11 Innovators in the Email Game

Today AWeber published a link to 11 innovators in email marketing. I’m honored to be one of them.
I don’t really think of myself as a marketer, I’m a delivery person. My job, really, is to help clients devise email strategies (and overall digital marketing strategies) that result in inbox delivery. When I started, there were some significant divides between email marketing and deliverability. Often what was good marketing strategy was bad deliverability strategy. That’s not as true as it once was and now good deliverability advice is good marketing advice.
Thanks, AWeber!

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Marketers missing out

Many delivery blogs have posted about the recent ReturnPath study showing that marketers are missing prime opportunities to use email to develop a strong relationship with recipients. I finally manged to get a few moments to read through the study and comment on it. Over a few days in February ReturnPath researchers signed up at more than 60 major retailer brands. They then monitored the subscriptions to see how often and what kind of mail the retailers sent.
Overall, it seems the researchers were disappointed in how the retailers were using mail. Even the title of the whitepaper captures this feeling: “Creating Great Subscriber Experiences: Are Marketers Relationship Worthy?” The answer seems to be more no than yes.
From my perspective the data is not all that surprising. In many cases it seems bigger companies rely on the recognition of their brand to get them through minor delivery problems (like complaints) rather than good practices. Whereas a smaller company will have to work harder to develop a relationship, larger companies with wide brand recognition can fall back on their brand.
There were a few areas ReturnPath measured.

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Blackboxes and unknown effects

In my previous career I studied the effect of alcohol on developing embryos. It’s a bit weird I ended up in that field because embryological development always seemed to complex to me. And it was and is complicated. In a lot of ways, though, it was good training for deliverability. We dealt with a lot of processes that seem, on the surface, straightforward.
Fertilization happens, then you get a flat group of cells, those cells fold up into the neural tube, cells migrate around, things happen, limbs form, organs form and 21 days later you have a fluffy little chick.
The details in all those steps, though. They’re a bit more complicated, looking something like this:
There are lots of different things going on inside the embryo to take it from a single cell up to a complex multicellular being. Genes turn on, genes turn off at different times in development, often driven by overlapping concentration gradients. Genes turn each other and themselves on and off. It’s complex, though, and there are things that happen that we don’t quite understand and have to black box. “If I add this protein, or take this gene and that gene away… what happens?”
A lot of that is like what email reputation is these days. There isn’t one factor in reputation, there are hundreds or thousands. They interact with each other, sometimes turning up reputation, sometimes turning down reputation. We figure this out by poking at the black box and seeing what happens. Unlike development, though, delivery rules are not fixed. They are changing along the way.
It’s not simple to explain delivery and how all the moving parts interact with each other. We don’t always know that doing A will lead to X. Because A -> X is not a straight line and there are other things that impact that line. Those other things also impact A, X and each other.
Delivery is a tangled web. On the surface it seems simple, but when you start peeling back the layers you discover the jumble of factors that all interact with each other. It’s what makes this a challenging field for all of us.

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Are seed lists still relevant?

Those of you who have seen some of my talks have seen this model of email delivery before. The concept is that there are a host of factors that contribute to the reputation of a particular email, but that at many ISPs the email reputation is only one factor in email delivery. Recipient preferences drive whether an email ends up in the bulk folder or the inbox.

The individual recipient preferences can be explicit or implicit. Users who add a sender to their address book, or block a sender, or create a specific filter for an email are stating an explicit preference. Additionally, ISPs monitor some user behavior to determine how wanted an email is. A recipient who moves an email from the bulk folder to the inbox is stating a preference. A person who hits “this-is-spam” is stating a preference. Other actions are also measured to give a user specific reputation for a mail.
Seed accounts aren’t like normal accounts. They don’t send mail ever. They only download it. They don’t ever dig anything out of the junk folder, they never hit this is spam. They are different than a user account – and ISPs can track this.
This tells us we have to take inbox monitoring tools with a grain of salt. I believe, though, they’re still valuable tools in the deliverability arsenal. The best use of these tools is monitoring for changes. If seed lists show less than 100% inbox, but response rates are good, then it’s unlikely the seed boxes are correctly reporting delivery to actual recipients. But if seed lists show 100% inbox and then change and go down, then that’s the time to start looking harder at the overall program.
The other time seed lists are useful is when troubleshooting delivery. It’s nice to be able to see if changes are making a difference in delivery. Again, the results aren’t 100% accurate but they are the best we have right now.
 

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