Hidden cost of email blasts

Seth Godin has a post up today talking about how friction, that is the cost of sending marketing, is good for marketing. With more friction, marketers make choices about sending instead of sending to everyone.
The post touches on a point I’ve certainly tried to explain to clients and senders in general.

Email, of course, is free.
Except it’s not. The friction that slows down sending email to everyone all the time is the cost of all the people you’ll lose. You might lose them because they unsubscribe, or more likely, you’ll train them to ignore you. Worse still, you might just make them annoyed enough to badmouth you.

Yes! Not only do senders risk alienating subscribers, those non-responsive addresses can turn into a reputation liability. The reputation schemes at most of the major ISPs look at if recipients interacting with email. Training recipients to ignore mail trains the reputation filters that mail, and mail from that sender in general, isn’t wanted.
Senders must implement list hygiene programs and data segmentation to keep reputation high.
Mark Brownlow has more on why list hygiene programs are critical.

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Reputation as measured by the ISPs

Part 3 in an ongoing series on campaign stats and measurements. In this installment, I will look a little closer at what other people are measuring about your email and how that affects your reputation at the ISPs.
Part 1: Campaign Stats and Measurements
Part 2: Measuring Open Rate
Reputation at the ISPs is an overall measure of how responsive recipients are to your email. ISPs also look at how much valid email you are sending. Anything the ISP can measure and use to distinguish good mail from bad is used in calculating reputation.
Some of the major metrics ISPs use include the following.
Invalid Address Rates
The ISPs count how much mail from any particular IP address is hitting non-existent addresses. If you are mailing a large number of email addresses that do not exist (550 user unknown), this is a suggestion that your address collection techniques are not very good. Responsible mailers do have the occasional bad address, including typos, expired/abandoned addresses, but the percentage in comparison to the number of real email addresses is low. How low is low? Public numbers suggest problems start at 10% user unknowns, but conversations with ISP employees show they consider lower levels a hint there may be a problem.
To calculate bounce rate ISPs take the total number of addresses that were for invalid accounts and divide that by the total number of addresses that the sender attempted to send mail to. Rates above 10% may cause significant delivery issues on their own, rates lower that 10% may still contribute to poor delivery through poor reputation scores.
Spamtraps
ISPs pay a lot of attention to how much mail is hitting their “trap” or “bait” accounts. There are a number of different sources of these trap accounts: old abandoned email addresses, addresses that never existed or even role accounts. Hits to a trap account tells the ISP there are addresses on your list that did not opt-in to receive mail. And if there are some addresses they know about that did not opt-in, it is likely that there are other addresses that did not opt in.
Spamtraps tend to be treated as an absolute number, not as a percentage of emails. Even a single spamtrap on a list can significantly harm delivery. According to the ReturnPath Benchmark report lists with a single spamtrap had nearly 20% worse delivery than lists without spamtraps.
This is spam clicks (FBL complaints)
Complaints from users are heavily used by ISPs. This tells them directly how many people are objecting to your email. In this case, permission is removed from the equation. Even if a sender has permission to send email, the recipient can say “no, I don’t want this, it is spam.” The ISPs put more weight on what their users tell them than on what the senders tell them.

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AOL talks about reputation

Over at the AOL postmaster blog, Christine posts about reputation and AOL.

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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.

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