Where to get deliverability help

laura
Industry
February 7, 2018

There are lots of places to get deliverability help, I thought I’d list some of them here so I have a post to point people to.

Of course, we provide deliverability consulting services and have done since 2001. Our customers are mostly large companies sending millions of emails a month. I focus mostly on complex problems that other deliverability folks haven’t solved. Overall I focus on understanding client programs and business needs as well as current deliverability situation. Once I have a picture of a client’s program, I craft solutions that work with their business processes and get mail to the inbox. We don’t sell tools or certification. Instead, we work with our clients to help them fix delivery and teach them how to analyze the data they already have.
The nature of the work I do is intensive and I limit the number of clients I have in order to provide personalized service. But that’s OK! We have 2000+ blog posts to answer questions. And, there are lots of other companies that provide deliverability help. Here’s a partial list of places to look for resources.

Your Service Provider

Many (most?) ESPs and MTAs provide deliverability help for customers. In some cases, this is primarily self serve through their website support pages, blog posts, and knowledge bases. Other ESPs have dedicated deliverability support staff to answer questions and help customers answer questions. MTA vendors and SaaS SMTP providers also provide deliverability support.

ISPs and Filtering Companies

Many ISPs and commercial filtering companies also provide deliverability advice in their blogs. Sometimes the information on these sites is not presented in as sender friendly a way as the third parties and the ESPs. I know some of my clients have visited these websites and bristled at the tone. Nevertheless, the information is good and it’s written by the people who block mail. It’s worth looking past the tone and seeing the content.

Email Associations

Most email adjacent organizations provide deliverability resources. The EEC, M3AAWG, and the ESPC are organizations we belong to that provide free deliverability resources, many of them developed through member collaboration. Other organizations, too, have deliverability sections, I’m sure.

Governments

Many governments provide information about local laws. Not necessarily deliverability advice, but vital for successful businesses.

Third Party Tools

Gone are the days when Return Path was really the only game in town for monitoring inbox delivery. There are multiple players in the market including 250OK, GreenArrow, Postmastery and eDataSource. But not everything in email is about monitoring inbox delivery. Many other companies have email focused products and provide information on delivery and email issues including (in no particular order) places like InboxPros, Litmus, Sendforensics, dmarcian, ValiMail, Agari.
I know I’ve missed some resources, this wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive list. Just some information about where to look for deliverability help besides yours truly.

Doing email right

Over on the MarketingLand website, Len Shneyder talks about 3 companies (Uber, REI and eBay) that do email right. In there he shows how the companies use email to further their business goals while understanding and meeting the needs of their customers.
Meeting the needs of recipients is the way to get your mail to the inbox. Send email that your users want, and they will tell the ISPs when they don’t get your mail. It’s sometimes hard to convince senders of this. Instead they want to tweak URLs or authentication or IPs or domains. But none of those things are what deliverability is all about. Deliverability is about the recipient. Deliverability is about the relationship between the sender and recipient.
Send to the right people – and the right people are those who have asked for and want your mail – and deliverability problems don’t materialize. Sure, every once in a while something might happen that throws mail into the bulk folder for one reason or another. But fighting to get to the inbox isn’t an every day thing. Instead, senders can focus on knowing their users and sending mail that makes them happy when it shows up in the inbox.

5 steps for addressing deliverability issues

Following on from my reading between the lines post I want to talk a little bit about using the channels. From my perspective the right way to deal with 99% of issues is through the front door.
Last week I found myself talking to multiple folks in multiple fora (emailgeeks slack channel, mailop, IRC) about how to resolve blocking issues or questions. All too often, folks come into these spaces and start by asking “does anyone know someone at…” Fundamentally, that’s the wrong first question. Even if the answer is yes. It’s even the wrong question if a representative of the company is on the list where you’re asking for help.
If that’s the wrong question, what is the right question? Where can we start to get help with issues when we’re stuck trying to fix a delivery problem we don’t understand?

State of Email Deliverability

I had other posts in the pipeline, but saw a link to the Litmus 2017 State of Email Deliverability Report and decided that deserved a mention here.
There’s all sorts of interesting data there, and well worth a download and read. I was, of course, interested in the “most problematic subscriber acquisition sources.” Senders having blocking issues or blacklist problems in the past 12 months use list rental, co-reg and purchased lists more often than senders that didn’t have problems.

Senders acquiring addresses through list rental are 104% more likely to be blacklisted than senders not using list rental. And they’re 47% more likely to be blocked.
These stats are the primary reason that most ESPs don’t allow list rentals, purchased or co-reg lists. They cause blocking and blacklisting. The ESP ends up having to deal with lots of problems and clean up the mess.
I’m unsurprised that lead generation by giving something away (a report, ebook, whatever) is related to problems. Most of these forms do little to no data checking and accept any and all fake data. There are fairly simple ways to enforce better data, but that does limit the spread of the information.
I am surprised to see signup through direct mail and catalog sales is so bad. Unless maybe people don’t know how to say no when asked for an email address over the phone. I know it seems awkward to say no when asked for an email address. Maybe some folks are giving fake addresses. I sometimes say I don’t have email, or just tell them no, they don’t need one.
The white paper itself is well worth a read. Go download it yourself (but don’t give them a fake email address!).