Forget about engagement, think inboxing

While answering a question about how to improve IP reputation at Gmail I realized that I no longer treat Gmail opens as anything about how a user is interacting with email. There are so many cases and ways that a pixel load can be triggered, without the user actually caring about the mail that it’s not a measure of the user at all.

image of a head with gears and ideas floating around it

That doesn’t mean opens are useless. In fact, they’re very useful. But only if you have the full picture.

  1. Gmail, and other consumer mailbox providers, do not allow images to load for messages in the bulk folder.
  2. Gmail, and other consumer mailbox providers, do some level of individualised delivery. Even if most of a particular mailing is going to the bulk folder, individual users may still get that email in their inbox.
  3. Every message delivered to the spam folder, whether marked as spam by the user or delivered there by the mailbox provider, hurts your reputation.

One of the ways to improve reputation is to remove anything that is hurting your reputation. This means, removing any emails going to the bulk folder. How do we know which emails are going to the bulk folder? One piece of data is an image was loaded, i.e. an open was recorded. That open won’t happen if mail is in bulk.

How far back we go to remove addresses is an interesting question. I can argue all sorts of timelines. it doesn’t really matter. I’ve seen reputation improvement using just a few thousand emails that we knew were going to the inbox.

The real signal is not that you perfectly remove every address receiving mail in the bulk folder, but that you remove the majority of addresses receiving mail in the bulk folder. Want to go back a year? Sure. 18 months? yeah, probably will work. Longer, well, what’s the likelihood those addresses have been abandoned and no longer have an active user logging in and looking at data?

Once reputation is repaired, you can start to mail some of the suspended folks on your lists. But, stopping mail that is actively hurting your reputation is always the first step. Think about it, if you could remove spamtraps from your lists, wouldn’t you? Mail going to the spam folder can damage your delivery just as much as spamtraps.

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Engagement based delivery makes testing tricky

Yesterday I wrote about how important recipients are to achieving good delivery. The short version of yesterday’s post is that delivery is all about engagement, and how the ISPs were really focusing on engagement and proving custom user experiences.
This is great, for the user. Take the common example where a commercial list has some highly engaged recipients and a bunch of recipients that can take or leave the mail. The ISP delivers the newsletter into the inbox of the highly engaged recipients and leaves it in the bulk folder of less engaged recipients.
With user focused delivery people get the mail they are interested in where they can read it and interact it. People who have demonstrated a lack of interest for a topic or a sender don’t see that mail.
This can get complicated for those of us trying to troubleshoot deliver problems, though. I have a couple mail accounts I use for testing at various ISPs. Even though I do very little to try and personalize the account I am seeing behaviour that leads me to wonder if ISP personalizing the inbox experience is going to make it that much more difficult to troubleshoot delivery issues.
I have to wonder, too, where this leaves delivery monitoring services in the future. If delivery is personalized, how can you know that the delivery monitoring addresses are representative any longer? Is there even a “representative” mailbox any longer?

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When faced with unexplained deliverability changes one of the first questions many folks ask is “Did the algorithm change.” In many ways this is an meaningless question. Why? Because there are two obvious answers to the question.
A1: Of course it didn’t.
A2: Of course it did.
Both answers are correct, but they’re answering different underlying questions. When we understand how two diametrically opposed answers are both correct, we understand much more about filtering.

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Recipients are the secret to good delivery

Many, many people hire me to educate them on delivery and fix their email problems. This is good, it’s what I do. And I’m quite good at helping clients see where their email program isn’t meeting expectations. I can translate tech speak into marketing. I can explain things in a way that shifts a client’s perception of what the underlying issues are. I can help them find their own way into the inbox.
But…
Most of what I do is simply think about email delivery from the point of view of a recipient and help clients better meet their recipient’s expectations. This works. This works really well. If you send mail that your recipients want your mail gets to the inbox.
Here’s the secret: ISPs and most spam filters have a design goal to deliver mail their users want. They only want to block mail their users don’t want.
Filters are not designed to block wanted mail.
Sure there are complicated situations where senders have gotten behind the 8 ball and need some help cleaning up. There are situations where filters screw up and block mail they shouldn’t (and aren’t quite designed to). Spam filters are complicated bits of code and sometimes they do things unexpectedly. All of these things do happen.
But these situations happen a lot less than most senders think. Most of the time when mail is hitting the bulk folder, or is throttled at the MTA the issue is that recipients don’t care about the mail.
Recipients aren’t engaged with a particular sender or particular brand. So ISPs react accordingly and that mail ends up slowly delivered or bulked. This upsets the senders to no end, but the recipients? The recipients often don’t care that some mail shows up in bulk or arrives Wednesday afternoon instead of Tuesday evening.
When recipients are engaged with a particular sender or brand, though? Delivery is fast and reliable. Mail is rarely delayed or bulked. When recipients want mail, they interact with it. They look in the bulk folder. They miss it when it’s not there. They complain to the ISPs when they don’t get it. The ISPs react accordingly and prioritize or “red carpet” that email.
The secret to really good delivery is to get your recipients to handle your ISP relations for you. Send mail they miss when they don’t get it, and you’ll discover most of your delivery problems go away.
 
 

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