Quotable quotes

That’s a great question: Would you bother to open your own mail if you had a choice, or would you toss it out with the rest of your spam?

But, wait! That’s not all!

If there is one reporter on the marketing beat who gets it (and gets hammered for it — and I’ll let you interpret “hammered” however you wish — as a result), it’s Ken Magill. This week, his article “Meet the new slop, same as the old slop” hits the nail on the head. This article features the thoughts of Deirdre Baird from Pivotal Veracity. And kudos to Ken for not watering down what she says.

The whole article is good, but here’s the best bit of it:

And while it’s tempting to interpret these studies to mean that ISPs have been consistently bad at distinguishing permission-based e-mail from spam, Baird contends the most likely reason deliverability rates have remained unchanged for so long is that most marketers have failed to improve their e-mail marketing practices.

“In many cases to improve deliverability, you need to change the way you do business, something many marketers are not willing or able to do,” she said. . . .   Moreover, she said, too many marketers look to place the blame for deliverability troubles anywhere but where blame should be placed—on themselves.   For example, she said, marketers sometimes blame their e-mail service providers for delivery troubles caused by their own bad marketing practices and switch vendors. . . .  

“All the top-tier ESPs at this point have the infrastructure in place to manage bounces, remove spam complaints, throttle mail and properly apply authentication,” she said. “Your ESP can only make so many calls to Yahoo to unblock you. On the third call, Yahoo’s going to refuse to lift the block because they know the marketer’s not changing its business practices.”

​(Magill 2009)​