More on Relevancy

Al Iverson comments on information from Craig Spiezel at the Exacttarget customer conference this week. Craig confirms that MSN/Hotmail is also looking at user engagement, opens and moving mail out of the spam folder as part of their delivery metrics.

Ultimately, engagement is the key to mitigating delivery issues when sending to Hotmail.

  • Stop mailing to subscribers that never open or click on your email messages.
  • Don’t reactivate old, bounced addresses just to see if they’ll go through…today. (A few might, but most won’t, and Hotmail will notice.)
  • Stay true to permission. Don’t buy lists, stick to clear opt-in (not opt-out). Don’t bury the “we’ll send you email” notice in a privacy policy or legal notice.

I expect that more ISPs than AOL and MSN/Hotmail are looking at recipient engagement or are investigating how to measure it and incorporate it into their delivery decision process. It does reinforce my earlier blog post about relevancy and how important it is for delivery.
Hat tip: Mark

Yahoo blocks unauthenticated PayPal and eBay Mail
Busy Busy.

Related Posts

Permission, Part 1

Before I can talk about permission and how a mailer can collect permission from a recipient to send them email I really need to define what I mean by permission as there are multiple definitions used by various players in the market. Permission marketing was a term coined by Seth Godin in his book entitled Permission Marketing.
The underlying concept beneath permission marketing is that all marketing should be “anticipated, personal and relevant.” Others have defined permission marketing as consumers volunteering or requesting to be marketed to.
When I talk about permission in the email marketing context I mean that the recipient understood *at the time they provided the sender with an email address* that they would receive email from that sender as a result.
Let’s look at some of the relevant parts of that definition.

Read More

It really can be your email

Yesterday I wrote about activist groups getting blocked at major ISPs and how the ISPs don’t block mail because they don’t like the political viewpoints in email. This morning Mark Brownlow has a post up about delivery in general and the cause of many delivery problems.

Read More

Marketing and Delivery blogs

Mark Brownlow links to a number of marketing and delivery blogs over at his website. Different perspectives and different thoughts will give you the tools to create the best email marketing campaign for your business.

Read More