Delivery is about helping you succeed

I was talking with another delivery person today who’s dealing with a customer struggling with some issues. As most of these discussions go, we get to the part where we have to tell the customer that what they’re doing looks problematic from the outside. And then the customer gets all upset and angry and starts complaining to account reps or managers or executives.
The challenge of delivery is working with clients who don’t want to hear they have to change what they’re doing. Some senders deflect better than a 3 year old caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
I think all of us in the delivery space, or at least most of us, want our customers and clients to succeed in their email goals. We want you to have a great mailing program. But when your delivery is having problems, getting to a great mailing program means doing something differently.
These changes can be hard, both in terms of thinking differently about email and how it works and about business models. Some business models make it extremely difficult to use emails. We understand that. We don’t make the rules, we just explain them.
We want your mail to work.

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Inbox rates and conversion rates

Jeanne Jennings published an interesting bit of research on open rates and inbox rates at ClickZ recently. Essentially she looked at two different industry studies and compared their results.
The first study was the Return Path Global Delivery Survey and the second was the Epsilon North American Trend Results. What Jeanne found is that while Return Path shows a decrease in inbox placement, Epsilon is seeing an increase in average open rate.

There are any number of reasons this could be happening, including simply different ways the numbers are calculated. I am not sure it’s just a numbers issue, though. Many of Epsilon’s clients are very big companies with a very experienced marketing team. The Return Path data is across their whole user base, which is a much broader range of marketers at different levels of sophistication.
I expect that the Epsilon data is a subset of the Return Path data, and a subset at the high end at that. It does hint, though, that when the inbox is less cluttered, recipients are more likely to open the commercial mail that does get in there.

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Spam illustrated

Portraits of Spammers
It’s been a long week, so enjoy some art (and spam). Next week we’ll get back to discussing the many faults of Gmail. And senders. And receivers. And, well, everyone has faults. And email is Dead. Tabs killed it.

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Spamhaus answers marketer questions

A few months ago, Ken Magill asked marketers, including the folks at Only Influencers to provide him with questions to pass along to Spamhaus. Spamhaus answered the first set in March, but then were hit with the Stophaus attack and put answering further questions on hold. Last week, they provided a second set of answers and this week they provided a third.
Nothing in there is surprising, but it’s worth folks heading over and reading.
There are a couple useful things that I think are worth highlighting.
When discussing spamtraps and how Spamhaus handles the traps.

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