP ends up having to deal with lots of problems and clean up the mess.
I’m unsurprised that lead generation by giving something away (a report, ebook, whatever) is related to problems. Most of these forms do little to no data checking and accept any and all fake data. There are fairly simple ways to enforce better data, but that does limit the spread of the information.
I am surprised to see signup through direct mail and catalog sales is so bad. Unless maybe people don’t know how to say no when asked for an email address over the phone. I know it seems awkward to say no when asked for an email address. Maybe some folks are giving fake addresses. I sometimes say I don’t have email, or just tell them no, they don’t need one.
The white paper itself is well worth a read. Go download it yourself (but don’t give them a fake email address!).

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Busiest email time of the year

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.

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Thinking about deliverability

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.

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