Email marketing is hard

I’ve watched a couple discussions around the email and anti-spam community recently with a bit of awe. It seems many email marketers are admitting they are powerless to actually implement all the good advice they give to others.
They are admitting they can’t persuade, cajole, influence or pressure their companies to actually follow best practices. Some of the comments public and private comments I’ve heard from various industry leaders:

  • “But my boss tells me we can’t stop what we’re doing, even though we’re getting less than 80% inbox delivery.”
  • “In my heart, I believe that most email marketers have good intentions. They are not out to spam you. They don’t want to send you email that you don’t want, that you’ll delete, or that your (gasp) mark as spam. They want to do the right thing. The challenge is that their [sic] is constant pressure to squeeze more juice out of email marketing. “
  • “My company can’t stop customers from sending to purchased lists, but want a list of really bad vendors so we can ban lists purchased from them. What sellers should we ban?
  • “as an individual who has been doing email marketing for over 10 years now, I can tell you that there are internal pressures, IT resource constraints and just about anything you can imagine that can hinder a email marketer from doing what is right for the subscriber. Understand that as a professional, I strive everyday to become a better email marketer, but I sometimes fail. That in no way makes me stupid…it makes me human.”

I know that people want to squeeze every possible bit of revenue possible out of email. The problem is that, as the above people have admitted, squeezing every possible cent out of email means adopting practices that are disrespectful of the recipient. They are practices that cause most recipients to label mail as spam. That mail is indistinguishable from spam. Delivery is poor and contributes to the general noise in all our mailboxes.
Email marketers need to stand up and stop adopting practices used by spammers. Your recipients don’t care that it might be hard or expensive to not send them mail they didn’t ask for and don’t expect. Your recipients don’t care that you have pressure from your boss to meet quotas this month. Your recipients really only care about themselves and their mailboxes. Respect your recipients ahead of your bottom line.

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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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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.
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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 emergencies

There is no such thing as a delivery emergency. They just do not happen.
Delivery is fluid, delivery is changing, delivery is complex.
But when delivery goes bad it is not an emergency. There is no need to call up an ISP person at home on a Saturday afternoon and ask them to remove the filters. (And, BTW, experience indicates if you do this that you may have future delivery issues at that ISP.)
I’m sure that people will provide me with examples of delivery emergencies. And, in some cases I might even concede that the receivers will be happy to receive email immediately when it was sent. However, email as a protocol was designed for store and forward. It was not designed to transmit messages instantaneously from sender to receiver. Sure, it works that way much of the time these days. On the whole the Internet is fairly reliable and major servers are connected 24/7 (which wasn’t always the case).
Among many people, particularly recipients and ISP employees, there isn’t the expectation that bulk email is instantaneous. This leads to the belief that delivery problems are not an emergency. Everyone faces them, they get dealt with, life goes on. Demanding an escalation to deal with a “delivery emergency” may backfire and slow down how long it takes to get a response from an ISP.

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