Nobody Left to Blame

It happened again last month: Another JupiterResearch e-mail buyer’s guide, another round of press releases from all the service providers congratulating themselves for making the list.

While the report by analyst David Daniels was certainly good news for the vendors that made the cut, it also contained one glaring statistic indicating a serious disconnect in the ranks of those who manage commercial e-mail marketing programs: Seventy percent of those surveyed said e-mail deliverability services were their No. 1 consideration when selecting an e-mail service provider.

Sixty-nine percent cited cost as No. 2. At the same time, just 16% said multichannel marketing services were a top concern; 28% indicated that strategic services were key; and 28% claimed integration capabilities were a high priority.

Translation: In a channel where message relevance is more important than in any other, most marketers think it’s mainly up to the ESP to get their mail past spam filters. They’re buying e-mail services in terms of tonnage instead of looking for the kind of help that might enable them to excel at message relevance.

An apt title for JupiterResearch’s report could easily have been “E-mail Marketers Have a Massive Case of Screwed-up Priorities.”

Here’s the deal: The main things that affect e-mail deliverability are completely within the list owner’s control.

The reason? The leading gauge large e-mail inbox providers such as AOL and Yahoo use to weed out spam is the number of people who report it as such.

If enough people think a marketer’s messages are spam — 0.5% or higher, according to conventional wisdom — it doesn’t matter whether the sender’s list is double, triple or quadruple opt-in. Those messages won’t ever reach recipients’ inboxes.

Oh, wait. Massive…case…of…déjà vu… . Feeling…like…I’ve…said…this…before.

OK. I’m back.

Think the report-spam button is an unfair metric? Then you need to change the way you think. This ain’t postal mail.

Internet service providers are under no obligation to deliver unwanted garbage to their subscribers. In fact, they have to do just the opposite.

As a result, the first and most important element of e-mail deliverability lies in the marketer’s address acquisition practices. Getting some vague form of permission simply doesn’t cut it in e-mail marketing. Recipients need to be informed up front exactly how much e-mail they’re going to get and why.

And no, contrary to popular thought, getting permission once is not permission for all time.

Meanwhile, if a list truly is permission based, deliverability really boils down to two relatively simple (at least, they should be relatively simple) concepts: list hygiene and message relevance.

Besides the report-spam button, another crucial metric that inbox providers use to flag unsolicited e-mail is how many bad or non-existent addresses the sender attempts to reach. Spammers have notoriously dirty lists.

The e-mail industry is rampant with tales of marketers switching ESPs, then adding all the addresses a former ESP told them were bad back onto their list and setting off alarms across the Internet. In a word, this is stupid. It accomplishes nothing more than damaging the reputation of the mailer and the ESP, and getting the mailer’s campaign blocked. It also forces the ESP to call the various anti-spam desks at the inbox providers and explain what just happened — and what they plan to do to fix it — to try getting their IP addresses unblocked.

Folks, if a marketer’s messages are unwanted or its list is dirty, no ESP can wave a magic wand and get that campaign past spam filters. It really is just that simple.

To be sure, there are many technical issues an ESP or deliverability firm can tackle to help an e-mailer reach people’s inboxes. How an ESP handles bounces and determines if an address is truly bad and should be removed from the list, for example, differs from ESP to ESP.

But when marketers that get their e-mail blocked try to place the blame, they should start by looking in the mirror.

W

Magilla Marketing, Ken Magill’s weekly e-mail newsletter, is archived at http://directmag.com/magill/.