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Don't forget the strategy

We’re two days out from the beginning of the Holiday Shopping Season here in the US. Three days out from one of the biggest retail shopping days of the year in the US. 5 days out from one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.
I’m sure everyone has their mail campaigns planned. Most of the messages are finished, just waiting for a tweak or the exact right image.
The challenge, during this time of year, is to actually think strategically about marketing. The challenge is to pay attention to what subscribers and ISPs are telling you. The challenge is to adapt to conditions on the ground, rather than just executing a strategy planned months ago.
I often joke that my job gets quiet around this time of the year. Most of my clients and customers are busy executing their strategy, not planning it. So much mail is being slung around that no one really has time to do any thinking about it. That is, of course, a gross exaggeration, smart email marketers are always considering strategy even as they’re in the middle of the holiday mailing season.  They still pay attention, they adapt to the conditions, they get the mail through.
Just remember, 2016 is almost over. But we still have a lot of email to send first.

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It depends… no more

The two most hated words in deliverability. Many people ask general questions about deliverability and most experts, including myself, answer, “It depends.”
There are a lot of problems with this answer. The biggest problem is that it’s led to the impression that there are no real answers about deliverability. That because we can’t answer hypothetical questions we are really just making the answers up.
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The reason we use “it depends” is because the minute details matter when it comes to deliverability. Wether or not something will hurt or help deliverability depends on the specific implementation. Who’s doing the sending? What is their authentication setup? What IP are they using? How were the addresses collected? What is their frequency? What MTA is used? Are they linking to outside sites? Are they linking to outside services? Where are images hosted? The relevant questions go on and on and on.
I am going to stop saying it depends when answering generic deliverability questions. Instead I will be using the phrase “details matter.” Details do matter. Details are everything. Details drive deliverability.
Details Matter
The importance of details is why many deliverability people hedge their answers. The details do matter.
I will do my best to stop answering It Depends to deliverability questions. Instead, I’ll be answering with question and pointing out the details matter.
 

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Recipients and the Spam Button

Earlier this week Litmus and Fluent hosted a webinar title “Adapting to Consumers’ New Definition of Spam.” This had a number of fascinating facts about email marketing, many of which should reassure folks.
gearheadLitmus has a blog post up highlighting some of the findings specific to millennials and email. Good news is millennials like getting mail from brands and interact with them regularly. Even better, they will rescue mail out of the spam folder.
The full whitepaper is available from Fluent: 2016 Consumer Perceptions of Email. I’ll be writing more about this over the interesting tidbits here over the next few weeks. But I really suggest people go download it and read it.

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Targeted marketing done badly

There was quite a bit of content I cut out on my rant about parasites in the email ecosystem earlier this week. I had whole section on people who ask to connect on LinkedIn and then immediately send a pitch or scrape your address and add it to their marketing automation software and start spamming. Generally, the only reason I will drop someone off LinkedIn is because they do this.
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Today, one of the deliverability mailing lists has been hopping over spam many folks in the industry received. The discussion started off simple enough, someone said “Is <companyname> spamming the industry?” People immediately chimed in that yeah, it did appear so.
A few people said they’d gotten the message and thought it was personal and were disappointed it wasn’t. Others weren’t sure why they were chosen to receive this message, or why some of their co-workers were chosen. A few of us didn’t get them. I didn’t.
This is a great example of marketing that was reasonably well planned, but a total fail for not knowing their audience. The product in question is an anti-abuse product. The company wants to reach people in the anti-abuse industry. They go off and find people in the anti-abuse industry and send them an email. Mail that seems personalized. It was a perfectly reasonable email. It asked questions and did get some people to engage with it by replying. They even appear to have done A/B testing on subject lines.
All solid marketing decisions. All great things to do.
But, the anti-abuse community is small, particularly the ESP anti-abuse community. We talk on mailing lists, IRC, LinkedIn, Facebook and Slack – and those are just the places I’m connected to. I’m sure there are other meeting places. The fact is, we’re a community and we do interact. If you’re going to try and do something like this, you have to expect that we’re going to realize you’re spamming. And many of us have very low tolerance for this kind of stuff.
A few years ago I worked with some senders who acquired most of their email addresses from technical conferences. They had a lot of delivery problems because a lot of their audience were the people who wrote and maintained filters. Spam the person who writes a spam filter and you may find yourself locked out from all of those filter users. I finally realized I couldn’t help those clients. No amount of technical perfection, personalization, looking like one-to-one mail or magic address cleaning is going to make this audience want your mail.
Marketing starts at understanding your audience. Permission is one of the better ways to understand your audience. Marketing to the anti-abuse crowd is a challenge. I can’t see any place where unsolicited email successfully fits into that plan.

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New shiny

Arrived yesterday! Still working on setting it up, but it’s pretty slick so far.
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Parasites hurt email marketing

As a small business owner I am a ripe target for many companies. They buy my address from some lead generation firm, or they scrape it off LinkedIn, and they send me a message that pretends to be personalized but isn’t really.
“I looked at your website… we have a list of email addresses to sell you.”
“We offer cold calling services… can I set up a call with you?”
“I have scheduled a meeting tomorrow so I can tell you about our product that will solve all your technical issues and is also a floor wax.”
None of these emails are anything more than spam. They’re fake personalized. There’s no permission. On a good day they’ll have an opt out link. On a normal day they might include an actual name.
These are messages coming to an email address I’ve spent years trying to protect from getting onto mailing lists. I don’t do fishbowls, I’m careful about who I give my card to, I never use it to sign up for anything. And, still, that has all been for naught.
I don’t really blame the senders, I mean I do, they’re the ones that bought my address and then invested in business automation software that sends me regular emails trying to get me to give them a phone number. Or a contact for “the right person at your business to talk to about this great offer that will change your business.”
The real blame lies with the people who pretend that B2B spam is somehow not spam. Who have pivoted their businesses from selling consumer lists to business lists because permission doesn’t matter when it comes to businesses. The real blame lies with companies who sell “marketing automation software” that plugs into their Google Apps account and hijacks their reputation to get to the inbox. The real blame lies with list cleansing companies who sell list buyers a cleansing service that only hides the evidence of spamming.
There are so many parasites in the email space. They take time, energy and resources from large and small businesses, offering them services that seem good, but really are worthless.
The biologically interesting thing about parasites, though, is that they do better if they don’t overwhelm the host system. They have to stay small. They have to stay hidden. They have to not cause too much harm, otherwise the host system will fight back.
Email fights back too. Parasites will find it harder and harder to get mail delivered in any volume as the host system adapts to them. Already if I look in my junk folder, my filters are correctly flagging these messages as spam. And my filters see a very small portion of mail. Filtering companies and the business email hosting systems have a much broader view and much better defenses.
These emails annoy me, but I know that they are a short term problem.  As more and more businesses move to hosted services, like Google Apps and Office365 the permission rules are going to apply to business addresses as well as consumer addresses. The parasites selling products and services to small business owners can’t overwhelm email. The defenses will step in first.
 

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Changes to AOL FBL

In a blog post today, AOL announced they are changing the from address on their FBL emails from scomp@aol.net to fbl-no-reply at postmaster.aol.com. This change will take place on January 16th, 2017.
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While this may seem a minor change to announce so far in advance, it’s really not. Because AOL was the first FBL, there are many tool chains that have been kludged together to handle the messages. Many of these tool chains rely on “scomp” in the header to work.
This is as good a time as any to review your current FBL handling code. Are you handling FBL messages correctly? Is there anywhere in your code that does things based on scomp being in the header?
Actually, it’s a good time to take a step back and think about FBLs in general and what you should be doing with the mail. These aren’t just complaints, they are direct feedback from your recipients. Sure, they just have to hit a button, but it’s still feedback.
Do you listen to that feedback or just unsubscribe folks?
Do you pay attention to which campaigns, mailings and offers trigger higher levels of FBLs?
Do changes in FBL rates factor into your marketing strategy at all? Why not?
Do you even know what happens when a FBL email arrives at your sever? Are you sure?
All of these are useful questions to ask at any time. But now that some folks are having to touch the FBL code, maybe it’s a time to develop a strategy for FBL processing. Use that data to inform and improve your marketing.
 
 

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Ask Laura: Will dedicated IP pools hurt delivery

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Got questions?

With my travel / vacation in October, blogging has been light the last few weeks, including a brief hiatus of our Ask Laura series. I’m working hard for the next few editions of Ask Laura and will get those posts out soon.
We’ve been getting questions from readers for a while, but I want to encourage folks to contact us with more. What are your questions about email? Got a problem you’ve been looking for specific answers about, but can’t find any answer that seems to apply? Use our contact address to send it to me.
Upcoming articles include questions about using IP pools and answers to some questions about opt-out processes.
Looking forward to getting back into the swing of Ask Laura, so keep those questions coming.

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What an election!

Last night was a bit of a shocker and it’s been a total distraction for days. I’m having a hard time focusing on email and insight right now, as I’m sure lots of other people are.
All I can do today is share a picture of Grover… who is very happy after he stole my seat on the couch. And so comfortable I don’t have the heart to move him.
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