The rules of delivery success

Senders with delivery problems ask about “the rules.” “Just tell us what the rules are!” “If the ISPs would just tell us what to do we’d do it!” There is only one rule anyone needs to pay attention to for good mail delivery: Respect the recipient.
Not good enough for you? Want more specific rules? OK.
The two rules everyone must follow for good mail delivery.

  • Send mail recipients expect and want to receive.
  • Don’t monopolize resources that aren’t yours.

The secret to delivery is very simple: respect your recipients and respect the ISPs.
Everything else is an implementation detail. Those details are often important, but they’re just details. If you follow the two above rules then delivery will work.
Many people, delivery experts and ISP filtering staff, have very negative reactions to a sender who says “just tell me the rules and I’ll follow them.” But, you say, that’s not fair! If they want to know the rules it’s because they want to do things right! Experience suggest this isn’t true.
People who ask for “the rules” usually don’t actually want the rules. What they really want to know are the specific, hard thresholds they should meet. They want to know what the thresholds are for things like complaint rates and open rates and all the other things that ISPs use to measure reputation and engagement so they can tweak their program to coast along that line. They want to do the absolute minimum they have to do in order to pass. They’re not actually interested in sending mail people want, or sharing ISP resources. Instead they want to know how far they can push things without triggering a negative effect.
They expect an A for effort. If they don’t get the A for effort, then they want to argue the minutiae of the thresholds. They’ll argue with the ISPs. They’ll argue with their ESP compliance desk. They waste hours or days explaining why the thresholds are wrong or shouldn’t apply to them.
Don’t be that sender. Don’t spend so much time figuring out that if you have a 0.12% complaint rate you’ll get to the inbox and if you have a 0.125% complaint rate you’ll get bulk foldered.  Focus on sending relevant, engaging email that people want to receive. Your email marketing program will flourish and your boss will thank you for it.

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“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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This morning AOL announced some changes to their Enhanced White List. Given I’ve not talked very much about the AOL EWL in the past, this is as good a time as any to talk about it.
The AOL Enhanced Whitelist is for those senders that have very good practices. Senders on the EWL not only get their mail delivered to the inbox, but also have links and images enabled by default. Placement on the EWL is done solely on the basis of mail performance and only the best senders get on the list.
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