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

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Solving delivery problems

“The only solution to our delivery problems isn’t double opt-in, is it?” A question I get quite frequently from clients and potential clients. In the vast majority of cases the answer is no, confirmed (double) opt-in [1] is not the only solution to delivery problems. In fact, there are delivery issues that confirmed opt-in will do nothing to solve.
Many other delivery sites and deliverability experts will tell clients that the solution to their deliverability problems is to switch to confirmed opt-in as a method to collect email addresses. This overly simplistic solution only treats one possible source of delivery problems, the collection of addresses. It does not address data hygiene issues, technical delivery issues or complaints.
While address collection is important, the best address collection processes on the planet cannot fix sloppy data handling, failure to unsubscribe recipients, or non-existent bounce handling. All of these factors play a role in delivery. It is critical to identify the underlying source of delivery problems before advising anyone on how to fix it.
Over the course of the next few blog posts, I am going to take a look at the various issues that affect delivery: permission, data hygiene, bounce handling, complaints and authentication. I’ll talk about what is important and what senders need to look for and be aware of when they’re trying to troubleshoot delivery issues.
[1] There is some disagreement between senders and anti-spammers about the correct terminology to use. Senders use double opt-in to describe the process, anti-spammers use confirmed opt-in. I am using both terms here to mean the same process.

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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.

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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.

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