More from Gmail

Campaign Monitor has an interview with Gmail looking at how to get mail to the Gmail inbox. It’s a great article and I think everyone should go read it.
One of the most important things it talks about is how complex filters are.

On Gmail’s end, Sri revealed that there are literally hundreds of signals to decide whether an email should go to the Inbox or the Spam folder. The importance of any given signal is dynamic and determined on complex algorithms, in essence it means that one factor or another isn’t likely to bin an entire campaign and there is no point in obsessing over any one element. “Think of how you can make the user love your mails rather than how to land in the Inbox” was Sri’s basic advice on the subject. Essentially stating if the user likes your mail the spam filter should not stop it from getting to the Inbox.

This really is the crux of delivery. Send email users want to receive. Sri’s statements to Andrew echo many of the things he, and his team, shared with us at M3AAWG in February. I focused more on the technical things but engagement and mail users want to receive was an ongoing theme through the talk.
Gmail is often the toughest inbox to crack because they rely so heavily on engagement metrics. But engagement as a metric for delivery is nothing new. I’ve been writing about how engagement is critical for delivery since at least 2008. I have posts from 2011 talking about how to increase engagement and inbox delivery.
I know that engagement and relevance are bad words in the marketing space. An number of marketers have made very public statements about how relevance is dead and engagement is something bad consultants have made up to keep them in business. The fact of the matter is that engagement is something the ISPs do look at and do measure. Anyone who wants to have a successful email marketing program needs to look at what their users want to receive. Sending mail users want leads to inbox delivery because that’s what makes the ISPs money.

Related Posts

Gmail promotions tab improves for marketers

The official Gmail blog announced today that they’re testing a new way of displaying emails in the Promotions tab. This display method will show users a featured image instead of the normal subject line.
Email marketers that want to take advantage of this should visit the Gmail developers pages for information on how to set a featured image for Gmail.
More innovation from Gmail in the mailbox. This one feels pretty consumer friendly, although I still have memories of XXX spam from years ago showing rather explicit images. Gmail must have a lot of confidence in their filtering to push image display to the inbox.

Read More

Gmail pilots new FBL

Yes, it’s true. Gmail announced last Thursday at M3AAWG that they were piloting a new Feedback loop.
The Gmail FBL is currently for ESPs only. The announcement during MAAWG was that only MAAWG ESP members were eligible. They are requiring a DKIM signature for the FBL, but ESPs using individual customer d= values can get a FBL based on IPs. They are also not providing ANY information that reveals the complainer. Gmail’s intention is only to give ESPs feedback so that ESPs can prevent abuse. They are not giving feedback so complainers can be removed.
The email has a .csv attachment that has 3 columns: date, identifier and complaint rate.
The identifier is an ESP provided customer identifier. One of the ESPs I talked to said they were adding an X-header into their emails.
I’ve heard from beta testers that there is a minimum of 100 complaints before you’ll get any report.
Reports are sent daily if there is sufficient traffic to trigger them.
If you’re a MAAWG member, check the senders list for the signup URL.

Read More

Gmail FBL update

Last week Gmail started contacting ESPs that signed up for their new FBL with more information on how to set up mailings to receive FBL emails.
One of the struggles some ESPs are having is the requirement for DKIM signing. Many of the bigger ESPs have clients that sign with their own domains. Gmail is telling these ESPs to insert a second DKIM signature to join the FBL.
There are a couple reasons this is not as simple or as doable as Gmail seems to think, and the challenges are technical as well as organizational.
The technical challenges are pretty simple. As of now, not all the bulk MTAs support multiple signatures. I’ve heard that multiple signatures are being tested by these MTA vendors, but they’re not in wide use. This makes it challenging for these ESPs to just turn on multiple signatures. For ESPs that are using open source software, there’s often a lot of customization in their signing infrastructure. Even if they have the capability to dual sign, if they’re not currently using that there is testing needed before turning it on.
None of the technical challenges are show stoppers, but they are certainly show delayers.
The organizational challenges are much more difficult to deal with. These are cases where the ESP customer doesn’t want the ESP to sign. The obvious situation is with large banks. They want everything in their infrastructure and headers pointing at the bank, not at their ESP. They don’t want to have that second signature in their email for multiple reasons. I can’t actually see an ESP effectively convincing the various stakeholders, including the marketing, security and legal staff, that allowing the ESP to inset a second signature is good practice. I’m not even sure it is good practice in those cases, except to get stats from Gmail.
Hopefully, Gmail will take feedback from the ESPs and change their FBL parameters to allow ESPs to get information about their customers who sign with their own domain.

Read More