Delivery consulting: it's all about the credibility

A few months ago I found a great blog post written by an ER doctor about how to convince other doctors to come in and deal with a patient in the middle of the night. There are quite  few similarities between his advice and the advice I would give delivery experts, ISP relations folks and ESP representatives when dealing with ISPs and spam filtering companies.

Credibility is the sole currency you have in this relationship. Hoard it carefully and spend it wisely.

Delivery is not a matter of life and death, so failing to get what I need from an ISP does not result in anyone dying. But over the long term, I am much more likely to get contacts, help and information if I demonstrate that I am an ally and that I can be trusted to work with them to get their users email that they want while stopping email they don’t want.
Here’s my not-so-patented recipe for success in getting information from ISPs.

  1. Never contact without first knowing exactly what it is that you want. Are you looking for information? Are you looking to get a block lifted? Do you need help translating a cryptic bounce message? Whatever it is, be clear about what you want. If you’re opening a ticket, give them all the information they ask for. If they have a text box where you can give more details do so, but be concise and clear.
  2. Never lie or shade the truth. The ISP reps have heard it all before, they know that a significant portion of people with “ISP relations” in their job title will lie, cheat or run their grandmother over on the street if it will get their mail delivered better. This is the reputation (right or wrong) of our industry. You can overcome this, if you always shoot straight. Don’t promise anything your customer (or client) can’t deliver.
  3. Have your data together. Have all the data you will need to deal with before opening a ticket or escalating. This means you need to know the dates the mail was sent, the IP it was sent from, what the bounce message was if it was rejected, how long this has been happening, what URLs are in the message, what the from: line of the message is. Being able to provide all the data that the woman on the other end needs to help you is going to make the process so much easier for everyone.
  4. Be reasonable. You know how over worked and behind you are? How many clients and customers you have screaming at you for a response? The ISP folks are at least that behind, and are generally not making near as much money as you are. Don’t open a ticket, then send an email to the guy you met at that conference and then open an IM conversation with him. Give them a chance to get back to you before escalating
  5. Be pleasant. Social lubrication is a good thing, keep it light. Again, most of us who do this are incredibly busy. “Hi, How are you, do you have a minute” is a great opening line. “Hey, what’s the new law in CA say?” is less so.  If they are open to a bit of chatter then that’s great, if they say they are busy ask your question and get out.
  6. SAY THANK YOU. This is especially true when you’re escalating something and using a personal contact. Thank them for helping you. It’s even nice to send a (very brief) followup once your customer or client has fixed whatever the problem was. “Thanks for your help the other day. Your information helped me to convince client to do X, and now they are getting good inbox delivery.”

Consistency is key to establishing a personal reputation that you are someone who is both pleasant to deal with, trustworthy and not going to waste their time.

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Delivery Monitor Closing Down

Delivery Monitor by Aweber is one of the inbox monitoring services available for senders. Aweber has been in the process of winding down Delivery Monitor for the last few months and they will be turning the service off completely tomorrow.
A lot of folks have asked me about replacements for Delivery Monitor. There are, of course, Return Path and Pivotal Veracity, but many of the smaller mailers I talk to can’t justify the expenditure for either service.
Enter Green Arrow Monitor, a service provided by Green Arrow. This is a new seed list service aimed at marketers that need some delivery monitoring at commercial US ISPs. They’re reaching for the middle of the market. As a bonus, they’re offering special pricing for former Delivery Monitor customers.
While they don’t offer all the bells and whistles of other seedbox services, for the small to mid-size company that wants to know what their delivery is like at the major commercial ISPs this is a worthwhile service to investigate.
Full disclosure – I worked with GreenArrow to look at what parts of the market were being missed by other monitoring services and provide delivery consulting for some of their customers.

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Rescuing reputation

One of the more challenging things I do is work with companies who have poor reputations that they’re trying to repair. These companies have been getting by with poor practices for a while, but finally the daily delivery falls below their pain threshold and they decide they need to fix things.
That’s when they call me in, usually asking me if I can go to the ISPs and tell the ISPs that they’re not spammers, they’re doing everything right and will the ISP please stop unfairly blocking them. Usually I will agree to talk to the ISPs, if fixing the underlying problems doesn’t improve their delivery on its own. But before we can talk to the ISPs, we have to try to fix things and at least have some visible changes in behavior to take to them. Once they have externally visible changes, then we can ask the ISPs for a little slack.
With these clients there isn’t just one thing they’ve done to create their bad reputation. Often nothing they’re doing is really evil, it’s just a combination of sorta-bad practices that makes their overall reputation really bad. The struggle is fixing the reputation requires more than one change and no single change is going to necessarily make an immediate improvement on their reputation.
This is a struggle for the customer, because they have to start thinking about email differently. Things have to be done differently from how they’ve always been done. This is a struggle for me because I can’t guarantee if they do this one thing that it will have improved delivery. I can’t guarantee that any one thing will fix their delivery, because ISPs measure and weight dozens of things as part of their delivery making decisions. But what I can guarantee is that if they make the small improvements I recommend then their overall reputation and delivery will improve.
What small improvement have you made today?

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Delivery problems are not all spam related

Not every delivery failure is due to poor reputation or spam. Sometimes ISPs just have problems on their mailservers and so mail doesn’t get through. It’s often hard for delivery experts (and their bosses and their customers and their clients) to watch email delays or rejections without being able to do anything about it.
Sometimes, though, there is nothing to do. The rejections are because something broke at the ISP and they have to sort through it. Just this week there’s been a lot of twitter traffic about problems at a major cable company. They are rate limiting senders with very good reputations. They have admitted there is a problem, but they don’t have a fix or an ETA. From what I’ve heard it they’re working with their hardware vendor to fix the problem.
Hardware breaks and backhoes eat fiber. Yes, ISPs should (and all of the large ones do) have backups and redundancies. But those backups and redundancies can’t always handle the firehose worth of mail coming to the ISPs. As a result, the ISPs start rejecting some percentage of mail from everyone. Yahoo even has a specific error message to distinguish between “we’re blocking just you” from “we’re shedding load and temp failing everyone.”

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