Some marketers, even large marketing companies, send mail from email addresses that are unread. Justin Premick posted a list of reasons this is a very, very bad idea. Be sure to read the comments, too.
Sending mail only Monday through Friday can cause reputation and delivery problems at some ISPs, even when senders are doing everything right. This “weekend effect” is a consequence of how ISPs measure reputation over time.
Most ISPs calculating complaint rate use a simple calculation. They measure how many “this is spam” clicks a source IP generates in a 24 hour period. Then they divide that number by how many emails were delivered to the inbox in the same 24 hour period.
The weekend effect happens when a sender sends on weekdays and not on the weekend thus lowering the number of emails delivered to the to the inbox. Recipients, however, still read mail on the weekend, and they still hit the “this is spam” button on the email. Even if the number of “this is spam” clicks is lower than a normal weekday, with no incoming email the rate of spam complaints goes above ISP thresholds. Even a very well run mailing program may see spikes in complaint rate on the weekends.
Now, when the ISPs are measuring complaint rates over time, they take the average of the average complaint rates. If the rates spike high enough on the weekend (and they can spike to the 1 – 3% range, even for a well run list), that can hurt the senders’ reputation.
The good news is that ISPs are aware of the weekend effect and take this into account when manually looking at complaints. The bad news is that not all of the major ISPs take this into account when programatically calculating reputation.
There isn’t very much senders can do to combat the weekend effect, except be aware this can happen and may be responsible for poor mailing performances on Monday. If you are seeing delivery problems you think may be a result of the weekend effect you can contact the ISPs and ask for manual review of your reputation. Some ISPs can provide manual mitigation for senders with otherwise clean stats. d
I spent the morning in multiple venues correcting mis-understandings of confirmed opt-in. The misunderstandings weren’t so much that people didn’t understand how COI works, but more they didn’t understand all the implications.
In one venue, the conversation centered around how small a portion of deliverability the initial subscription process affects. Sure, sending unwanted, unexpected email can and does cause reputation problems, but merely using COI as a subscription methodolgy doesn’t automatically give a sender a good reputation or good delivery. Senders using COI as a subscription practice need to also need to send relevant and engaging mail that their recipients expect to receive. They need to handle their bounces well and purge or re-engage inactive subscribers. They need to keep their complaints low and their responses high.
How you manage subscriptions is only one factor in reputation schemes, and even if the subscription method is COI other factors can negate any bonus involved.
The second conversation involved Ken challenging me on the comment I left on his quiz yesterday. I said COI wasn’t foolproof and he challenged me to explain how. I did, and he’ll be following up next week.
AllSpammedUp has a post describing the primary techniques anti-spam filters use to identify mail as spam or not spam. While is this not sender or delivery focused knowledge, it is important for people sending mail to have a basic understanding of filtering mechanisms. Without that base knowledge, it’s difficult to troubleshoot problems and resolve issues.
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