Recipients

Why Deliverability Matters

Deliverability matters because we are the conscience of our companies. We are the ones who tell our companies, and particularly the marketing team, no. We’re the ones looking out for the health of our company reputation, the recipient’s inbox and the email ecosystem as a whole.

Advice on coronavirus emails

Gartner has some really good recommendations for companies considering mailing about the coronavirus pandemic.

Why don't users want that mail?

Things are extremely busy here and blogging is going to be light for a few weeks. I’ll be reposting some older blog posts that are still relevant for today’s email senders.
Today’s post is a repost from July 2009. I discuss why recipients complain about mail and how senders can lower the complaint rates. While this addresses complaint rates directly, the same series of questions can be used to investigate almost any change in performance.

Facts about engagement

It is reality that ISPs look at the population of recipients that a mail stream is going to.
It is reality that they evaluate the activity of that population.
It is reality that ISPs treat senders that are sending to a significant number of email addresses that have not been logged into or accessed recently negatively.
If you’re having delivery problems, looking at the recipients and their activity is part of troubleshooting the issue and identifying a path back to the inbox.
You can use web and purchase data as a measurement of engagement IF you have, at some point, directly linked the email address and the user.
If you don’t have something that demonstrates a direct link between the person and the address, then it’s a crapshoot as to whether or not that email address belongs to who you think it belongs to.
Happy Friday everyone. It’s been a week.

Engagement, it's not what you might think

Most delivery experts will tell you that ISPs measure recipient engagement as a part of their delivery. That’s absolutely true, but I think there’s a language difference that makes it hard for senders to understand what we mean by engagement.
ISPs, and other filtering companies, profile their user base. They know, for instance, who logs in and checks mail every day. They know who checks mail every 20 seconds. They know who gets a lot of spam. They know who hasn’t logged in for months. They know who accurately marks mail as spam and who is sloppy with the this-is-spam button. They know if certain recipients get the same mail, it’s likely to be spam.
Engagement at the ISPs is more about the recipient engaging with their email address and the mail in their mailbox then it is about the recipient engaging with specific emails.

Misdirected email

While this does seem to be more common with gmail addresses, it’s not solely limited to gmail. I’ve written about this frequently.

Yahoo retiring user IDs: why you shouldn't worry

A couple weeks ago, Yahoo announced that they were retiring abandoned user IDs. This has been causing quite a bit of concern among email marketers because they’re not sure how this is going to affect email delivery. This is a valid concern, but more recent information suggests that Yahoo! isn’t actually retiring abandoned email addresses.
You have to remember, there are Yahoo! userIDs that are unconnected to email addresses. People have been able to register all sorts of Yahoo! accounts without activating an associated email account: Flickr accounts, Yahoo groups accounts, Yahoo sports accounts, Yahoo news accounts, etc,. Last week, a Yahoo spokesperson told the press that only 7% of the inactive accounts had associated email addresses.
Turning that around, 93% of the accounts currently being deactivated and returned to the user pool have never accepted an email. Those addresses will have hard bounced every time a sender tried to send mail to that address.
What about the other 7%? The other 7% will have been inactive for at least a year. That’s a year’s worth of mail that had the opportunity to hard bounce with a 550 “user unknown.”
If you’re still concerned about recycled Yahoo userIDs then take action.

Feedback from recipients

Please Don’t Add Me to Your Email List
Email marketing wisdom from Forbes and someone who spends a lot of time networking and handing out business cards.

Mini Cooper and their email oops

I haven’t been able to track down any information about what happened, but it seems MINI USA had a major oops in their email marketing recently. So much so that they’re sending out apologies by snail mail. Pictures of the apology package appeared on Reddit earlier this week, and include a chocolate rose, some duct tape and a SPAM can stress reliever.
It’s a great example of a win-back campaign that really focuses on the recipients rather than the sender.

Delivery reflects recipient desires

Ken has an article today about how Pro Flowers managed to get their mail out of the bulk folder at Gmail by asking their recipients for help.

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.

Ownership of the inbox

Marketers often treat recipient inboxes with a certain level of ownership. They talk about getting mail to the inbox with the underlying implication that inboxes are for use by marketers and they tend to forget that recipients use email for a lot of things, not just being marketing targets.
This was crystallized for me a few years ago when I was running a conference session. The session had a very diverse group of attendees and as part of the session they broke up into smaller groups to talk about various email related topics. One of the questions was how do people use email. Those groups with more ISP representatives produced a list with dozens of ways people use email. The groups dominated with email marketers, though, came up with a much more limited set of uses, all of them related to marketing or commerce. They didn’t mention mailing lists or one on one discussions or connecting with friends as part of the things people use email for.
Marketers seem to forget that email was not adopted by users so they could be marketed to. In fact, email is primarily used by people to interact with friends, colleagues, allies and family members. Most recipients really don’t really care about marketing in their inbox. They’re much more interested in the mail from mom with pictures of the new puppy. They’re looking for that mail from a friend linking to a silly video. They’re deeply involved in an online discussion with friends or colleagues about anything at all.
This doesn’t mean they don’t want marketing in their inbox. Every subscription is an invitation to visit the recipient’s mailbox. They are inviting a sales person to visit them at home or at work; spaces where marketers are not traditionally invited.
The problem is that a lot of email marketers do not respect the space they’ve been invited into. They assume, usually incorrectly, they are being given ownership of that space. The marketer sees the inbox as their marketing space, not as space that the recipient feels ownership over.
When someone buys a magazine or watches TV, there are a lot of ads, but that’s OK because they don’t feel any ownership of those spaces. But when they subscribe to something in email, they don’t cede ownership of their inbox to the senders. It is still their inbox and marketers are there only because the recipient invited them. The recipient will kick marketers out if they start writing on the walls or otherwise disrespecting their space.
Many delivery consultants talk about engagement and sending timely, relevant email. All of those are really coded phrases meaning “when you’re invited into somebody’s house don’t scrawl on the walls or poop on the carpets.”

Don't forget to check out the forest

I have the #emailmarketing feed on twitter scrolling live across my screen while I’m working. It’s been an interesting experience as many of the people who tweet #emailmarketing aren’t part of my social network.
Over the last week or so there’s been a lot of tweeting going on about Ben and Jerry’s GIVING UP EMAIL MARKETING!!! Only, come to find out, that’s not what they’re doing. Yes, they are moving more into the social networking arena but they will be continuing to connect with subscribers through email. Today many are tweeting that perhaps they “jumped the cow” with their initial reports of email abandonment by B&J.
Watching the ongoing discussions led me to wonder if a lot of email marketers are so focused on the trees that they miss the forest? Are they so disconnected from how people actually use email, and social networks for that matter, that they spend way to much time chasing a response and not enough time thinking about what they’re saying and doing?
Email marketing discussions often focus on a limited number of things, the biggest are how to get mail to the inbox and how to get recipients to engage. Many marketers spend time and money looking for the elusive combination of factors that will get their mail to the inbox and impel the recipient to give the sender money. The focus is on details like color and pre-headers and length and timing and content above and below the fold and the perfect call to action.
The discussions focus almost exclusively on the sender and only mention the subscriber in passing. That is understandable on one level. Senders can only control one end of the equation and figuring out what inputs compel the best response from the other side is what marketing is all about.
But there’s another part of email marketing, and that is that subscribers invite marketers into their inboxes. When someone subscribes to a newsletter or mail from a company they’re offering that company the opportunity to interact with them in their personal space. This is, in fact, the holy grail of marketing having the customer invite contact from a seller.
I suspect this is why the rumors of Ben and Jerry’s abandoning email had people all up in arms. A company abandoning a channel where they had an engaged and interested audience? PREPOSTEROUS! What’s happening to email as marketing?
I’ll be honest, I didn’t pay much attention because it was such a silly idea. Any marketer worth their salt wouldn’t give up a way to interact with customers. Ben and Jerry’s is a company with an almost cult like following. Anyone who was going to subscribe to a B&J newsletter was going to want that mail (new flavors! coupons! new locations! inside information!).
Someone started a rumor, though, that B&J were abandoning email marketing and everyone focusing on the trees grabbed that story and ran with it. They were so focused on the details they didn’t take a step back and think about what they were repeating. Had they taken a step back and thought about the forest they would have realized how silly the idea of B&Js abandoning email as a customer communication channel was.

TWSD: My lunch is not spam

My ISP information page occasionally gets trackback pings from various blog posts. This week one of the trackbacks was from a blog post titled “One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch.” The theme of the blog post was that email marketers are poor, put upon business people that have to contend with all sorts of horrible responses from recipients, spam filtering companies and ISPs.
Since the poster took the time to link to my blog, I thought I’d take the time to look in detail at his post and talk about how likely it is to work.