The key to improving deliverability

According to the UK DMA, marketers report improvements in deliverability after GDPR went into effect.

I mean, thank you UK DMA for doing the research. Of course deliverability is going to improve when you send mail to those people who have expressly opted into your mail.

76% report an increase in open rates in the past 12 months; 75% say click- throughs are higher; 51% say ROI has risen. Opt-out rates have decreased according to 41%, and 55% say spam complaints are also down — further evidence of the GDPR effect. DMA UK Marketer Email Tracker 2019

We often gloss over the most important best practice: send mail to people who ask for it. Many of the data hygiene recommendations are all about making sure that the recipients still want your mail.

Recipients, and ISPs, expect senders to have permission before they start blasting out emails. Most best practices are a way to confirm permission. The others, things like authentication and the like, they’re ways for ISPs to identify your mail streams so they can assign reputation and effectively deliver mail.

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Necessary but not sufficient

TechnicalTwitterConversation
With all the emphasis on getting the technical right, there seem to be people who think their mail will be delivered as long as the technical is right.
Getting the technical right is necessary for good inbox delivery, but it’s not sufficient.
The most important part of getting mail to the inbox is sending mail users want. In fact, if you’re sending mail folks want, interact with and enjoy then you can get away with sloppy technical bits. Look, major players (eBay and Intuit) have invalid SPF records, but we’re all still getting mail from them.
There are also a lot of folks who are doing everything technically perfectly, but their mail is still going to bulk. Why? Because their recipients don’t want their mail.
Permission is still the key to getting mail to the inbox. In fact, permission is more important than getting all the technical bits right. If you have permission you can play a little fast and loose with the technical stuff. If you have the technical stuff right you still need permission.
 
 

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Click-wrap licenses again

Earlier this week ARS Technica reported on a ruling from the Missouri Court of Appeals stating that terms and conditions are enforceable even if the users are not forced to visit the T&C pages. Judge Rahmeyer, one of the panel members, did point out that the term in question, under what state laws the agreement would be enforced, was not an unreasonable request. She “do[es] not want [their] opinion to indicate that consumers assent to any buried term that a website may provide simply by using the website or clicking ‘I agree.'”
What does this have to do with email? Well, it means that reasonable terms in the agreements may still be binding even if the user does not read the full terms of the opt in before submitting an email address. In practical terms, though, there’s very little that has changed. Hiding grants of permission deep in a terms document has long been a sneaky trick practiced by spammers and list sellers. Legitimate companies already make terms clear so that users know what type of and how much mail to expect by signing up to a list. They also know that the legal technicalities of permission are not as important as meeting the recipients expectations.

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The many meanings of opt-in

An email address was entered into our website

An email address was associated with a purchase on our website.

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