Delete or read?

This week I attended a Data Visualization workshop presented by the Advanced Media Center at UC Berkeley. Every year I set at least one professional development goal; this year it’s learning how to better communicate visually.

Part of the class included other resources, which led me to Nathan Yau’s website. One of the articles on the front page of his site is titled “Email Deletion Flow Chart.” Well, of course I had to read the post.

We all get a lot of emails, and there’s a large subset of them that almost instantly end up in the archive or the trash bin. In the past year, this subset seems to have really grown for me. They tend to follow a similar pattern to “submit infographic” probably 90 percent of the time. At this point, the patterns seem so regular that I can archive without ever opening the email. Here’s my deletion process.

Over the last week or so I’ve written a number of blog posts talking about B2B spam and how annoying I find it. Sometimes I think I’m too sensitive about the amount of junk I get. But then I have two days at a class unrelated to email and discover a couple things.

Many people hate spam

The messages that Nathan talks about in his deletion flow chart are the same sorts of messages I complain about. Nominally, they’re targeted and cantina information ‘relevant’ to him. Someone is scraping his website, and mine, for key words and they sending us mail related to those key words.

The problem is these messages aren’t relevant. Just because I mention an airline on my website, doesn’t mean I’m interested in your sponsored travel posts. That mail is spam.

I’m not the only small business person that hates this kind of mail.

Spam is still a problem

My primary spam filters are in my mail client. We don’t run many on the server. I discovered the last two days just how effective the desktop filters are. Over 1000 messages per day in my inbox. Without the laptop filters my mailbox was totally unusable on my phone. There was no way to easily view mail on my phone – there was just too much spam.
I know my situation is special, even unique. Even then, I was actively surprised at the sheer volume of spam in my mailbox. This morning I spent a good 20 minutes manually going through over 700 messages before I could start on any work.

Opt-in mail works

The key to delivery is permission. We all know that. The more people who simply look at a subject line and delete the mail, the worse a sender’s reputation gets. Processes like Nathan’s directly affect his mailbox and they affect other people’s mailboxes. These processes are more likely to happen when we don’t recognize the sender.

We talk about IP reputation, domain reputation, content reputation as if they’re separate from permission. They’re not.

Permission makes it easier to create and maintain a good reputation.

Having problems with delivery? The first step is always evaluating permission.

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Permission trumps good metrics

Most companies and senders will tell you they follow all the best practices. My experience says they follow the easy best practices. They’ll comply with technical best practices, they’ll tick all the boxes for content and formatting, they’ll make a nod to permission. Then they’re surprised that their mail delivery isn’t great.

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There are a few segments in the marketing industry that seem to acquire senders with bad mailing practices. Nutraceuticals, male performance enhancing drugs, short term or payday loans and gambling have a lot of senders that treat permission as optional. The content and the industry themselves have garnered a bad reputation.
This makes these industries extremely difficult for mailers who actually have permission to send that content to their recipients. Working with this kind of sender, sometimes it seems impossible to get mail delivered to the inbox, no matter what the level of permission. Even when it’s double confirmed opt-in with a cherry on top, all the care in the world with permission isn’t enough to get inbox delivery.
This doesn’t have to be the case. Look at the porn industry. Early on in the email marketing arena there was a lot of unsolicited image porn. A Lot. So much that complaints by recipients drove many ISPs to disable image loading by default. The legitimate porn companies, though, decided unsolicited image porn was bad for the industry as a whole. Porn marketers and mailers adopted fairly strong permission and email address verification standards.
It was important for the porn marketers that they be able to prove that the person they were mailing actually requested the email. The porn marketers took permission seriously and very few companies actually send photographic porn spam these days. Even the “Russian girls” spam doesn’t have not safe for work images any longer.
Because of their focus on permission, in some cases revolving around age of consent in various jurisdictions, the porn industry as a whole is not looked at as “a bunch of spammers.” Porn content isn’t treated as harshly as “your[sic] pre-approved for a wire transfer” or “best quality drugs shipped overnight.”
Just having offensive content isn’t going to get you blocked. But having content that is shared by many other companies who don’t care about permission, will cause delivery headache after delivery headache. This is true even when you are the One Clean Sender in the bunch.
 

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