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.

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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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IP Reputation Portability

Matt posted a discussion of the portability of IP reputation over at his EmailKarma blog.
I have heard about Hotmail/MSN’s claim that if you add your new IPs to your SPF/SenderID record and send from your old IPs that your old IP reputation will transfer to your new IPs. I’ve not heard it working in practice, but it really can’t hurt to add your new IPs to your records as soon as you know what they are.

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They’re not blocking you because they hate you.

Really. They’re blocking you because you’re doing something that is triggering their blocking mechanisms.
This has happened over and over and over again. Some political or activist website sends out an email that gets blocked by some large ISP and the political site turns it into a giant crisis that means the ISP hates them or is trying to shut them up or is trying to silence their message.
Except that’s not what is going on. The folks at the large ISPs who handle blocking and incoming mail are incredibly smart and conscientious . They take their jobs seriously. They, both personally and corporately, want their customers (the end recipients) to receive the email they want. Additionally, they do not want to deliver mail that the recipients did not ask to receive.
In almost no cases is the block a particular activist site encounters a result of the ISP not liking the content of the email. If an activist site is being blocked it’s due to complaints or reputation or something that ISPs measure and block on. Some person at the ISP didn’t read your email, decide they didn’t like what you had to say and then block that email. That email was blocked because something related to that email triggered the thresholds for blocking.
Of course, as with everything online, there are caveats. In this case it’s that the above statements really only hold true for large ISPs in free countries. There are some countries in the world that do block email based on content, and that is dictated by the government. Likewise, some small ISPs will block based on the guy in charge not liking the email.
Generally, though, if an activist site is being blocked by a large ISP in the US or other free countries it is because their mailings are somehow not complying with that ISPs standards. Instead of starting an email campaign or blog campaign to shame the ISP for suppressing speech, it is much more productive to actually contact the ISP in question and find out what went wrong.

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