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Email deliverability

“Maybe things aren’t broken-broken,” [Laura] said. “Maybe you could be doing a little better. We can sit down and talk with you about where you want to be. And then we can work with you to identify how you can get from where you are to where you want to be without hurting your deliverability.
“Email is a really special place because the consumer has so much more power than the marketer in terms of ‘yes/no’ decisions,” she said. “All of the other channels, the advertisers own and pay for. Being able to understand that you’re a guest [in the inbox] and you have to be a good guest in order to be invited back is where we come in and help you work through: ‘What does being a good guest mean?’” The Magill Report
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Occasionally when we meet longtime readers of the blog at conferences and industry events, they are surprised to learn that we are not just bloggers. We actually spend most of our time consulting with companies and service providers to optimize their email delivery. Though we try to avoid using the blog as a WttW sales pitch, we thought it might be useful to devote a short post to explaining a bit more about what we do.

Gmail Postmaster Tools for Senders

logo_2x Google announced new postmaster tools for senders sending to Gmail. The Gmail Postmaster Tools are to help “qualified high-volume senders analyze their email, including data on delivery errors, spam reports, and reputation.” The updated postmaster pages also include Gmail’s best practices for bulk senders.
Postmaster Tools by Gmail http://gmail.com/postmaster
Update: ReturnPath has a blog post that includes data and definitions for each of the data points.

Set expectations for new subscribers

A common way to build your email address list is to provide a free resource such as an eBook or PDF in return for contact information from the reader. While this is a good way to be mutually beneficial to the reader and the company, often the reader is providing their information only for the free resource and does not want to receive the emails. This leads to sending to an unengaged recipient or worst, sending to a bad email address.
Another way to build your email address list is to pre-check the “subscribe to the mailing list” when a user creates an account on your site. The same problem with the free resource offer, the user may not want the emails.
You can combat both of these types of unengaged users by providing them with an example of what they will be receiving from you via email. Displaying the most recent mailing or providing them with how often you send out monthly will not only help you collect accurate information but also helps set the expectations of what the recipient will be receiving. Examples of sending expectations would be to inform the recipient that you only send once a month but then allow them to select an onboarding program that may send daily for 10 days.
Email.Simple-6 Providing the end user with information about your mailings encourages them to provide accurate information and helps build your mailing list with recipients who want to engage with your emails. If you offer a free resource such as a whitepaper or ebook behind a signup form, send the download link within the email so that it encourages readers to provide accurate information. By sending the email with a link the recipient clicks, it shows ISPs that this mail is wanted and helps boost your sending reputation.

New AOL Postmaster Pages

AOL has updated their Postmaster pages with a new design and new resources for senders who are sending to AOL. If you are sending to AOL, use the updated site to sign up for the feedback loop, request whitelisting, open a trouble ticket, or learn about the AOL error codes and bulk sending best practices.
AOL Postmaster Pages

June 2015: the Month in Email

Happy July! We are back from another wonderful M3AAWG conference and enjoyed seeing many of you in Dublin. It’s always so great for us to connect with our friends, colleagues, and readers in person. I took a few notes on Michel van Eeten’s keynote on botnets, and congratulated our friend Rodney Joffe on winning the prestigious Mary Litynski Award.
In anti-spam news, June brought announcements of three ISP-initiated CAN-SPAM cases, as well as a significant fine leveled by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) against Porter Airlines. In other legal news, a UK case against Spamhaus has been settled, which continues the precedent we’ve observed that documenting a company’s practice of sending unsolicited email does not constitute libel.
In industry news, AOL started using Sender Score Certification, and Yahoo announced (and then implemented) a change to how they handle their Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL). Anyone have anything to report on how that’s working? We also noted that Google has discontinued the Google Apps for ISPs program, so we expect we might see some migration challenges along the way. I wrote a bit about some trends I’m seeing in how email programs are starting to use filtering technologies for email organization as well as fighting spam.
Steve, Josh and I all contributed some “best practices” posts this month on both technical issues and program management issues. Steve reminded us that what might seem like a universal celebration might not be a happy time for everyone, and marketers should consider more thoughtful strategies to respect that. I wrote a bit about privacy protection (and pointed to Al Iverson’s post on the topic), and Josh wrote about when senders should include a physical address, what PTR (or Reverse DNS) records are and how to use them, testing your opt-out process (do it regularly!), and advice on how to use images when many recipients view email with images blocked.

Where can I mail a purchased list?

We’ve had a lot of comments over the last few weeks regarding our post on ESPs that don’t allow purchased lists. Most of them were companies adding their addresses to the list. But one comment needs a little more discussion, I think.

Unexpected break

Sorry for the unexpected break in blogging. Been dealing with some emergencies. Happy 4th to my fellow citizens. Happy late Canada day to all our northern friends. We’ll resume blogging next week.

Another CASL fine

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced today that Porter Airlines had agreed to pay a fine of $150,000 for violations of the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL).
After investigating the airline, CRTC found multiple violations of the statute. These violations include no unsubscribe link or the unsubscribe link was not prominent enough.
Some of the messages at issue failed to have proper identification. Finally, Porter Airlines couldn’t prove consent for at least some subset of the subscribers.
This is another in a series of enforcement actions where CRTC fined companies for violations of CASL. But none of those enforcement actions really seem overly punitive. There were multiple people publicly concerned about CRTC aggressively fining companies and even driving them out of business. These concerns now appear to be unfounded. Certainly, CRTC is enforcing the law but in a way to help companies come into compliance with it.
Another major concern some individuals had was the private right of action under CASL. I recently attended a conference where one of the talks was related to CASL and enforcement. What was said there is that there are some constraints on bringing a case. For instance cases can’t be brought in lower courts, they have to be brought in the provincial (I think) courts. This puts an additional burden on plaintiffs. Reading between the lines, my impression was this was intended by the regulatory agency and lawmakers to stop nuisance type suits, but allow for real action when needed.
Finally, I have yet to hear about any enforcement action that resulted in fines for corporate officers rather than the corporation as an entity.
All in all, the chicken littles claiming that this law was going to drive email marketers out of business seem to have been wrong. In fact, when I asked a question during the session “have you heard of any companies stopping marketing in Canada due to CASL” the first response was a scoff. This was not the purpose or intent of the law, and it doesn’t appear to be enforced that way.

When to include a physical address

One of the requirements to be CAN-SPAM compliant is to include a physical address within every promotional email that is sent. If your company hires a third party to send email on your behalf, your physical address should be clearly visible within the message when the message is selling your products and services. There is a stipulation that if your message is transactional or a relationship message, then it does not need to adhere to the CAN-SPAM requirements by including your physical address or unsubscribe link.
Examples of transactional mail would be welcome emails, password resets, auto-responders, shipment notifications, or account alerts. While you and I may know that these emails aren’t required to include this information most users would not know.
street-signs The CAN-SPAM Act has been in effect going on 12 years and recipients look for unsubscribe links and physical addresses within the messages. Emails that are missing this bit of information leads the recipient to believing the message is spam. While including the physical address and unsubscribe link are not required for your transactional emails, it’s better to be safe than sorry and include them anyways.
The recipient may have recently received a series of marketing emails from you and when they receive a transactional mail message, they may want to adjust the frequency of the mail they are receiving. By not including an unsubscribe link and physical address, the user may resort to marking the message as spam.
When sending marketing and transactional emails, you want to adhere to the law and then take the user behavior and expectations into consideration. There is no harm in including your physical address in both your marketing emails and transactional emails.