Interview with Stripo - extended thoughts

While I was in Vienna at the IETF meeting last week, Stripo published an interview I did with them earlier this summer.

Recipient first has been the core of my deliverability work since I first started doing this whole email thing 25 years ago. I work from the first principle that the mailbox belongs to the person who reads the mail. Their wants and needs come before anything else.

As I’ve grown I’ve found some places where yeah, OK, we need to be a little more nuanced about how we approach email and permission. Even in those cases, a critical consideration is: is this email likely to be important for the recipient? Focus on getting the technical pieces right and meeting the needs of your recipients and deliverability stops being a challenge.

All my experience tells me that deliverability strategy is also good marketing strategy. Companies that focus on the recipient experience have fewer deliverability problems and simpler recoveries when problems occur.

My interview with Stripo
Turscar Isle

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The perfect email

More and more I’m moving away from consulting on technical setup issues as the solution to delivery problems. Delivery is not about the technical perfection of a message. Spammers get the technical right all the time. No, instead, delivery is about sending messages the user wants. While looking for something on the blog I found an old post from 2011 that’s still relevant today. In fact, I’d say it’s even more relevant today than it was when I wrote it 5 years ago.
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Email is a fluid and ever changing landscape of things to do and not do.
Over the years my clients have frequently asked me to look at their technical setup and make sure that how they send mail complies with best practices. Previously, this was a good way to improve delivery. Spamware was pretty sloppy and blocking for somewhat minor technical problems was a great way to block a lot of spam.
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In short, email filters are very sophisticated and really do measure “wanted” versus “unwanted” down to the individual subscriber levels.
I will happily do technology audits for clients. But getting the technology right isn’t sufficient to get good delivery. What you really need to consider is: am I sending email that the recipient wants? You can absolutely get away with sloppy technology and have great inbox delivery as long as you are actually sending mail your recipients want to receive.
The perfect email is no longer measured in how perfectly correct the technology is. The perfect email is now measured by how perfect it is for the recipient.

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What better time to advertise pizza specials than at 2:30 pm on a Friday afternoon?
Either my local pizza joint is doing sophisticated tracking (hrmmm… these people often order pizza on the weekend, email on Friday) or I’m just smack dab in the middle of their average demographic.
In either case, advertising pizza on a Friday afternoon strikes me as the epitome of timely, relevant marketing.
Pizza for dinner, anyone?

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