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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The secret to fixing delivery problems

There is a persistent belief among some senders that the technical part of sending email is the most important part of delivery. They think that by tweaking things around the edges, like changing their rate limiting and refining bounce handling, their email will magically end up in the inbox.
This is a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for bulk foldering and blocking by the ISPs. Yes, technical behaviour does count and senders will find it harder to deliver mail if they are doing something grossly wrong. In my experience, though, most technical issues are not sufficient to cause major delivery problems.
On the other hand, senders can do everything technically perfect, from rate limiting to bounce handling to handling feedback loops through authentication and offer wording and still have delivery problems. Why? Sending unwanted mail trumps technical perfection. If no one wants the email mail then there will be delivery problems.
Now, I’ve certainly dealt with clients who had some minor engagement issues and the bulk of their delivery problems were technical in nature. Fix the technical problems and make some adjustments to the email and mail gets to the inbox. But with senders who are sending unwanted email the only way to fix delivery problems is to figure out what recipients want and then send mail meeting those needs.
Persistent delivery problems cannot be fixed by tweaking technical settings.

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