The Question

Mark Brownlow has a list of 12 questions every email marketer should ask about their marketing program. Buried in the middle is the most important question for delivery.

Do you worry more about what ISPs think about your email than what subscribers think about your email? If you take care of the latter, won’t the former take care of itself?

My answer is if a sender is worried more about what the ISPs think than what subscribers think that sender is going to have ongoing and continual delivery problem. However, if a sender focuses on sending relevant, expected and wanted email then they will have almost zero delivery problems.

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That's spammer speak

I’ve been hearing stories from other deliverability consultants and some ISP reps about what people are telling them. Some of them are jaw dropping examples of senders who are indistinguishable from spammers. Some of them are just examples of sender ignorance.
“We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer speak. The speaker sees no value in any individual recipient, so instead of actually figuring out what about their mail is causing problems, they are going to drop 30% of their list. We talk a lot on this blog about relevancy and user experience. If a sender does not care about their email enough to invest a small amount of time into fixing a problem, then why should recipients care about the mail they are sending?
A better solution then just throwing away 30% of a list is to determine the underlying reasons for  delivery issues, and actually make adjustments to  address collection processes and  user experience. Build a sustainable, long term email marketing program that builds a loyal customer base.
“We have a new system to unsubscribe people immediately, but are concerned about implementing it due to database shrink.” First off, the law says that senders must stop mailing people that ask. Secondly, if people do not want email, they are not going to be an overall asset. They are likely to never purchase from the email, and they are very likely to hit the ‘this is spam’ button and lower the overall delivery rate of a list.
Let people unsubscribe. Users who do not want email from a sender are cruft. They lower the ROI for a list, they lower aggregate performance. Senders should not want unwilling or unhappy recipients on their list.
“We found out a lot of our addresses are at non-existent domains, so we want to correct the typos.” “Correcting” email addresses is an exercise in trying to read recipients minds. I seems intuitive that someone who typed yahooooo.com meant yahoo.com, or that hotmial.com meant hotmail.com, but there is no way to know for sure. There is also the possibility that the user is deliberately mistyping addresses to avoid getting mail from the sender. It could be that the user who mistyped their domain also mistyped their username. In any case, “fixing” the domain could result in a sender sending spam.
Data hygiene is critical, and any sender should be monitoring and checking the information input into their subscription forms. There are even services which offer real time monitoring of the data that is being entered into webforms. Once the data is in the database, though, senders should not arbitrarily change it.

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Appropriating reputation

One of the thing savvy spammers are doing these days is appropriating the reputation of someone else. Reputation appropriate takes many forms. Some spammers hijack windows machines, turn them into bots and send spam through major ISP smarthosts. “Legitimate email marketers” buy service from mainstream ESPs to send their permission-challenged email that they cannot get delivered through their own IP space.
There are different strategies for companies to prevent bad groups from appropriating their  reputation. For the ESP, the prime defense against reputation appropriation is screening new customers and new lists.
When screening potential customers, there are three broad categories that customers fall into. One is the legit prospect that is exactly whom they represent to you, these are the easy guys. Another is the naive mailer, who really does not have any clue about email but wants to move into the digital age. This mailer is often extremely small, but knows nothing about email. The final category is the subversive prospect. This is the company who knows exactly what they are doing, and who is actively working to hide their practices from the ESP. They are attempting to subvert the process.
Over the coming weeks I will be talking more about screening new customers and how to distinguish the naive customer from the subversive one.

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Botnets

Terry Zink has been posting articles about botnets as traced by Hotmail. I do not often talk about botnets as they are outside my area of expertise. They are not something I deal with, as no one who uses botnets is welcome as a client here.
My clients and I, however, do have to deal with the fallout from botnets.  Because of botnets, receiver ISPs are extremely suspicious of mail from any IP address that they have not seen mail from previously. Mail from new IPs is, more often than not, a newly infected Windows machine. This results in mail from new IPs not starting with a reputation of zero but starting with a negative reputation.
Botnets are another example of spammers making it more difficult for mailers with permission to use email.

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