Speaking to executives about deliverability

Exacttarget published a Deliverability whitepaper today. They interviewed a number of people around the email industry and asked them what they would tell C-level executives about email and email marketing.
It’s well worth a read, particularly given there are at least two ISP representatives speaking out about what they think makes a good email marketing program. You’ll see many of the themes we talk about here represented in the various articles.
Good delivery boils down to a few things, the most important of which is sending mail people have asked for and want.

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Compliance vs. Deliverability

Most people I know handling delivery issues for senders have some version of delivery or deliverability in their job title. But as I talk to them about what they do on a daily basis, their role is as much policy enforcement and compliance as it is delivery. Sure, what they’re telling customers and clients is how to improve delivery, but that is often in the context of making customers comply with relevant terms and conditions.
Some delivery folks also work the abuse desk, handling complaints and FBLs and actually putting blocks on customer sends.
I think the compliance part of the delivery job description that is often overlooked and severely downplayed. No one likes to be the bad guy. None of us like handling the angry customer on the phone who has had their vital email marketing program shut down by their vendor. None of us like the internal political battles to convince management to adopt stricter customer policies. All of these things, however, are vital to delivery.
Despite the lack of emphasis on compliance and enforcement they are a vital and critical part of the deliverabilty equation.

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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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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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