10 things every mailer must do

A bit of a refresh of a post from 2011: Six best practices for every mailer. I still think best practices are primarily technical and that how senders present themselves to recipients is more about messaging and branding than best practices. These 6 best practices from 2011 are no longer best, these days, they’re the absolute minimum practices for senders.

If you can’t manage to do these, then find someone who can.

  1. Authenticate email with both SPF and DKIM. These are both mature technologies now and it’s long past time that every email is authenticated with both protocols. Bonus points if the authentication domains align with the visible from (5322.from) for DMARC authentication. Negative points if you use cousin domains.
  2. Send technically correct email. Most ESPs manage to do this well these days and a lot of the pressure is off marketers to create templates that are correct. For those who want to create their own templates, Litmus is my go to reference for displaying email.
  3. Stop hammering on bad addresses. This means correctly handling addresses that bounce and implementing some sort of data hygiene that’s appropriate for your lists and market segments. This does not mean hiring some hygiene company to wash your list. You have better data than the hygiene companies if you’re mailing regularly.
  4. Use VERP. VERP means each email is tagged with the subscriber, list, and even mailing. Having that data encoded in the headers allows troubleshooting, bounce processing and FBL processing much, much easier. Again, most ESPs manage this for you.
  5. Send only opt-in mail. I know a lot of people argue permission is passé but I don’t believe that is true. ISPs, receivers and filtering companies don’t like it when you send mail without permission. Yes, even if you’re sending B2B mail. Stop buying lists scraped from LinkedIn and spamming them through your google apps account. People don’t like spam, even when they’re at work. Plus, your “cutesy” “friendly” automated mail looks like every other one out there.
  6. Respect the unsubscribe. If someone unsubscribes then stop mailing them. Do it as fast as possible and make it permanent. The number of senders who reactivate subscriptions months or years after an unsubscribe are legion. It’s not just annoying, it’s illegal in most jurisdictions.
  7. Be up front with recipients how you’re going to use their email address. Don’t hide the opt-in language in your privacy policy.
  8. Have adequate security for recipient information. Really, it’s 2017, time to treat user data as valuable and protect it. Don’t be Equifax.
  9. Monitor your sends. Between opens, clicks, FBLs, straight complaints, Spamcop summary reports, and inbox monitoring services there is no excuse for not having data on your sends. Use this data to drive improvements to your program.
  10. Send a welcome message. Introduce yourself, introduce your program, get your message in front of your new subscriber as soon as possible after they subscribed. They signup because they’re interested in what you have to offer, get into their inbox ASAP to engage them before they move on.

It’s 2017, time to step up.
 

A DMARC warning
Sometimes less is more

Related Posts

How do unengaged recipients hurt delivery?

In the comments Ulrik asks: “How can unengaged recipients hurt delivery if they aren’t complaining? What feedback mechanism is there to hurt the the delivery rate besides that?”
There are a number of things that ISPs are monitoring besides complaint rates, although they are being cautious about revealing what and how they are measuring things. I expect that ISPs are measuring things like:

Read More

Bounces, complaints and metrics

In the email delivery space there are a lot of numbers we talk about including bounce rates, complaint rates, acceptance rates and inbox delivery rates. These are all good numbers to tell us about a particular campaign or mailing list. Usually these metrics all track together. Low bounce rates and low complaint rates correlate with high delivery rates and high inbox placement.

Read More

Spamtraps are not the problem

Often clients come to me looking for help “removing spamtraps from their list.” They approach me because they’ve found my blog posts, or because they’ve been recommended by their ISP or ESP or because they found my name on Spamhaus’ website. Generally, their first question is: can you tell us the spamtrap addresses on our lists so we can remove them?
My answer is always the same. I cannot provide a list of spamtrap addresses or tell you what addresses to remove. Instead what I do is help clients work through their email address lists to identify addresses that do not and will not respond to offers. I also will help them identify how those bad addresses were added to the list in the first place.
Spamtraps on a list are not the problem, they’re simply a symptom of the underlying data hygiene problems. Spamtraps are a sign that somehow addresses are getting onto a list without the permission of the address owner. Removing the spamtrap addresses without addressing the underlying flaws in data handling may mean resolving immediate delivery issues, but won’t prevent future problems.
Improving data hygiene, particularly for senders who are having blocking problems due to spam traps, fixes a lot of the delivery issues. Sure, cleaning out the traps removes the immediate blocking issue, but it does nothing to address any other addresses on the list that were added without permission. In fact, many of my clients have discovered an overall improvement in delivery after addressing the underlying issues resulting in spamtraps on their lists.
Focusing on removing spamtraps, rather than looking at improving the overall integrity of data, misses the signal that spamtraps are sending.

Read More