And from the completely-screwed-up-priorities file comes one particularly glaring statistic in JupiterResearch analyst David Daniels’ e-mail buyer’s guide released yesterday: 70% of e-mail marketing executives said deliverability features and services are their No. 1 consideration when selecting an e-mail service provider.
What a sad—but not necessarily surprising—statement on e-mail marketing. At the risk of offending 70% of this newsletter’s readership, priorities simply don’t get more messed up than this.
To be sure, there are a bunch of technical issues ESPs must handle—removing bounces, monitoring feedback loops, getting their clients’ mail whitelisted at the various ISPs, and throttling e-mail volume to meet the demands of various inbox providers—but the things that most often cause mailers to have delivery problems are all completely within the list owner’s control.
It all comes down to four words: List hygiene and relevance.
As Daniels correctly pointed out in his report, “JupiterResearch consistently finds the deliverability woes of marketers can be traced back to their own poor list-hygiene practices.”
Let’s put it a little more bluntly: If enough recipients think a marketer’s e-mail program is garbage, no e-mail service provider in the world will be able to prevent spam complaints, and the resulting delivery troubles. Likewise, if a marketer refuses to clean dead addresses off their list because one of those addresses just might, maybe, someday make a purchase, there isn’t a single ESP out there who will be able to stop Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft from diverting the marketer’s messages into recipients’ spam folders or blocking them altogether.
Yet, this industry is rampant with tales of marketers taking their business from one ESP to another and re-polluting their e-mail list with all the addresses the former ESP told them were bad.
What does that accomplish? Why, it gets their e-mail blocked from reaching recipients, that’s what. It also damages the marketer’s e-mail reputation and that of their new provider who must go red-faced to the anti-spam desks of the various inbox providers and explain that the reason they suddenly spammed the crap out of the ISP’s mailboxes was because a new client thought they could pull a fast one.
A marketer can’t ride an ESP’s e-mail reputation, folks.
If readers take one thing away from this newsletter in its entire, miserable, little, as-yet-to-be-determined existence, please let it be that the major elements of e-mail deliverability are entirely within their control and no vendor can wave a magic wand and make the results of a dirty e-mail list go away.
That we still have marketers—the majority of them, apparently—who believe that the ESP they choose will have a significant effect on their deliverability means some ESP reps are selling marketers on lies, or the marketers are deluding themselves.
Meanwhile, almost as disturbing—albeit more understandable—was the fact that 69% of marketers said cost was a top consideration when selecting an ESP, making it the No. 2 priority.
At the same time, just 16% said multichannel marketing services were a top consideration, 28% said strategic services were important and 28% said integration capabilities were a top priority.
Translation: In a channel where the “report spam” button makes relevance of message more crucial than on any other, most marketers are buying their e-mail services based on tonnage and little more.
Great. Just great.
