Every once in a while we see a client try to tell us how to go about doing our jobs. A favorite comment along those lines from a non-profit client:

Bulk mail providers – like your firm – should really be lobbying the ISPs to re-think their strategy on this issue!

This gem comes from someone who doesn’t like what they think ISPs are doing when it comes to measuring engagement. There were some misconceptions there about how to go about things that got cleared up, but notice the underlying assumption in the quote because that assumption is wrong.

ISPs generally have all of the data that they need to make decisions. What “lobbying” means in this context is really “tell them that they wrong and need to change to help me out here.”

In my dealings with ISPs I have found that they will listen to well-reasoned positions and criticisms of what they might be doing. But there are some things that don’t go over well:

• What you are doing is hurting our clients.
• I have this one client who….
• Did you think about how this might hurt our legitimate clients?

The answer in each of these instances falls somewhere between “yes, we thought about that” and “no, we don’t care.”

Why? Because they have the data to support a proposition that their clients want them to do what they’re doing. When their data tells them that they are doing something their clients don’t want them to do, they generally change because they know that their clients will vote with their feet if they should fail to meet those expectations.

ESPs cannot lobby the ISPs to do something. Lobbying implies that the ESP represents the interests of a party that the ISP genuinely cares about. The ISP doesn’t care about the ESP or the ESP’s clients. It cares about the thoughts and feelings of its subscribers. It is happy to deliver mail that its clients want, commercial, personal, or otherwise. When mail you are trying to deliver happens to intersect with mail the ISP’s clients want then everyone is happy.

But, don’t begin to think that ISPs consider your business a constituency deserving of a great deal weight when you feel pain over what they are doing. This is why following best practices is so important: they are those things that will tend to make certain that your interests are intersecting with the interests of your recipients and thus keep you on the right side of what ISPs are doing.

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• Mickey Chandler, Deliverability Consultant (spamresource.com)