Cheetahmail on appending

Experian CheetahMail believes that opt-out email appending is no longer an acceptable practice, and that marketers should no longer use of this practice to acquire customer email addresses. EmailResponsibly

In my experience, appending causes major delivery problems. Of course, every time the issue comes up some marketer tells us who think it’s a bad idea that they successfully used appending and it worked and all the delivery problems are a figment.
Maybe the supporters will believe Ben and Experian / CheetahMail that appending is not a good thing to do. After all, Ben was a large proponent of the practice many years ago and Experian still sells appending services in some countries.
Sending mail without permission, which is what appending usually is, will cause delivery problems. Stick to real permission, not vague promises.

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Recipients are the secret to good delivery

Many, many people hire me to educate them on delivery and fix their email problems. This is good, it’s what I do. And I’m quite good at helping clients see where their email program isn’t meeting expectations. I can translate tech speak into marketing. I can explain things in a way that shifts a client’s perception of what the underlying issues are. I can help them find their own way into the inbox.
But…
Most of what I do is simply think about email delivery from the point of view of a recipient and help clients better meet their recipient’s expectations. This works. This works really well. If you send mail that your recipients want your mail gets to the inbox.
Here’s the secret: ISPs and most spam filters have a design goal to deliver mail their users want. They only want to block mail their users don’t want.
Filters are not designed to block wanted mail.
Sure there are complicated situations where senders have gotten behind the 8 ball and need some help cleaning up. There are situations where filters screw up and block mail they shouldn’t (and aren’t quite designed to). Spam filters are complicated bits of code and sometimes they do things unexpectedly. All of these things do happen.
But these situations happen a lot less than most senders think. Most of the time when mail is hitting the bulk folder, or is throttled at the MTA the issue is that recipients don’t care about the mail.
Recipients aren’t engaged with a particular sender or particular brand. So ISPs react accordingly and that mail ends up slowly delivered or bulked. This upsets the senders to no end, but the recipients? The recipients often don’t care that some mail shows up in bulk or arrives Wednesday afternoon instead of Tuesday evening.
When recipients are engaged with a particular sender or brand, though? Delivery is fast and reliable. Mail is rarely delayed or bulked. When recipients want mail, they interact with it. They look in the bulk folder. They miss it when it’s not there. They complain to the ISPs when they don’t get it. The ISPs react accordingly and prioritize or “red carpet” that email.
The secret to really good delivery is to get your recipients to handle your ISP relations for you. Send mail they miss when they don’t get it, and you’ll discover most of your delivery problems go away.
 
 

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Delivery versus marketing

I’ve been thinking lately that sometimes that what works for marketing doesn’t always work for delivery.
For instance in many areas of marketing repetition is key. Repeat a slogan and forge an association between the slogan and the product in the mind of the consumer. More repetition is better. Marketers can even go so far as using the same ad to drive consumer action. Television advertising is a prime example of this. Companies don’t create new content for every advertising slot, they create one or a few ads and then replay them over and over. The advertiser doesn’t even really care if the consumer consciously ignores the ads. The unconscious connection is still being made.
In the world of email delivery, though, having many or most recipients ignore advertising is the kiss of death. Too many unengaged users and filters decide that mail shouldn’t go into the inbox. These don’t even have to be ISP level filters, but Bayesian filters built into desktop mail clients.
Sending repetitive ads over email may be an effective marketing strategy, but may not be an effective delivery strategy.
Am I off base here and missing something? Tell me I’m wrong in the comments.

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Looking towards the future

I had the opportunity to go to a seminar and networking event hosted by Return Path yesterday evening. The topic was “Email trends in 2012” and it was presented by Tom Sather.
If any of you get the opportunity to go to a talk presented by any of the Return Path folks I encourage you to do so. They know their stuff and their presentations are full of good information.
One of the trends mentioned is the increase in reliance on domain reputation. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. I wrote a little bit about it recently, but have focused more on the whole realm of content filtering rather than just domain reputation.
Domain reputation is where delivery is going. And I think a lot of senders are going to struggle with delivery as they find that IP reputation is not enough to get into the inbox.
 

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