Never 100% inbox

No matter how great an email program deliverability is, no one can guarantee that 100% of the email sent will reach the recipient’s inbox. Why? Recipients can make decisions about where mail goes in their own inbox. Every mail client has a way for users to control where mail is delivered.

This is good for delivery, when the mail means so much to people that they override spam filters and put mail in their inbox. This is problematic for delivery when the final recipient throws mail away or filters it into spam.

Of course, there’s no way to know what individual recipients are doing with mail in general. Sure, there’s currently panel data but that is only for the subset of users that installs a 3rd party app into their mailbox. There’s no way to know where 100% of email is delivered.

For me, I consider any email program with a >95% inbox delivery rate to be an excellent program. I also don’t think there’s much the sender can do in order to get that last 5% to the inbox. That 5% is just not reachable. Not by improving data, not by double opt-in, not by any of the things we do to improve delivery. Some small percentage of mail is just never going to get in front of the user.

The primary reason for these delivery failure is the end user. End users can, and do, create their own filters. While ISPs do curate the inbox, end users have the ability to filter email. If an enduser sets up a filter for a particular email, the ISP isn’t going to overrule that. ISPs want the end users to have a pleasant inbox experience. Thus, the end user’s wants and needs rule. Nothing is clearer to the ISP whether a particular user wants an email than that user directly setting up a filter.

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Back to the office!

I’m back in the office after a busy June. The 2 continent, 3 city tour was unexpectedly extended to a 4th city thus I was out most of last week as well.
What was I doing? We spent a week in Dublin, which is an awesome and amazing city and I love it a little bit more every time we visit. After Dublin I jetted off to Chicago, where I spoke at ActiveCampaign’s first user conference.
The talk I did for ActiveCampaign was about how we’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in how email is filtered, particularly at the consumer ISPs. In order reach the inbox. we need to think beyond IP or domain reputation. We need to stop thinking of filters as a way of sorting good mail from bad mail. I touched a little on these concepts in my What kind of mail do filters target? blog post.
The shift in filtering is changing how email reaches the inbox and what we can and should be monitoring. At the same time, the amount of data we can get back from the ISPs is decreasing. This means we’re looking at a situation when our primary delivery fixes can’t be based on feedback from the filters. This is, I think, going to be an ongoing theme of blog posts over the next few months.

The next trip was to spend 2 days onsite at a client’s office. These types of onsite training are intense but I do enjoy them. As this was mostly client specific, there isn’t much I can share. They did describe it as a masterclass in deliverability, so I think it was also intense for them.
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I’ll be getting back into the swing of blogging over the next few days. It’s good to be back and not looking at traveling in the short term.

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