Controlling delivery

How much control over delivery do senders have? I have repeatedly said that senders control their delivery. This is mostly true. Senders control their side of the delivery chain, but there is a point where the recipient takes over and controls things.
As a recipient I can

  • report your email as spam
  • forward your email to another account on another mail system
  • file your email in a mailbox I never read
  • block all your images
  • delete your email before it ever hits my mailbox
  • forward your email to public or private blocklists
  • fold, spindle or mutilate your email
  • forward your email to friends
  • blog about your email
  • purchase something from that email
  • visit your website and purchase something else
  • reply to you

Some of these things are going to hurt your reputation as a sender. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t make a recipient accept your email. You can’t make a recipient ISP accept your email.
What you, as a sender, can do is send mail that your recipients want to read. Send mail that they expect, even anticipate. For instance, it’s now noon on Tuesday, I know I’m going to get Ken Magill’s newsletter in the next 2 hours. Then I will read it, chat about it with some other delivery folks and possibly comment on his blog. I may even get inspired and blog about something he wrote.
Influence and inspire your recipients. Send them mail they want, don’t just send mail they tolerate. Because they don’t have to just tolerate your email. They can react in many ways, some of them positive, some of them negative.
Senders need to remember they only control one end of delivery, but they can influence the whole stream.

Internationalisation (part 2)
I don't have a "this is spam" button

Related Posts

Senders need to take responsibility

Having just returned home from another conference, my head is full of new ideas, new thoughts and new projects. I enjoy seeing old friends, making new contacts and sharing ideas. One thing I don’t enjoy, though, is listening to senders and marketers complaining about how hard it is to be a sender because the ISPs will not tell them what standards they need to meet.
If the ISPs would just tell us what they want us to do, we’ll do it.

The ISPs have told senders what they want them to do. They want senders to stop sending mail that their users don’t want. It is a very simple statement.
Stop sending spam.

For many senders, however, it’s not enough. “Tell us exactly what we need to do to stop sending spam. What complaint rates must we be under? What bounce rates do we have to be under? How do you want us to do this?” By this point in the conversation the ISP person is mentally rolling their eyes and looking for a way to escape the conversation.
The ISPs don’t want to tell senders how to behave, they want senders to start behaving. Stop sending spam should be all they need to tell senders.
Senders who ask for ISPs to tell them how to stop sending mail recipients think is spam are looking for specific thresholds they can stay under. They’re not really interested in actually sending wanted mail, they’re interested in sending good-enough mail, where good-enough mail is simply mail that gets to the inbox.
Want to know why ISPs don’t think much of many senders? Because the senders are not visibly taking any stand against abuse. I know there are a lot of senders out there who stop a lot of spam from ever leaving their systems, but there’s also a lot of unwanted mail that goes out, too. Some of that mail is even spam by any definition of the word. All the ISPs can see is the spam that gets through, and then they hear just tell us what to do and we’ll do it. From an ISP perspective, this means the senders only care about the thresholds and getting in under the ISPs’ radars.
Senders need to take more responsibility for the mail that goes out over their networks.
What do I mean by this? I mean senders need to stop waiting for the ISPs to define good practices. Senders need to implement standards and good practices just because they’re good practices, not because the ISPs are dictating the practices. Senders need to stop customers from doing bad things, and dump them if they won’t stop. Senders need to stop relying on ISPs for specific answers to why mail is being blocked. Senders need to take responsibility for the mail going across their networks.
It’s time for senders to grow up and stop relying on others for guidance. They shouldn’t implement good practices just because the ISPs tell them to, but instead should implement good practices because they are good practices.

Read More

Dealing with blacklists

Al has a good post listing the top 5 things senders should remember when dealing with blacklists.
One of the critical things to remember about blocklists is that they are an early warning sign. Sure, some of them are one crank and his cat and will not hurt your overall delivery. A sender may be listed for totally spurious reasons . On the other hand, many of the widely used public lists and the private lists at the big ISPs, list IPs that they see as doing something wrong.
The challenge for anyone listed on any IP based blocklist is to look inside and determine what it is that they’re doing that caused the listing. The first step is to look at the technical issues, does your mail look like something coming out of infected bots? Is there a configuration problem? If the answer is no, then senders have to look at their practices. Are they sending mail to people who don’t expect it? Are they sending mail to people who didn’t ask for it? Most listings that will affect large numbers of recipients fall into the above 2 categories: technical or practices.
Technical problems can be fixed easily, once they’re identified. Permission or practice problems can also be fixed, but may require a sender reassess how they are using email and what value email brings to the business.

Read More

Subscription practices in the wild

It’s always interesting to look at what other email marketers are doing and how closely their practices align with what I am recommending to clients.
Today’s example is a welcome message I received from Marriott. During my recent trip to visit a client, I gave Marriott my email address. They sent me a welcome message, primarily text that looked good even with images turned off. The text of the email told me why I was receiving the email and what I could expect.

Read More