Targets and measures

Over the past few years a number of email delivery products have been launched. Many of these products are intended to improve deliverability by improving metrics. The problem is they don’t work the way their purchasers thing.

Take data hygiene services. For the most part, these services take a list of email addresses, do data analysis and magic and then return a “clean” list to the list owner. They’re sold as a way to “improve list quality” but is that what they really do? They certainly reduce the number of bouncing email addresses. Which, in turn can improve reputation. But if a list is actively mailed and properly bounce handled, this does nothing.

The number of non-existent addresses on a list (bouncing addresses) is a way to measure the quality of data. By turning this into a target measurement for senders, we’ve made it much less useful as a metric for list quality. Every list can have a very low bounce rate now, you just need to go to a data hygiene company and they’ll clean off all the addresses that bounce.

What they can’t do is clean off all the non-bouncing addresses that were mistakenly subscribed. What happens is that lists look clean as they have low bounce rates but they may suffer from “mysterious” delivery issues. Mail goes to spam, open rates are kinda low, it’s just not a well performing list. The list owner may engage with their ESP to get help with delivery, but there isn’t much to do because the surface numbers look OK. There’s some half hearted recommendations to try and clean up the list, but because there’s nothing really wrong, the recommendations are not very aggressive. Minor tweaks don’t really lead to major improvements.

Everyone leaves the interaction and the implementation feeling somewhat dissatisfied, the program limps along and no one really knows how to fix it. Sometimes, the limping along is sufficient and revenue is high enough and everyone just accepts the lacklustre performance.

On the other hand, companies that have their data and can see that there are an increasing number of bouncing addresses on their list can use that data to make much more aggressive and effective changes. They aren’t hiding signals, so they have more to work with and can actually address the problem. Their programs that do more than tweak around the edges reap the rewards in a more vibrant and profitable marketing program.

 

 

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Metric Monetization

As a digital channel, email provides a lot of different metrics for marketers to use. Not only can marketers measure things like open and click rates, but they can tie these numbers back to a particular recipient. This treasure trove of information leads to obsessing over making the numbers look good. For good deliverability senders want low bounce rates, low spamtrap rates, and high engagement rates.
These metrics are important because they’re some of the things that filters look at when making delivery decisions. We care about this data because the receiver ISPs care about the data. The ISPs care about this data because they are characteristics of wanted and/or opt in email.

Over the past few years a number of companies sell services selling good metrics.

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20% of email doesn't make it to the inbox

Return Path released their global delivery report for the second half of 2009. To put together the report, they look at mail delivery to the Mailbox Monitor accounts at 131 different ISPs for 600,000+ sends. In the US, 20% of the email sent by Mailbox Monitor customers to Return Path seed accounts doesn’t make it to the inbox. In fact, 16% of the email just disappears.
I’ve blogged in the past about previous Return Path deliverability studies. The recommendations and comments in those previous posts still apply. Senders must pay attention to engagement, permission, complaints and other policy issues. But none of those things really explain why email is missing.
Why is so much mail disappearing? It doesn’t match with the philosophy of the ISPs. Most ISPs do their best to deliver email that they accept and I don’t really expect that ISPs are starting to hard block so many Return Path customers in the middle of a send. The real clue came looking at the Yahoo numbers. Yahoo is one of those ISPs that does not delete mail they have accepted, but does slow down senders. Other ISPs are following Yahoo’s lead and using temporary failures as a way to regulate and limit email sent by senders with poor to inadequate reputations. They aren’t blocking the senders outright, but they are issuing lots of 4xx “come back later” messages.
What is supposed to happen when an ISP issues a 4xx message during the SMTP transaction is that email should be queued and retried. Modern bulk MTAs (MessageSystems, Port25, Strongmail) allow senders to fine tune bounce handling, and designate how many times an email is retried, even allowing no retries on a temporary failure.
What if the missing mail is a result of senders aggressively handling 4xx messages? Some of the companies I’ve consulted for delete email addresses from mailing lists after 2 or 3 4xx responses. Other companies only retry for 12 – 24 hours and then the email is treated as hard bounced.
Return Path is reporting this as a delivery failure, and the tone of discussion I’m seeing seems to be blaming ISPs for overly aggressive spamfiltering. I don’t really think it’s entirely an ISP problem, though. I think it is indicative of poor practices on the part of senders. Not just the obvious permission and engagement issues that many senders deal with, but also poor policy on handling bounces. Perhaps the policy is fine, but the implementation doesn’t reflect the stated policy. Maybe they’re relying on defaults from their MTA vendor.
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