How do unengaged recipients hurt delivery?

In the comments Ulrik asks: “How can unengaged recipients hurt delivery if they aren’t complaining? What feedback mechanism is there to hurt the the delivery rate besides that?”
There are a number of things that ISPs are monitoring besides complaint rates, although they are being cautious about revealing what and how they are measuring things. I expect that ISPs are measuring things like:

  • How many users read a particular mail?
  • How many users click through on a particular mail?
  • How many users have the senders from: address in their address book?
  • How many users receiving the mail have abandoned their accounts or not logged in for months?
  • How many users never open a particular mail?

Some of these values senders can measure as well. Senders know, for instance, how many users click through on a mail. They know that some people do open the mail, and they know that some people don’t open the mail. The numbers on opens are not always completely accurate, as to measure opens the recipient must load HTML images. But images are not rendered by default in a number of email clients, and some ISPs don’t show images unless the recipient agrees, or the sender is in the recipient’s address book or the sender is certified by a 3rd party.
Senders don’t have any way of knowing, however, if an email account has been abandoned. That’s something that only the ISPs know. Because of the tools that senders have, there is no difference between an account that doesn’t load images and doesn’t click on any links and one that has been abandoned. Both of these cases will hurt a sender’s reputation, but the abandoned account will hurt more. The ISP figures that if you’re sending mail for months and months to recipients who don’t even log in, that you’re not engaging readers and sending mail recipients want.
What can senders do?

  • Senders with websites requiring a login can disable email to that user. The users account can be  and notify users that they will need to resubscribe to the email list when the user next logs in at the site.
  • Senders that do not have registration can send re-engagement campaigns to recipients who have not clicked or opened a mail. Users that do not interact with the mail are dropped from the list.

Yes, you will lose names off your list. But those are people who aren’t interested enough in your mail to read it or click on anything for months and months. What value is that name bringing to your business? Does that value outweigh the reputation hit that continuing to mail non-responsive addresses brings?

Related Posts

The coming changes

Yesterday I talked about how I’m hearing warnings of a coming paradigm shift in the email industry. While these changes will affect all sender, ESPs in particular are going to need to change how they interact with both ISPs and their customers.
Currently, ESPs are able to act as “routine conveyers.” The traffic going across their network is generated by their customers and the ESP only handles technical issues. Responsible ESPs do enforce standards on their customers and expect mailings to meet certain targets. They monitor complaints and unknown users, they monitor blocks and reputation. If customers get out of line, then the ESP steps in and forces their customer to improve their practices. If the customer refuses, then the ESP disconnects them.
Currently standards for email are mostly dictated by the ISPs. Many ESPs take the stance that if any mail that is not blocked by the ISPs then it is acceptable. But just because a certain customer isn’t blocked doesn’t mean they’re sending mail that is wanted by the recipients.
It seems this reactive approach to customer policing may no longer be enough. In fact, one of the large spam filter providers has recently offered their customers the ability to block mail from all ESPs with a single click. This may become a more common response if the ESPs don’t start proactively policing their networks.
Why is this happening? ISPs and filtering companies are seeing increasing percentages of spam coming out of ESP netspace. Current processes for policing customers are extremely reactive and there are many ESPs that are allowing their customers to send measurable percentages of spam. This situation is untenable for the filtering companies or the ISPs and they’re sending out warnings that the ESPs need to stop letting so much spam leave their networks.
Unsurprisingly, there are many members of the ESP community that don’t like this and think the ISPs are overreacting and being overly mean. They do not think the ISPs or filtering companies should be blocking all an ESPs customers just because some of the customers are sending unwanted mail. Paraphrased, some of the things I’ve heard include:

Read More

Email related predictions for 2010

As my recent series of posts has indicated, I am seeing a lot of future changes in the email industry.

Read More

Sending too much mail

Not having policies restricting the amount of mail any customer or recipient receives may lead to higher spam complaint rates and blocking warns the DMA Email Marketing Council.
HT: Box of Meat

Read More