Hey marketers! Listen up! I’m about to give you the dirty little secret to deliverability.
You know those stupid “one simple trick” scams that you see touting weight loss or lower insurance rates? Well, unlike those scams, I have one simple trick that will absolutely improve your deliverability rates.
Are you ready?
FORGET ABOUT THE RECEIVERS AND THEIR SPAM FILTERS.
Seriously. That’s it. Forget about them. We live in a world of engagement now. The world is now all about respecting your subscribers and doing things their way.
You might have heard about someone who wrote a blog post saying that “Email engagement doesn’t matter…again”.1 The author discusses the recent Email Experience Council meeting in Florida. One of the final panels featured some of my friends from various receivers, and they shared shocking news: They don’t count clicks. Since the ISP doesn’t count clicks, well, then they must not measure engagement!
No, not really. As my friend Andrew Barrett points out,2 this shocking announcement means that they’re measuring other forms of engagement that marketers DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO.
So, what does that mean for marketers? Does it mean that:
- Hope is lost, and we should do what we want?
- ISPs don’t care about engagement, and we should do what we want?
Absolutely not in both cases. As Andrew points out, opens and clicks are the proxies that people outside of the environment can use to measure engagement.3
So, why did I say to forget about the ISPs and their spam filters? Because we’re now living in a world of individual engagement.4 And the fact is that we’ve been there for years already with the largest receivers. These receivers are now looking at what individual recipients want. In fact, for a good long time, AOL has had a rejection code that reads “550 ‘username’ Is Not Accepting Mail From This Sender”. Where that used to mean that the user had a whitelist of addresses that were allowed and all others were to be rejected, we’re to the point in the technology where the opposite of that can be true as well: Now the technology exists that will allow the user to say, “I don’t want to receive mail from this sender anymore.”
The thing that has struck me the hardest about this “fight” over engagement is that we are leaving the recipient out of the discussion, and they’re pretty much the most important part of it. The discussion is all about the impact of engagement on the ISP — not the recipient.
The biggest selling point of any ESP is its ability to help the marketer craft the right message for the right person at the right time. It’s their bread and butter. But when talking about delivering messages, we forget about the recipient. And, while that’s maybe understandable for someone like me (who specializes in troubleshooting what happens when mail servers talk to each other), it’s really unforgivable for a marketer — someone who should be specializing in the impact that the (right) message has on the (right) recipient when delivered at the right time.
ESPs specialize in technology. It’s that technology that enables mail to get delivered. It’s that technology that gives you a nice, shiny interface for building out the journey you want to take with the customer. And if you’re way more concerned about that journey with the customer than you are about the ISP’s spam filters, deliverability will tend to take care of itself.
Footnotes
- Bob Frady, Dela Is Right (Feb. 11, 2015), https://www.onlyinfluencers.com/blog/entry/dela-is-right, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20150213135951/https://www.onlyinfluencers.com/blog/entry/dela-is-right. ↩︎
- Andrew Barrett, Engagement Totally Matters (Feb. 11, 2015), http://emailskinny.com/2015/02/11/engagement-totally-matters/, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20150214083940/http://emailskinny.com/2015/02/11/engagement-totally-matters/. ↩︎
- Id. ↩︎
- Massimo Arrigoni, Sender Reputation and Personalized Deliverability: What Inbox Engagement Really Means (Feb. 4, 2015), http://blog.mailup.com/2015/02/sender-reputation-personalized-deliverability-inbox-engagement-really-means/, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20150207064234/http://blog.mailup.com/2015/02/sender-reputation-personalized-deliverability-inbox-engagement-really-means/. ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
