Re-adding subscribers after reputation repair

A comment came in on Engagement and Deliverability and I thought it was a good question and deserved a discussion.

Good article. My question about Gmail engagement is how would I reach someone who has not been opening my emails? Say I want to do a re-engagement campaign. If I temporarily suppress a contact from my list for a period of time and only send to my engaged contacts, will that contact potentially get an email in the future if my reputation improves? Or is the contact essentially lost to the spam folder abyss if their emails start going there for engagement reasons?

The short answer is that yes, you can add in contacts after repairing reputation and expect them to get the mail in the inbox. There are some caveats, though.

Part of any reputation repair process is letting some of your recipients go for good. I know some folks think they can simply repair reputation and then go back to mailing the same as they did before. But that’s not how reputation works. Unless there is one precipitating incident – like a phishing page on your domain or one mailing that is clearly something unintended reputation reflects all the mail that you’re sending. If you get to a place where you have to repair reputation, then you need to make some changes to your data.

Let old subscribers who are unengaged for long periods of time go. 24 months is pretty safe, you can be more aggressive, like 12 or 18 months, but I wouldn’t advise being less aggressive.

Next trickle folks back into your active mailings slowly. Don’t take your full 2 year database and mail it. That’s the way to destroy all your hard work on reputation repair. Instead, start adding recent engagers in batches. There are different ways to structure the batches. For instance, you can increase your list by 10% a week, adding in old addresses. You may find that there is a point where you see a reputation change – like you’re adding addresses from 18 months ago and Gmail reputation falls or FBL emails increase. This is a sign to slow down, stop or change tactics.

Whatever you do, monitoring is key. Your own internal metrics – FBL numbers, Google postmaster tools, probe accounts (yours and commercially available ones), opens, clicks, bounces – will tell let you monitor how delivery is going. You can make adjustments on the fly. Try things like slowing down the addition of addresses or move the new addresses into a re-engagement stream rather than your main mail stream. Decisions are driven by data. Collect everything you can get.

Overall, the population of recipients you choose for reputation repair isn’t the only population of recipients you will ever be able to contact. Unless a recipient actually marked you as spam, you will be able to reach their inbox.

My domain reputation is bad, should I get a new domain?
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The coming changes

Yesterday I talked about how I’m hearing warnings of a coming paradigm shift in the email industry. While these changes will affect all sender, ESPs in particular are going to need to change how they interact with both ISPs and their customers.
Currently, ESPs are able to act as “routine conveyers.” The traffic going across their network is generated by their customers and the ESP only handles technical issues. Responsible ESPs do enforce standards on their customers and expect mailings to meet certain targets. They monitor complaints and unknown users, they monitor blocks and reputation. If customers get out of line, then the ESP steps in and forces their customer to improve their practices. If the customer refuses, then the ESP disconnects them.
Currently standards for email are mostly dictated by the ISPs. Many ESPs take the stance that if any mail that is not blocked by the ISPs then it is acceptable. But just because a certain customer isn’t blocked doesn’t mean they’re sending mail that is wanted by the recipients.
It seems this reactive approach to customer policing may no longer be enough. In fact, one of the large spam filter providers has recently offered their customers the ability to block mail from all ESPs with a single click. This may become a more common response if the ESPs don’t start proactively policing their networks.
Why is this happening? ISPs and filtering companies are seeing increasing percentages of spam coming out of ESP netspace. Current processes for policing customers are extremely reactive and there are many ESPs that are allowing their customers to send measurable percentages of spam. This situation is untenable for the filtering companies or the ISPs and they’re sending out warnings that the ESPs need to stop letting so much spam leave their networks.
Unsurprisingly, there are many members of the ESP community that don’t like this and think the ISPs are overreacting and being overly mean. They do not think the ISPs or filtering companies should be blocking all an ESPs customers just because some of the customers are sending unwanted mail. Paraphrased, some of the things I’ve heard include:

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Setting expectations at the point of sale

In my consulting, I emphasize that senders must set recipient expectations correctly. Receiver sites spend a lot of time listening to their users and design filters to let wanted and expected mail through. Senders that treat recipients as partners in their success usually have much better email delivery than those senders that treat recipients as targets or marks.
Over the years I’ve heard just about every excuse as to why a particular client can’t set expectations well. One of the most common is that no one does it. My experience this weekend at a PetSmart indicates otherwise.
As I was checking out I showed my loyalty card to the cashier. He ran it through the machine and then started talking about the program.
Cashier: Did you give us your email address when you signed up for the program?
Me: I’m not sure, probably not. I get a lot of email already.
Cashier: Well, if you do give us an email address associated with the card every purchase will trigger coupons sent to your email address. These aren’t random, they’re based on your purchase. So if you purchase cat stuff we won’t send you coupons for horse supplies.
I have to admit, I was impressed. PetSmart has email address processes that I recommend to clients on a regular basis. No, they’re not a client so I can’t directly take credit. But whoever runs their email program knows recipients are an important part of email delivery. They’re investing time and training into making sure their floor staff communicate what the email address will be used for, what the emails will offer and how often they’ll arrive.
It’s certainly possible PetSmart has the occasional email delivery problem despite this, but I expect they’re as close to 100% inbox delivery as anyone else out there.

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Public reputation data

IP based reputation is a measure of the quality of the mail coming from a particular IP address. Because of how reputation data is collected and evaluated it is difficult for third parties to provide a reputation score for a particular IP address. The data has to be collected in real time, or as close to real time as possible. Reputation is also very specific to the source of the data. I have seen cases where a client has a high reputation at one ISP and a low reputation at another.
All this means is that there are a limited number of public sources of reputation data. Some ISPs provide ways that senders can check reputation at that ISP. But if a sender wants to check a broader reputation across multiple ISPs where can they go?
There are multiple public sources of data that I use to check reputation of client IP addresses.
Blocklists provide negative reputation data for IP addresses and domain names. There are a wide range of blocklists with differing listing criteria and different levels of trust in the industry. Generally the more widely used a list the more accurate and relevant it is. Generally I check the Spamhaus lists and URIBL/SURBL when investigating a client. I find these lists are good sources for discovering real issues or problems.
For an overall view into the reputation of an IP address, both positive and negative, I check with senderbase.org provided by Ironport and senderscore.org provided by ReturnPath.
All reputation sources have limitations. The primary limitation is they are only as good as their source data, and their source data is kept confidential. Another major limitation is reputation sources are only as good as the reputation of the maintainer. If the maintainer doesn’t behave with integrity then there is no reason for me to trust their data.
I use a number of criteria to evaluate reputation providers.

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