Deliverability Relationship Marketing

A teaser¹ for a Delivera whitepaper by Ken Magill provided blog fodder over at Word to the Wise.² Ken’s premise, with which Laura agrees, is that ESPs that start talking about the wonderful relationships they have with folks at Spamhaus or at various ISPs should cause you to be extremely skeptical. Andrew Bonar, on the other hand, took issue with this premise on his blog.³

Some of this comes from various Requests For Proposal (RFPs) out there. These RFPs ask things like: “Outline the level and depth of relationships that your deliverability team has with service providers and blacklists.”

Like many others who have been working in the email space since before “deliverability” was a word, I have an extensive number of contacts — both at Spamhaus and other blocklists and at ISPs and other receivers. But instead of answering that RFP question by name-dropping my friends and business acquaintances (and the list would be impressive, I promise), we tend to explain what we do to help clients with their issues.

Honestly, though, when you are talking with a deliverability specialist, you already have a problem. People like me don’t talk to clients whose programs are sparkling and shiny. Instead, we get brought in when your good name has been tarnished, and maybe even dragged through the mud. Laura and Ken’s premise is that your deliverability depends mainly on you because, just about everything these days is metrics-driven and leaves little room for human intervention. Andrew’s counter-premise is that this isn’t true universally.

Now, granted, I don’t have much experience dealing with Chinese or Latin American deliverability issues, but they tend to come up pretty rarely in my practice. But my experience aligns more closely with Ken and Laura’s than it does with Andrew’s. This includes those times when I’m actually talking to someone I know about a client. They tend to ask two questions:

1. Did you use the normal process before coming to me?
2. What do the metrics look like?

If the answer to the first question is “no,” then I get to hear: “Why don’t you let that process happen first before escalating this to me?” If the answer to the second is “bad,” then I get to hear: “Great! Then our filters/blocklist is working as expected. Come back when your client has fixed things and the metrics look better.” Yes, things really are that simple.

But if you want outstanding deliverability, you need to understand that this process is one that you want to avoid altogether. You need to do the things that ensure outstanding deliverability before there is a problem, rather than doing them to fix problems. And I don’t care if you’re sending mail to China or to Chinatown. If you’re doing things right, then you’ll never need to talk to someone like me.

Does my name mean something? Sure, it does. My reputation is something that I’ve spent years building. But will it get you any special consideration? Not really. About as far as it’s ever gotten me has been “the benefit of the doubt” when trying something off the wall — but even that plan had to prove itself with metrics, not my solemn word that my client is a good person who would no more send spam than they would strangle their mother with kitten tails.

Deliverability really isn’t about who you know anymore. It’s all about how you perform.

Footnotes

1. Lauren King, Preview: The Great Deliverability Myth, Delivra Blog (Sept. 6, 2013) (archived Nov. 26, 2013), https://web.archive.org/web/20131126101101/http://www.delivra.com/preview-the-great-deliverability-myth/. ↩︎
2. Laura Atkins, ISP Relationships, Word to the Wise (Sept. 11, 2013), https://www.wordtothewise.com/2013/09/isp-relationships/. ↩︎
3. Andrew Bonar, Bonar Calls #BS: The Great Deliverability Myth, EmailExpert.org (Sept. 13, 2013) (archived Sept. 16, 2013), https://web.archive.org/web/20130916002232/http://emailexpert.org/bonar-calls-bs-the-great-deliverability-myth/. ↩︎