Never 100% inbox

No matter how great an email program deliverability is, no one can guarantee that 100% of the email sent will reach the recipient’s inbox. Why? Recipients can make decisions about where mail goes in their own inbox. Every mail client has a way for users to control where mail is delivered.

This is good for delivery, when the mail means so much to people that they override spam filters and put mail in their inbox. This is problematic for delivery when the final recipient throws mail away or filters it into spam.

Of course, there’s no way to know what individual recipients are doing with mail in general. Sure, there’s currently panel data but that is only for the subset of users that installs a 3rd party app into their mailbox. There’s no way to know where 100% of email is delivered.

For me, I consider any email program with a >95% inbox delivery rate to be an excellent program. I also don’t think there’s much the sender can do in order to get that last 5% to the inbox. That 5% is just not reachable. Not by improving data, not by double opt-in, not by any of the things we do to improve delivery. Some small percentage of mail is just never going to get in front of the user.

The primary reason for these delivery failure is the end user. End users can, and do, create their own filters. While ISPs do curate the inbox, end users have the ability to filter email. If an enduser sets up a filter for a particular email, the ISP isn’t going to overrule that. ISPs want the end users to have a pleasant inbox experience. Thus, the end user’s wants and needs rule. Nothing is clearer to the ISP whether a particular user wants an email than that user directly setting up a filter.

Related Posts

Collecting email addresses

One of the primary ways to collect email addresses is from website visitors, and it’s actually a pretty good way to collect addresses. One of the more popular, and effective, techniques is through a pop-up window, asking for an address. Users need to provide an address or click a “no thanks” link or close the window. I’ve noticed, though, that many companies drop something passive aggressive in their “no thanks” button. “No, thanks, I don’t want to save money.” “I don’t need workout advice.”

Read More

It's not fair

In the delivery space, stuff comes in cycles. We’re currently in a cycle where people are unhappy with spam filters. There are two reasons they’re unhappy: false positives and false negatives.
False positives are emails that the user doesn’t think is spam but goes into the bulk folder anyway.
Fales negatives are emails that the user does thing is spam but is delivered to the inbox.
I’ve sat on multiple calls over the course of my career, with clients and potential clients, where the question I cannot answer comes up. “Why do I still get spam?”
I have a lot of thoughts about this question and what it means for a discussion, how it should be answered and what the next steps are. But it’s important to understand that I, and most of my deliverability colleagues, hate this question. Yet we get it all the time. ISPs get it, too.
A big part of the answer is because spammers spend inordinate amounts of time and money trying to figure out how to break filters. In fact, back in 2006 the FTC fined a company almost a million dollars for using deceptive techniques to try and get into filters. One of the things this company did would be to have folks manually create emails to test filters. Once they found a piece of text that would get into the inbox, they’d spam until the filters caught up. Then, they’d start testing content again to see what would get past the filters. Repeat.
This wasn’t some fly by night company. They had beautiful offices in San Francisco with conference rooms overlooking Treasure Island. They were profitable. They were spammers. Of course, not long after the FTC fined them, they filed bankruptcy and disappeared.
Other spammers create and cultivate vast networks of IP addresses and domains to be used in snowshoeing operations. Still other spammers create criminal acts to hijack reputation of legitimate senders to make it to the inbox.
Why do you still get spam? That’s a bit like asking why people speed or run red lights. You still get spam because spammers invest a lot of money and time into sending you spam. They’re OK with only a small percentage of emails getting through filters, they’ll just make it up in volume.
Spam still exists because spammers still exist.
 

Read More

Did the algorithm change?

When faced with unexplained deliverability changes one of the first questions many folks ask is “Did the algorithm change.” In many ways this is an meaningless question. Why? Because there are two obvious answers to the question.
A1: Of course it didn’t.
A2: Of course it did.
Both answers are correct, but they’re answering different underlying questions. When we understand how two diametrically opposed answers are both correct, we understand much more about filtering.

Read More