Increasing engagement for delivery?

I’ve talked a lot about engagement here over the years and how increasing engagement can increase inbox delivery.
But does driving engagement always improve delivery?

Take LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn has started to pop-up a link when users log in. This popup suggests that the user endorse a connection for a particular skill. When the user clicks on the popup, an email is sent to the connection. The endorsement encourages the recipient to visit the LinkedIn website and review endorsements. Once the user is on the site, they receive a popup asking for endorsement of a connection. Drives engagement both on the website and with email. Win for everyone, right?
I get lots of these endorsements, but I’ve had a few that have made me wonder what’s really going on. Are these people really endorsing my skills? If they are then why am I getting endorsements from people I’ve not seen in 15 years and why are some of the endorsed skills things I can’t do?
This morning I asked one of my connections if he really did endorse me for my abilities in Cloud Computing. His response was enlightening.

yeah, i just click on those to make them go away. seems like a cloying ploy to get people to interact with the site more, harmless. the endorsements do add up into a little graph-like thing, fwiw.

but it is true that they are blind, and unsubstantiated. i’ve no idea if you know cloud professionally.Neil S.

I also talked to another individual who complained to me that you can only endorse people for things that LinkedIn has decided are skills. This person was trying to endorse a connection for a skill, but LinkedIn would not accept that skill as valid.
This isn’t the only thing that LinkedIn does to get people to click on links and visit their website. In fact, most things that happen on the site and generate an email require or encourage the recipient to log into the site and act. Even digests for their discussion groups don’t contain the entire discussion, just a teaser.
It’s a great ploy by LinkedIn to increase engagement.
But is it real engagement? I don’t know. I get the mails because I can’t figure out how to turn them off. “Unsubscribe” leads me to a login page and a preference center that has more choices than your average co-reg page. It isn’t clear which preferences will turn off the mails I don’t want to get any more. Some of the mail I get from LinkedIn I appreciate, so I don’t just want to turn off everything.
Interestingly enough, as I’ve been writing this post, I’ve seen a number of people complaining that LinkedIn is purging their subscriptions to group digests. Apparently, failing to visit a group in some period of time triggers LinkedIn to send you a mail that says LinkedIn has noticed the recipient has not visited a certain group, so they will be unsubscribing the recipient from future digests. I don’t have examples, because at some point in the past I’ve managed to unsubscribe myself from group mails.
I have to wonder if LinkedIn isn’t doing all this in an attempt to address some delivery issue. They’re opting users in to mail to drive clicks to the site. While at the same time, they are removing folks who don’t click on other emails.
Based on discussions on various mailing lists, it seems that both behaviours are upsetting some subset of their users. Some are upset that LinkedIn is opting them in to mail they didn’t ask for. Others are angry that LinkedIn is opting them out of mail that they want. LinkedIn are trying to increase engagement, but seem to be annoying people in many different demographics and in many different ways.
The irony is that if these actions are designed to increase engagement and solve delivery problems, it’s probably not going to work. While I don’t know for sure, I expect that many people use work or business related addresses when signing up there. Most of the filtering at business domains isn’t engagement driven. Engagement is really a metric only used by the large ISPs that control the interface.
This strategy is not going to improve delivery. Even worse the different tactics are actually annoying and angering users: those who get mail they don’t want, those who have to deal with pop-ups and those who aren’t getting mail they do want. From the outside it doesn’t seem like a way to win friends and influence people. And it is certainly not a way to get mail into the inbox.

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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 changes

Thanks to tips by a couple blog readers and some clients, I have been looking into Yahoo disabling links in the bulk folder. It does appear Yahoo is no longer allowing users to click on links in emails that Yahoo places in the bulk folder.
In fact, some of the spam in my Yahoo mailbox even has a notice about this.

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Spamhaus rising?

Ken has a good article talking about how many ESPs have tightened their standards recently and are really hounding their customers to stop sending mail recipients don’t want and don’t like. Ken credits much of this change to Spamhaus and their new tools.

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