More on Yahoo and Engagement

A friend of the blog contacted me earlier today and pointed out that the news that Dan posted about Yahoo and engagement that I blogged about last week was actually reported by George Bilbrey in a Mediapost article on August 1.

We’d contacted Yahoo about a number of sender issues since seeing inbox placement rates drop by roughly 3% this summer, and poor user response was cited as a cause of bulking. More recently, the company warned that as it improves its ability to analyze behavior to determine what users want delivered to their inboxes, some senders — even responsible mailers — may face deliverability challenges. When Engagement Began to Matter

My apologies to the fine folks at Return Path, especially Christine and Melinda who did all the hard work, for missing their initial report on this.

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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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Yahoo looking harder at engagement

In a post this morning, Dan Deneweth from Responsys says he’s received confirmation from Yahoo that they have increased the value of engagement metrics when making delivery decisions.
The really great thing, for the ISPs, about engagement metrics is that they directly measure how much a particular email is wanted by recipients. There’s no guessing about it, it measures how engaged the recipient is with a mail. Even better is the fact that, unlike proxy metrics, engagement metrics are extremely difficult for the sender to manipulate. As a sender I can artificially lower complaints and bounces without improving the mail I’m sending. But I can’t improve engagement metrics without actually engaging my recipients.
As I wrote back in 2010:

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How to make sure your mail is read

ThinkGeek have a bit of a challenging audience to connect with. Many of their customers are, well, geeks. And many geeks have a reputation for being suspicious of marketing. I’d even go so far as to say that ThinkGeek has a bigger marketing challenge than other popular retailers.
One of the challenges all marketers face, though, is getting people to actually open and read an email carefully. ThinkGeek have addressed this challenge by turning reading email into a competitive game.
In June they sent out an email with a hidden coupon code in it. The first person to redeem the code received $100 off their order. What a creative way to get people to actually look through an email and make a purchase.
This, of course, is not a new marketing technique. I have at least 2 different Sigma t-shirts using the same style of marketing. This was in the dark ages and we didn’t have online forms, but the new catalog came with a postcard of questions to answer and return and the first 100 post cards got t-shirts. It was actually kinda nifty. As head tech, I got catalogs all the time. But answering the questions got me to look through the Sigma catalog and see their new products. Plus! T-shirt!

What new an interesting ways have you seen marketers use to engage recipients?

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