Schroedinger’s email

The riskiest email to send is that very first email. It’s a blank slate. Even if you’re sending confirmation messages, you don’t really know anything about how this email is going to affect your reputation.

It’s Schroedinger’s email. The address is both good and bad, until you send to it.

If it’s good, great things will happen. You’ll be happy. The recipient will be happy. Deliverability will increase. Everything is awesome.

But if it’s not good, there are a whole host of consequences to sending that email. The obvious problems are hitting spamtraps, bouncing mail and complaints with the resulting delivery problems and, in very bad case, spamfoldering and blocklisting. Sure, you can use a data hygiene to lower the chances of the mail bouncing. But hygiene services don’t help you if the address is deliverable but belongs to someone else. They certainly don’t help if the address is a spamtrap.

There are all sorts of ways to mitigate damage from bad email addresses, after you know for certain they’re bad email addresses. But that first email is still risky. Even sending a confirmation email (double opt-in) can cause delivery problems at some places. That’s especially true for signups where you might want to send confirmation emails like sweepstakes or political mail.

The obvious answer is to segregate all confirmation emails onto their own IP with their own DKIM signature and, if you’re really worried, it’s own domains and everything. The problem there is that if your mail is messy enough, you may generate a bad reputation on it and your confirmation emails will go to bulk.

You may want to consider, then, just mixing in the confirmation emails with your regular mailstream and letting the good reputation carry the new messages. That may work depending on the relative volumes and the quality of the subscription feed.

Another way to handle it is to segregate the confirmation messages on an IP with other transactional and triggered emails like password resets, 2FA emails and purchase receipts. If you have a transactional feed, this is the best way to handle this mail. Most of the other emails are heavily engaged with, but come at irregular intervals. This mimics the confirmation emails and lets all that stream develop a reputation outside of the reputation of regular bulk mail.

All in all, there’s no one way to manage confirmation emails for a signup stream. There’s always going to be risk to mailing that unknown email. We’re already seeing filters able to sort out different mail types when they’re from the same IPs with the same authentication. Google and Oath are good at that already.

My best advice is to lump it in with the other transactional email. That’s what it is, that’s what it looks like. If you only have a single IP, then I’d advise authenticating transactional mail, including confirmation mail, differently from marketing and bulk mail. That way the filters can distinguish between the two streams. While some reputation will be shared between the different kinds of mail, the filters will be able to distinguish between them. As such the confirmation emails will be less likely to harm your overall delivery.

Related Posts

Brand indicators in email

A number of companies in the email industry have been working on a way to better identify authenticated emails to users. One proposal is Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). A couple weeks ago, Agari announced a pilot program with some brands and a number of major consumer mail providers. These logos should be available in the Yahoo interface now and will be rolling out at other providers.

Read More

Deliverability is critical for marketing

It is increasingly clear that successful email marketing programs measure and emphasize deliverability. No longer is deliverability the crisis management team called when everything breaks. They’re part and parcel of an effective email marketing team.
Today I watched a bit of the EIS livestream where acquisition marketers were discussing their processes. Everyone of them talked about things that are critical for deliverability as core to their business.

Read More

Don't leave that money sitting there

The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts.
I’m probably the first to admit that confirmed opt-in isn’t the solution to all your delivery problems. There are situations where it’s a good idea, there are times when it’s not. There are situations where you absolutely need that extra step involved and there are times when that extra step is just superfluous.
But whether a sender uses confirmed opt in or not they must do something to confirm that the email address actually belongs to their customer. It’s so easy to have data errors in email addresses that there needs to be some sort of error correction process involved.
Senders that don’t do this are leaving money on the table. They’re not taking that extra step to make sure the data they were given is correct. They don’t make any effort to draw a direct line between the email address entered into their web form or given to them at the register or used for a receipt, and their actual customer.
It does happen, it happens enough to make the non-tech press. Consumerist has multiple articles a month on some email address holder that can’t get a giant company to stop mailing them information about someone else’s account.
Just this week, the New Yorker published an article about a long abandoned gmail address that received over 4000 “legitimate” commercial and transactional emails.

Read More