Social media to improve email delivery

Mail delivered to the bulk folder is likely to continue landing in the bulk folder without intervention. Sometimes a sender can talk to the ISP involved and get mail moved back to the inbox. Sometimes a sender can make hygiene changes and get mail moved back to the inbox.
The most effective way to get mail delivered to the inbox, however, is for recipients to go into the bulk folder and mark the mail as “not spam.” Nothing is more effective at getting mail delivered to the inbox.
But there is a bit of a catch 22 there. If mail ends up in the bulk folder consistently, recipients tend to forget about it. Many people trawl through their bulk folder sporadically, if at all. If recipients aren’t engaged with mail and don’t know when they should see it, then they won’t miss it and won’t look for it.
So if mail is ending up in the bulk folder and recipients aren’t expecting it what can a sender do? One of the obvious answers is find another channel. Let recipients know through some channel besides email that they need to look in their bulk folder for a particular email.
In the past it was difficult to find non-email ways to connect recipients. I worked with customers who really had no other way to interact with recipients than email. They weren’t running a website, they didn’t have any other contact methods, they were really stuck. But a recent tweet from AppSumo shows how social media can be used to improve email delivery.

AppSumo requesting recipients pull mail out of their bulk folder
Using social media to improve mail delivery
Of course, not every AppSumo recipient follows them on twitter. But every recipient that does pull the mail out of their bulk folder tells Gmail that the mail really is wanted. Most ISPs heavily weight users removing the mail from their bulk folder. ISPs know that users who look for mail in the bulk folder really are engaged and really do want that mail.
Using social media is a great way to contact recipients through another channel to address delivery problems. Even just a few people pulling the mail out of the bulk folder will tell the ISP the mail is wanted. Plus, those people will now find that mail delivered to their inbox by default, no matter what happens with other users.
 

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Email marketing ulcers for the holiday

I’ve mentioned here before that I can usually tell when the big ISPs are making changes to their spam filtering as that ISP dominates my discussions with current and potential clients and many discussions on delivery mailing lists.
The last two weeks the culprit has been Yahoo. They seem to be making a lot of changes to their filtering schemes right at the busiest email marketing time of the year. Senders are increasing their volume trying to extract that last little bit of cash out of holiday shoppers, but they’re seeing unpredictable delivery results. What worked to get mail into the inbox a month ago isn’t working, or isn’t working as well, now.
Some of this could be holiday volume related. Many marketers have drastically increased their mail volume over the last few weeks. But I don’t think the whole issue is simply that there is more email marketing flowing into our mailboxes.
As I’ve been talking with folks, I have started to see a pattern and have some ideas of what may be happening. It seems a lot of the issue revolves around bulk foldering. Getting mail accepted by the MXs seems to be no different than it has been. The change seems to be based on the reputation of the URLs and domains in the email.
Have a domain with a poor reputation? Bulk. Have a URL seen in mail people aren’t interested in? Bulk. Have a URL pointing to a website with problematic content? Bulk.
In the past IPs that were whitelisted or had very good reputations could improve delivery of email with neutral or even borderline poor reputations. It seems that is no longer an effect senders can rely on. It may even be that Yahoo, and other ISPs, are going to start splitting IP reputation from content reputation. IP reputation is critical for getting mail in the door, and without a good IP reputation you’ll see slow delivery. But once the mail has been accepted, there’s a whole other level of filtering, most of it on the content and generally unaffected by the IP reputation.
I don’t think the changes are going to go away any time soon. I think they may be refined, but I do think that reputation on email content (particularly domains and URLs and target IP addresses) is going to play a bigger and bigger role in email delivery.
What, specifically, is going to happen at Yahoo? Only they can tell you and I’m not sure I have enough of a feel for the pattern to speculate about the future. I do think that it’s going to take a few weeks for things to settle down and be consistent enough that we can start to poke the black box and map how it works.

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Yesterday I wrote about how important recipients are to achieving good delivery. The short version of yesterday’s post is that delivery is all about engagement, and how the ISPs were really focusing on engagement and proving custom user experiences.
This is great, for the user. Take the common example where a commercial list has some highly engaged recipients and a bunch of recipients that can take or leave the mail. The ISP delivers the newsletter into the inbox of the highly engaged recipients and leaves it in the bulk folder of less engaged recipients.
With user focused delivery people get the mail they are interested in where they can read it and interact it. People who have demonstrated a lack of interest for a topic or a sender don’t see that mail.
This can get complicated for those of us trying to troubleshoot deliver problems, though. I have a couple mail accounts I use for testing at various ISPs. Even though I do very little to try and personalize the account I am seeing behaviour that leads me to wonder if ISP personalizing the inbox experience is going to make it that much more difficult to troubleshoot delivery issues.
I have to wonder, too, where this leaves delivery monitoring services in the future. If delivery is personalized, how can you know that the delivery monitoring addresses are representative any longer? Is there even a “representative” mailbox any longer?

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If you haven’t mailed an address in 5-10 yrs, would you include it in a re-engagement mail?

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