A few years ago I subscribed to a financial website that emails out articles about investing as well as a recap of your investments.  For the first few months I enjoyed reading these emails but as time went on, I found them less valuable and receiving them every other day they turned into a burden to clean up and deal with.

My options were to either unsubscribe or I could create a rule in Outlook to file away the emails to possibly read them later.

What I would really like is the option to define how often I would receive the updates.  If I’m actively looking to change my investments, I would want to receive the emails daily.  I would also like to have the option for either a weekly or monthly email.

The frequency of mailings should be tailored to the subscriber. Buying a new car? I may want to see emails and reviews daily.  Just bought a new blender? I want to receive emails for the first few days learning about the different features and recipes. The idea is to present options to each subscriber on what they prefer.  It’s better to treat subscribers as individuals rather than sending the same message to your entire list.

The newsletter I was receiving does not provide me with any type of control over how many times I receive the updates. The newsletter is also lacking a working unsubscribe link leaving me no alternative to clicking “this is junk”.

Senders should consider providing recipients with options:

• Provide the ability to pause a mailing for 30,60,120 days
• Allow the recipient to limit the mailings to daily, weekly, or monthly updates
• Ability to update and change their email address through a Email Preferences Center
• Always include a clear and easy way to unsubscribe

The post Give Recipients Options appeared first on Word to the Wise.

HubSpot recently posted an blog article comparing which was better for engagement, plain text emails or HTML emails. In a survey they sent out in 2014, 64% of the responses said they preferred the HTML and image-based emails. It seems pretty straight forward, recipients say they want HTML emails over text based emails but through their A/B testing, the text versions had a higher open rate.

They also reported:

• Adding GIFs decreased the opens by 37%
• HTML template lowered opens by 25%
• Heavy HTML with images lowered open rates by 23%

HubSpot tested the theory over 10 mailings then looked at the click through rates. As the number of images increased, the number of clicks decreased.

What HubSpot’s results tells me is that senders may be missing out on engagement by not identifying what their recipients want.  Testing is a critical aspect of email marketing by continuously looking at how to send the type of content your recipients are wanting. Many ESPs have built-in support for automated split A/B testing.

There are many ways to compare what works best for your recipients including:

• Testing various subject lines
• Changing PreHeader text
• Relocating and adjusting the colors of your call to actions
• Providing the option to receive either HTML or Text based emails
• Adjusting the send time

There are many more options for A/B  testing.  Sending engaging emails is a top priority for email marketers and senders should continuously test to discover what works best for their recipients.

The post Continuous Testing appeared first on Word to the Wise.

Email marketing continues to be a great way to reach out to prospects and customers and many companies utilize multiple mail streams. Companies often have the following systems sending mail:

1. Welcome Messages for new subscribers
2. Transactional Messages such as password resets or receipts from purchases
3. Drip programs from a marketing automation system
4. Direct to customers via CRM

Depending on your company, you may have all of their email services routed through a single MTA to send out the mail so that the email data (bounce backs and unsubscribes) are centrally managed. This certainly sounds like a nice utopia for those who are able to achieve it but most likely, you have multiple services sending outbound mail.

A common issue with using multiple mail streams is that a user will sign up and receive a welcome letter, perhaps even make a purchase, then the user will change their email address. A sales associate may send the user an email reaching out to them and the message goes back to the CRM as a bounce. Then the marketing department may do a re-engagement campaign to market to past customers, and the user then bounces again. If you provide an online service, your application server may even identify users who have not logged in for 90 days and send them a message letting them know they still have an account.

As time goes on, the data on each of these mail streams becomes inaccurate. If the CRM knows the user no longer works at the company then it doesn’t make sense to include that user in the marketing efforts. ESPs are adding improvements to their systems so they can access the data from your other mail streams. MailChimp recently released their new list import workflow that allows integration to many online services such as Salesforce, Zoho, and Zendesk.

As a marketer, you want as much data as possible and you want your data to be as up-to-date as possible. If your ESP supports integration to other services you use, you should set the connection so that you gain the insight from those systems. If your ESP does not support integration, consider adding a weekly or monthly task to your to-do list to download the bounce/unsubscribe data from your various systems and share that data between all of your mail streams.

The post Utilizing all of your data appeared first on Word to the Wise.

I wrote a piece for the Only Influencers special Holiday Preparations edition about deliverability and the holiday email rush. One thing I like about the chance to write for other publications is the process often leads me down thought pathways and generate some new ideas.

One thing this post helped crystalize in my mind is the idea that every company doing email marketing needs a deliverability strategy. Senders really can’t just hope that if they send decent mail to people who gave their email addresses to the sender they can reach the inbox. Deliverability has gotten so much more complex over the last few years that following best practices is Just Not Enough to reliably get into the inbox.

What’s more, there are different deliverability strategies for different kinds of mail. Transactional mail has different delivery needs than marketing mail. First email to any address should be treated differently than the 50th mail.

There are also strategic decisions that need to be made about email Email marketing is well into it’s second decade of an important marketing channel. Address collection practices that were acceptable in the early days aren’t always acceptable now. The data is still valuable, so shouldn’t be thrown away, but can be a liability so should be dealt with carefully.

Deliverability failures can ruin the best planned and executed email campaign. But deliverability failures start long before a single piece of email is sent. Large senders need to consider deliverability as part of their overall marketing strategy, not just something that they can offload onto their ESP or technology team.

The post Deliverability strategy to reach the inbox appeared first on Word to the Wise.

Reputation is calculated based on actions. Send mail people want and like and interact with and get a good reputation. Send mail people don’t want and don’t like and don’t interact with and get a bad reputation.

Reputation is not

… about who the sender is.

… about legitimacy.

… about speech.

… about message.

Reputation is

… about sender behavior.

… about recipient behavior.

… about how wanted a particular mail is forecast to be.

… based on facts.

Reputation isn’t really that complicated, but there are a lot of different beliefs about reputation that seem to make it complicated.

The reputation of a sender can be different at different receivers.

Senders sometimes target domains differently. That means one receiver may see acceptable behavior but another receiver may see a completely different behavior.  

Receivers sometimes have different standards. These include standards for what bad behavior is and how it is measured. They may also have different thresholds for things like complaints and bounces.

What this means is that delivery at one receiver has no impact on delivery at another. Just because ISP A delivers a particular mail to the inbox doesn’t mean that ISP B will accept the same mail. Each receiver has their own standards and sometimes senders need to tune mail for a specific receiver. One of my clients, for instance, tunes engagement filters based on the webmail domain in the email address. Webmail domain A needs a different level of engagement than webmail domain B.

Public reputation measures are based on data feeds.

There are multiple public sources where senders can check their reputation. Most of these sources depend on data feeds from receiver partners. Sometimes they curate and maintain their own data sources, often in the form of spamtrap feeds. But these public sources are only as good as their data analysis. Sometimes, they can show a good reputation where there isn’t one, or a bad reputation where there isn’t one.

Email reputation is composed of lots of different reputations. 

Email reputation determines delivery.  Getting to the inbox doesn’t mean sending from an IP with a good reputation. IP reputation is combined with domain reputation and content reputation to get the email reputation. IP reputation is often treated as the only valuable reputation because of the prevalence of IP based blocking. But there are SMTP level blocks against domains as well, often for phishing or virus links. Good IP reputation is necessary but not sufficient for good email delivery.

Reputation is about what a sender does, not about who a sender is.

Just because a company is a household name doesn’t mean their practices are good enough to make it to the inbox. Email is a meritocracy. Send mail that merits the inbox and it will get to recipients. Send email that doesn’t, and suffer the repercussions.

The post Reputation is about behavior appeared first on Word to the Wise.

We’re half way through September and it seems way too early to start thinking about the holidays. But for marketers, even email marketers, planning should be starting now. This planning shouldn’t just be about content and targeting and segmentation, but should also cover deliverability.

Most retailers use email marketing to drive traffic to their websites during the holidays. Experian reported that in 2014 email was the second largest driver of traffic, behind search, to the Hitwise Retail 500. In recent years, though, some retailers have run afoul of filters during the holiday season, losing precious opportunities to reach potential buyers due to delivery problems.

Retailers should consider deliverability as a factor in their marketing strategy.

Choices about who, how, how much and when to email can and do significantly affect marketing. The good news is that smart marketers can use their understanding of filters as part of their strategic planning and avoid some of the bigger problems that have plagued retailers in the past.

In December 2012, retailers Gap and Gilt were listed on the Spamhaus Block List. Since then, other retailers have also had delivery and blocking problems during the holiday season, although none have been quite so public.

Delivery problems can have a significant impact on a retailer’s bottom line. Mark Zadon, the chairman of Zulily, blamed his company’s lower profits in Q3 2014 on changes at their unspecified email service provider. After that announcement, Zulily’s stock value dropped 15%. Zulily isn’t the only company to have email delivery problems affect business growth enough to be mentioned in SEC filings. “Various private spam blacklists have in the past reduced, and may in the future reduce, the effectiveness of our solutions and our ability to conduct our business, which may cause demand for our solutions to decline.”

Deliverability rules don’t change.

Some people argue that the increase in blocking during the holiday season is because the folks running the filters are attempting to sabotage retail marketing. The available evidence doesn’t support this conclusion. For webmail providers and consumer ISPs, the overarching rule for filters is to give users email they want and filter email users don’t want. The processes and techniques the ISPs and filter companies use don’t change during the holidays. A few years ago Return Path interviewed people at a number of providers and all agreed that the receivers don’t change during the holidays.

It is true that during the holiday season some retailers see an increase in delivery problems. These are mostly self-inflicted. The good news is that given the changes are happening at the sending end, there are things senders can do to minimize the impact of filters. It’s all in their control.

Mail volume increases for multiple reasons.

The volume of transactional email goes up because brick-and-mortar retailers collect addresses in the store and email receipts to shoppers. This often involves the shopper spelling out the address for a harried sales associate in the middle of a store blasting holiday music. Typos can, and do, happen. Even when shopping online, from the comfort of the couch, there is a risk of a mis-typed email address.

These typos hurt deliverability a few different ways. The receipt can go to the wrong person, causing a complaint and hurting the reputation of the sender. The receipt can go to a non-existent account, causing a bounce and hurting the reputation of the sender. Both of these things happen, and can hurt delivery if they happen in significant enough numbers. Of even more concern is when a receipt goes to a spamtrap. Enough trap hits or complaints and the sender risks blocking and delivery failures at one or more ISPs.

Many of the larger brick-and-mortar retailers have implemented processes to reduce the chance of bad addresses. Some ask the shopper to input their email address right into the credit card pad. Others show the address to the user on the register and have the user confirm it. These things do help lower the risk of problems and incorrect addresses. But they don’t resolve it completely. Verification services can weed out undeliverable addresses, but can’t really do anything to make sure a deliverable address is the right one.

Transactional email isn’t the only reason volume increases during the holiday season. The volume of marketing email goes up as well. Marketers increase their frequency, sometimes to ridiculous amounts. A few years ago, I was on a list for a cooking store. They increased their volume from 2x a week to 3x a day in the 3 weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. This may make perfect sense from their point of view, but some recipients just don’t want that much email.

In addition to increasing volume to current and engaged customers, retailers often look to older, unengaged lists during the holidays. This has a double negative effect. First, addresses that have gone dormant, whether they bounce or not, can drive reputation down. Second, sending to people after a long period of no email can result in increased complaint rates. Increased complaints, increased bounces, and increased email to abandoned addresses all drive reputation down.

Taken together it’s no wonder some retailers see an increase in deliverability problems during the holiday emailing season. The good news is that mailers have the ability to control and manage their deliverability, even as they manage the holiday volume.  

What can you do to prepare for the holiday?

Make sure your email is technically correct.

Marketers often check authentication and other sending factors when they first start an email program, but over time changes happen. These changes can result in we-thought-it-was-authenticated or other errors that can drive delivery problems. Before the holiday mailing season is a great time for a technical checkup. Need some help with your technical setup? We’re offering a technical checkup for senders who want reassurance that their mail is correct and won’t trigger filters due to authentication or other structural problems. 

Verify your deliverability strategy.

There are lots of things senders can do to improve delivery.

1. Choose recipients. Send to your regular, engaged recipients as normal. When expanding to recipients that haven’t been mailed recently, think about different strategies. Instead of increasing your volume to unengaged folks the same as your regular subscribers create a different win-back style campaign for them. If they engage, great! Move them over to the engaged list and blast away. If they don’t, then send at a lower volume so as not to hurt delivery to other recipients. 
2. Treat recipients as individuals. Recipients have their own wants, needs and preferred communication style. Treating all recipients the same, particularly when increasing volume or cadence in an email marketing program, frequently leads to deliverability problems. Use engagement and other data in order to tailor communication to recipients. 
3. Monitor sends. Keep an eye on delivery and inbox stats. If things go bad for one send, it may be a fluke or be the start of a trend. If things go bad for multiple sends, particularly if some streams are fine and others aren’t, then it’s likely a specific problem with those streams. Look at the permissions and stats for the problem streams, and adjust to increase deliverability.

Word to the Wise has helped countless companies develop sustainable delivery strategies that support business goals. We have advised companies about mailing old and new customers during the holidays, and all year long, without losing access to the inbox. Want some help with delivery strategy? Contact us. 

The holiday season can be a great time to email current and former customers. More consumers are in the buying mood and are more receptive to emails and marketing. With a little careful attention to deliverability, holiday email will go straight to the inbox.

The post The holiday mailing season appeared first on Word to the Wise.

You’ve started to notice that your campaigns aren’t working as well as they used to. Your metrics suggest fewer people are clicking through, perhaps because more of your mail is ending up in junk folders. Maybe your outbound queues are bigger than they used to be.

You’ve not changed anything – you’re doing what’s worked well for years – and it’s not like you’ve suddenly had an influx of spamming customers (or, if you have, you’ve dealt with them much the same as you have in the past).

So what changed?

Everything else did. The email ecosystem is in a perpetual state of change.

There’s not a bright line that says “email must be this good to be delivered“.

Instead, most email filtering practice is based on trying to identify mail that users want, or don’t want, and delivering based on that. There’s some easy stuff – mail that can be easily identified as unwanted (malware, phishing, botnet spew) and mail that can easily be identified as wanted (SPF/DKIM authenticated mail from senders with clean content and a consistent history of sending mail that customers interact with and never mark as spam).

The hard bit is the greyer mail in the middle. Quite a lot of it may be wanted, but not easily identified as wanted mail. And a lot of it isn’t wanted, but not easily identified as spam. That’s where postmasters, filter vendors and reputation providers spend a lot of their effort on mitigation, monitoring recipient response to that mail and adapting their mail filtering to improve it.

Postmasters, and other filter operators, don’t really care about your political views or the products you’re trying to sell, nor do they make moral judgements about your legal content (some of the earliest adopters of best practices have been in the gambling and pornography space…). What they care about is making their recipients happy, making the best predictions they can about each incoming mail, based on the information they have. And one of the the most efficient ways to do that is to look at the grey area to see what mail is at the back of the pack, the least wanted, and focusing on blocking “mail like that”.

If you’re sending mail in that grey area – and as an ESP you probably are – you want to stay near the front or at least the middle of the grey area mailers, and definitely out of that “least wanted” back of the pack. Even if your mail isn’t great, competitors who are sending worse mail than you will probably feel more filtering pain and feel it sooner.

Some of those competitors are updating their practices for 2015, buying in to authentication, responding rapidly to complaints and feedback loop data, and preemptively terminating spammy customers – and by doing so they’re both sending mail that recipients want and making it easy for ISPs (and their postmasters and their machine learning systems) to recognize that they’re doing that.

Other competitors aren’t following this years best practices, have been lazy about providing customer-specific authentication, are letting new customers send spam with little oversight, and aren’t monitoring feedback and delivery to make sure they’re a good mail stream. They end up in the spam folder, their good customers migrate elsewhere because of “delivery issues” and bad actors move to them because they have a reputation for “not being picky about acquisition practices“. They risk spiraling into wholesale bulk foldering and becoming just a “bulletproof spam-friendly ESP”.

If you’re not improving your practices you’re probably being passed by your competitors who are, and you risk falling behind to the back of the pack.

And your competitors don’t need to outrun the bear, they just need to outrun you.

The post Outrunning the Bear appeared first on Word to the Wise.

I just saw a post over on the mailop mailing list where someone had been bitten by some of the IPv6 email issues I discussed a couple of months ago.

They have dual-stack smarthosts – meaning that their smarthosts have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and will choose one or the other to send mail over. Some domains they send to use Office 365 and opted-in to receiving mail over IPv6, so their smarthosts decided to send that mail preferentially over IPv6.

The mail wasn’t authenticated, so it started bouncing. This is probably going to happen more and more over the next year or so as domain owners increasingly accept mail over IPv6.

If your smarthosts are dual stack, make sure that your workflow authenticates all the mail you send to avoid this sort of delivery issue.

One mistake I’ve seen several companies make is to have solid SPF authentication for all the domains they send – but not for their IPv6 address space. Check that all your SPF records include your IPv6 ranges. While you’re doing that keep in mind that having too many DNS records for SPF can cause problems, and try not too bloat the SPF records you have your customers include.

The post IPv6 and authentication appeared first on Word to the Wise.

We have multiple measures of deliverability. Ones that we don’t even let in the door, and then we have ones that customers indicated that they don’t want to be delivered.

 – Jeff Bonforte, Senior VP Communications, Yahoo Mail

Read a little more about Yahoo and spam over at Tech Insider, or listen to the podcast at codebreaker.codes.

The post Deliverability at Yahoo appeared first on Word to the Wise.

Someone mentioned on a mailing list that mail “from” intuit.com was being filed in the gmail spam folder, with the warning “Our systems couldn’t verify that this message was really sent by intuit.com“. That warning means that Gmail thinks it may be phishing mail. Given they’re a well-known financial services organization, I’m sure there is a lot of phishing mail claiming to be from them.

But I’d expect that a company the size of Intuit would be authenticating their mail, and that Gmail should be able to use that authentication to know that the mail wasn’t a phish.

Clearly something is broken somewhere. Lets take a look.

Looking at the headers, the mail was being sent from Salesforce, and (despite Salesforce offering DKIM) it wasn’t DKIM signed by anyone. So … look at SPF.

SPF passes:

Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of
mintcustomersupport=intuit.com__0-8zwx1w6zmvdihu@3k2i3a0a5qw8r5.e-a8tlmay.na14.bnc.salesforce.com
designates 204.14.232.69 as permitted sender) client-ip=204.14.232.69;

SPF proper doesn’t say anything about the visible From: header; it looks at the (invisible) salesforce return path instead, so the formal SPF check passing says nothing about whether it’s legitimate intuit mail or not.

But you can use SPF to answer the more general question “Is legitimate mail from this domain sent from that IP address?”. Gmail could potentially use that information to distinguish between a phish and a legitimate mail. A quick look at the TXT records for intuit.com shows they have an SPF record that includes several others, and one of those in turn includes salesforce.com, so it’s possible.

That’s a lot of includes, though. And we know that if your SPF record has too many terms that will trigger DNS queries it will exceed the limit of ten queries and any SPF check using it will fail. I’ve recently added features to our SPF tool to check for that, so it’s a good time to try that out.

http://tools.wordtothewise.com/spf/check/intuit.com

There’s the problem. This SPF record is too big and too deeply nested and the SPF specification says that must lead to an SPF “PermError” failure. If Gmail were to try and use SPF to answer “Might this mail be authorized by intuit.com?” any SPF library would say “No”.

The post SPF debugging appeared first on Word to the Wise.

I posted Friday about how most deliverability folks roll their eyes when a sender starts talking about their business model.

The irony is that one of the first things I do with a client is ask them to tell me about their business model and how email fits into their business plan. Once I know that, I can help them improve their email sending to meet the requirements of ISPs, blocklists and recipients.

While most deliverability people don’t care about your business model, for me it’s essential that I understand it. I want to hear about it, all the details. Tell me about what you’re doing and together we’ll craft a strategy to make email work for you in your unique situation.

We have one goal for every client: their email gets to the inbox. But no two clients have the same problems so we tailor our advice specifically for their unique situation. We don’t have a 3-ring binder that we read a standard answer from when clients ask for recommendations for their email strategy. We use our own knowledge of email and our history in the industry to craft unique solutions to deliverability problems.

Your business model is disruptive? Great! We can help you get those disruptive emails into their inbox.

You have a niche social platform that uses email as part of your growth strategy? We’ll make sure users and future users see your email in their inboxes.

You have a SaaS platform and you want customers to be able to use email to communicate with their customers? We’ll help you craft the right policy for your business.

You’re a retail company and struggle to reach the inbox consistently? We’ve helped dozens of companies navigate email challenges. We’ve helped clients figure out how to effectively capture addresses at point of sale in brick and mortars. We’ve helped clients restructure their entire data flow.

We can help you too.

You bring us your business model and we’ll create a comprehensive strategy that gets your email into the inbox. What’s more, we’ll help you understand what factors relate to inbox delivery and train you how to handle most issues on your own. Once we’ve got you set up, a process that takes 3 – 6 months, you have everything you need to run an email program. Even better, when those rare, complicated issues come up we’ve got your back and can get your emails delivering to the inbox again.

The post Tell me about your business model appeared first on Word to the Wise.

The CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown. The warrant was to take down a C&C (command and control) server for Win32/Dorkbot. International efforts to take down C&C servers take a lot of effort and work and coordination. I’ve only ever heard stories from folks involved but the scale and work that goes into these take downs is amazing.

Bots are still a problem. Even if we manage to block 99% of the botnet mail out there people are still getting infected. Those infections spread and many of the newer bots steal passwords, banking credentials and other confidential information.

This kind of crime is hard to stop, though, because the internet makes it so easy to live in one country, have a business in a third, have a shell corp in a fourth, and have victims in none of those places. Law enforcement across the globe has had to work together and develop new protocols and new processes to make these kinds of takedowns work.

The post CASL botnet take down appeared first on Word to the Wise.

Even for those of us who’ve been around for a while, and who have a lot of experience troubleshooting delivery problems things are getting harder. It used to be we could identify some thing about an email and if that thing was removed then the email would get to the inbox. Often this was a domain or a URL in the message that was triggering bulk foldering.

Filters aren’t so simple now. And we can’t just randomly send a list of URLs to a test account and discover which URL is causing the problem. Sure, one of the URLs could be the issue, but that’s typically in context with other things. It’s rare that I can identify the bad URLs sending mail through my own server these days.

There are also a lot more “hey, help” questions on some of the deliverability mailing lists. Most of these questions are sticky problems that don’t map well onto IP or domain reputation.

One of my long term clients recently had a bad mail that caused some warnings at Gmail.
We tried a couple of different things to try and isolate the problem, but never could discover what was triggering the warnings. Even more importantly, we weren’t getting the same results for identical tests done hours apart. After about 3 days, all the warnings went away and all their mail was back in the inbox.

It seemed that one mailing was really bad and resulted in a bad reputation, temporarily. But as the client fixed the problem and kept mailing their reputation recovered.

Deliverability troubleshooting is complicated and this flowchart sums up what it’s like.

Here at Word to the Wise, we get a lot of clients who have gone through the troubleshooting available through their ESPs and sometimes even other deliverability consultants. We get the tough cases that aren’t easy to figure out.

What we do is start from the beginning. First thing is to confirm that there aren’t technical problems, and generally we’ll find some minor problems that should be fixed, but aren’t enough to cause delivery problems. Then we look at the client’s data. How do they collect it? How do they maintain it? What are they doing that allows false addresses on their list?

Once we have a feel for their data processes, we move on to how do we fix those processes. What can we do to collect better, cleaner data in the future? How can we improve their processes so all their recipients tell the ISP that this is wanted mail?

The challenging part is what to do with existing data, but we work with clients individually to make sure that bad addresses are expunged and good addresses are kept.

Our solutions aren’t simple. They’re not easy. But for clients who listen to us and implement our recommendations it’s worth it. Their mail gets into the inbox and deliverability becomes a solved problem.

The post Troubleshooting delivery is hard, but doable appeared first on Word to the Wise.

An Advice Column on Email Delivery

When we work with brands and senders to improve email delivery, there are many questions that come up again and again. For 2016, we thought it might be interesting to answer some of those questions here on the blog so others can benefit from the information.

Confused about delivery in general? Trying to keep up on changing policies and terminology? Need some Email 101 basics? This is the place to ask. We can’t answer specific questions about your server configuration or look at your message structure for the column (please get in touch if you’d like our help with more technical or forensic investigations!), but we’d love to answer your questions about how email works, trends in the industry, or the joys and challenges of cohabiting with felines.

Your pal,
Laura

Dear Laura,

I’m having a hard time explaining to our marketing team why we shouldn’t send email to addresses on our lists with very low read rates, that are dormant but not bouncing, or that spend less than 2 seconds reading our mail. I’m also struggling to convince them that it’s not a good idea to dramatically increase email volume during the holidays (i.e. going from one send/day to 2-3 sends/day).

We already segment based on recency, engagement, and purchase behavior, and we also have some triggered messaging based on user behavior.

Can you help me find a way to help explain why sometimes less is more?

Thanks,
The Floodgates Are Open

Dear Floodgates,

ISPs ask two fundamental questions about email when it comes in:

1. Is it safe?
2. Is it wanted?

If the answer to both those questions is yes, the mail is delivered to the inbox.

Safe is something we don’t talk much about in the marketing space, because generally our mail is safe. But our mail has to go through the exact same filters that are set out to catch the bad guys. And sometimes we do things that trigger that set of filters unintentionally.

The second question — is it wanted — is where marketers can really shine. ISPs look at their user behavior to determine if mail is wanted or not. While their measurements are slightly different than what marketers use, senders must also find ways to determine if recipients want their messages.

Engagement with the email is part of it, but you can also use other metrics you have about that customer or prospect on your list. Do they visit your website? Are they active on your Facebook page? What other data do we have that says this person is engaged with your brand and won’t object to increased volume?

Spammers send unwanted mail. Spammers send mail to a lot of addresses where the address owner doesn’t log in. Spammers send mail to people who don’t want it, so they delete it immediately. If you are sending lots of mail and your recipient demographic looks like the typical spammer recipient demographic, then your mail will be treated like spam. It’s ALL about the recipient. That’s what the ISP uses to measure your mail. And if your recipients are reacting to your mail in the same way they react to spam, then you’re going to face deliverability challenges.

Both customers and ISPs expect increased volume around certain holidays and time periods. But, you need to be strategic with how you increase it.

For our clients, we’ve had to make some modifications to their holiday marketing programs to help protect them against deliverability challenges. We’ve done a careful warmup for their lists, which is really critical when you increase volumes.

Always, always, always, if you’re going to increase your volume, start by increasing volume to your most engaged recipients. Don’t just blast out to the entire list, pay attention to the data you have. Be selective about who you send to.

When you have this conversation with your marketing team, you might remind them that the larger goal is not around completing a single purchase, but around retaining and delighting that customer over a lifetime relationship. The more that a customer wants the email you send, the more likely it is to bolster that relationship.

Hope this helps,
Laura

The post Ask Laura appeared first on Word to the Wise.

Spamhaus gave a bunch of us a preview of their new “Top 10 worst” (or should that be bottom 10?) lists at M³AAWG. These lists have now been released to the public.

The categories they’re measuring are:

• Countries
• Spam ISPs
• Spammers
• Botnet Countries
• Botnet ISPs
• Botnet ASNs
• TLDs

Nothing really surprising there, but it’s nice to see the numbers.

I have to wonder if the listing of the top 10 spammers will change the minds of some of the anti-CASL folks. To listen to them all the “real” spammers are criminals hiding over seas. But, according to Spamhaus, 6 of the top 10 spammers are in the US and two of the others are in Canada (albeit with Russian influence). Only two of the top 10 spammers are outside North America.

The other thing that surprised me about the top 10 spammers is that I recognize some of the names from names clients have mentioned to me as legitimate marketing partners and affiliates. These hard core spammers, some of the worst in the world, convince real companies to pay them money to send mail. It’s great for the spammers, they get paid whether or not mail is delivered. In my experience, though, it’s not so great for their customers though. Customers frequently end up dealing with major delivery problems, even for the mail the send directly.

Another thing worth discussing is the list of TLDs. This is TLDs that have the highest ratio of spam domains compared to the total number of domains in the TLD, it’s not a list of TLDs with the most spam domains. I expect that award goes to .com. I do expect this to be a volatile list. Spammers are, at heart, cheap con artists. While they will spend money to try and get their mail through, they’ll also try to find a deal when they can. As TLDs run sales and offer incentives, they’re going to attract more spammers.

I have heard some folks managing the filters saying that the new and non-standard TLDs are treated as guilty until proven innocent. I think until the TLD owners figure out they need to actually pay attention to abuse it’s best to stick with the mainstream TLDs.

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One of the things I miss about being in science is the regular discussions (sometimes heated) about data and experimental results. To be fair, I get some of that when talking about email stuff with Steve. We each have some strong view points and aren’t afraid to share them with each other and with other people. In fact, one of the things we hear most when meeting folks for the first time is, “I love it when you two disagree with each other on that mailing list!” Both of us have engineering and science backgrounds, so we can argue in that vein.

One of the challenges of seemingly contradictory data is figuring out why it seems to disagree. Of course, in science the first step is always to look at your experimental design and data collection. Did I do the experiment right? (Do it again. Always do it again.) Did I record the data correctly? Is the design right? So what did I do differently from what you did? For instance, at one of my labs we discovered that mixing a reagent in plastic tubes created a different outcome from mixing the reagent in glass vials. So many variables that you don’t even think of being variables that affect the outcome of an experiment.

What’s that got to do with email?

In the email space we have lots of people sharing data. Some of it is data we like – that is data that confirms our perceptions. And some of it is data we don’t like – data that contradicts our perceptions.

Recently two different ESPs have published contradictory data about purging subscribers and removing recipients from your lists.  Mailchimp published Inactive subscribers are still valuable customers and Hubspot published What Happened to Our Metrics After We Stopped Sending So Much Email.

These two publications seem to be a bit contradictory. One is saying that inactive subscribers, subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked on emails in a while, are still valuable sources of revenue. The other is saying removing inactive subscribers increases email metrics like opens and clicks. So what’s really going on?

Different methods measure different things

Mailchimp looked at the revenue generated by inactive subscribers as compared to revenue from non-subscribers. They specifically looked at e-commerce senders mailing to previous purchasers.

Hubspot looked at various email metrics and how they changed when removing subscribers. They specifically looked at recipients to their own mailing list.

In many ways that’s the end of the story. The two studies look at different things. They looked at different populations. They measured different things. They are not comparable. They’re not even really contradictory due to the significant differences in the study population.

Well, that’s not very useful

Sorry. Research tells us answers, but doesn’t always give us clear and actionable answers.

The reality is, neither of these were designed experiments. Rather, they both describe observed behavior in “the wild” as it were. The research is much closer to epidemiology than any other branch of science. Epidemiology tells us what happens, but doesn’t necessarily tell us how to either make something happen or stop something from happening. Back when I was taking poultry pathology in grad school we did quite a bit of epidemiology and it’s HARD. For instance, one example we studied was an avian disease outbreak that seemed totally random. After months and months of work, research, interviews and study they finally figured out the infection was being carried on the car tires of a particular sales person. That’s how hard epidemiology is.

A lot of deliverability and email marketing is like epidemiology. We know what worked in the past, but sometimes we’re chasing a guy with a contagious disease on his tires.

No, really, what do you think about the data?

I think the data is right. And I do think we can take some lessons from it.

• Hubspot did see increased email engagement with their subscribers when they stopped mailing quite so much.
• Mailchimp customers did see actual revenue from their inactive subscribers.

Let’s rephrase what Mailchimp said they discovered: Inactive subscribers buy more than non-subscribers and don’t buy as much as active subscribers. That’s one of those things that my only response is, “Well, yes, we all kinda knew that but it’s nice someone did the work.”

Let’s rephrase what Hubspot said they discovered: If you send too much mail you wear out your receivers and they pay less attention. Again, we knew that.

But what didn’t they say?

• Mailchimp didn’t mention delivery changes.
• Hubspot didn’t mention revenue.

We don’t know whether Mailchimp saw deliverability differences. In the face of more revenue, it’s not really an issue but their delivery stats may have been worse.

We don’t know if Hubspot saw increased revenue (although we do have their 10-K that shows some revenue increase). But they’re not a commerce shop, they’re not directly selling through email. Their emails drive potential readers. Eventually the hope is (I’m assuming) the readers will convert, but the Hubspot emails are not the same as e-commerce email.

You didn’t answer the question.

I did, though. Both things are true.

If you are in e-commerce you’ll make revenue from your inactive subscribers; so you should prune them carefully.

If you are driving site engagement you’ll increase readership by removing inactive subscribers; so you can probably be more aggressive in pruning.

What’s right for my program?

It depends.

Is your program closer to the mail studied by Mailchimp? Or is your program closer to the mail studied by Hubspot?

We work with a lot of different kinds of senders and work with them to find the answer right for their business, their subscribers and their marketing program. Sometimes it means pruning, sometimes it doesn’t.  Contact us for more information on how we can help your program make sense of seemingly conflicting data.

The post Dueling data appeared first on Word to the Wise.

Most deliverability problems don’t start where many people think they do. So very often people call looking for deliverability help and tell me all about the things they’re doing to reach the inbox. They’ll tell me about content, they’ll tell me about bounces, they’ll talk about complaints, engagement, opens and clicks. Rarely will they bring up their list source without some prompting on my part.

The reality is, though, that list source is to root of deliverability success and deliverability problems. Where did those addresses come from and what do the people who gave them think you’re going to do with them?

Outsourcing collection to a third party can cause significant issues with delivery. Letting other people collect addresses on your behalf means you lack control over the process. And if you’re paying per address, then there monetary incentive for that company to pad the list with bogus addresses.

Sometimes there are even issues with having your own employees collect addresses from customers. For instance, a retailer requires sales associates collect a minimum percentage of addresses from customers. The company even ties the associates’ evaluations to that percentage. Associates have an incentive to submit addresses from other customers. Or a retailer will offer a discount for an address and customers want the discount but not the mail, so they give a fake address.

All of these things can affect deliverability.

Address collection is the key to delivery, but too many companies just don’t put enough attention to how they’re collecting addresses and entering into the relationship with subscribers. This is OK for a while, and delivery of small lists collected like this can be great. But as lists grow in size, they come under greater scrutiny at the ISPs and what used to work doesn’t anymore.

The first step to diagnosing any delivery problem is to look at the list. All of the things ISP use to measure reputation measure how well you’re collecting addresses. Changing IPs or domains or content doesn’t change the reason mail is being filtered. It just means the filters have to figure out something new to key on.

Want great deliverability? Start with how you’re collecting addresses.

Want to fix deliverability? Start with how you’ve collected addresses, how you’ve stored them and how you’ve maintained them.

The post The source of deliverability problems appeared first on Word to the Wise.

One of the questions asked of my panel during Connections 16 last month was who owns the inbox.

My point of view is that the end user owns the inbox, with a few minor exceptions. For instance, in the case of a business, the business owns the inbox. With email marketing, the marketing is entering a personal space as an invited guest. Senders need to be cognizant of this to continue having access to the inbox.

Another panel participant said that marketers own the inbox. While I don’t necessarily agree I found her argument persuasive. Her point was that senders own the inbox because they have the ability to tailor messages to get there. That it is the sender’s behavior that results in inbox delivery. While I don’t think that means that the sender owns the inbox, I do believe that means the sender owns their delivery to the inbox.

Chad White was in the audience for that session and went back and asked the Litmus community who they think owns the inbox. Their community came down on the side of the recipients, by a sizable margin.

The whole post is worth reading and I encourage people to head over to Litmus to look.

Litmus also has a graphic talking about the hierarchy of email.

I think the hierarchy of respectful, functional, valuable and remarkable is a pyramid. Not sure I’m totally sold on the metrics (you can have forwards without conversions, for instance) but it’s a good visualization of the foundation of a strong email program.

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Dear Laura,

We are trying to evaluate the success of our email programs, and I don’t have a good sense of what metrics we should be monitoring. We have a lot of data, but I don’t have a good sense of what matters and what doesn’t. Can you advise us what we should look at and why?

Thanks,
Metrics Are Hard

Dear Metrically-Challenged,

You’re not going to like this answer, but here goes.

It depends.

If you’re sending newsletters and general brand mail, you’ll want to track clicks and opens to look at how engaged your recipients are with your content. This will help you evaluate the success of individual messages and campaigns, as well as your larger program efforts. You can also use this information to further segment and market to your most engaged (or least engaged) recipients.

If you’re sending marketing mail, you need to look at revenue as well. You need to understand how email engagement translates to purchases, both by campaign and over the customer lifetime.

And for any kind of mail you send, you need to keep an eye on bounces, complaints and unsubscribes. These can be valuable early indicators of both technical issues and marketing success.

The biggest question is: what data do you have access to? When we talk to clients, we often find that they have SO MUCH DATA, but they have no idea how to analyze it and make sense of what they’re seeing. As you point out, there are a lot of numbers to look at. Whether you’re sending mail directly or working with an email service provider, you likely have more dashboards and reports than you know what to do with. You need to figure out what you have and what matters most to you.

On the deliverability front, you can look at your logs to see if there are any ISPs temp failing mail. This will tell you if there’s some reputation issues. Y! and AOL both have specific codes for “come back later” and they’re helpful to ID if there’s something problematic with your reputation.

“Unknown users” is also a valuable metric. If you’re using a data hygiene service, you’ll want to monitor how many addresses they’re removing. If it’s more than 1 – 5%, then you need to look at your address collection process.

Opens and clicks are reasonable metrics to measure. Marketers also look at click-to-open-rate (CTOR), but that’s not something I use for deliverability — It’s more about how many people are interacting with your mail.

Mailbox monitoring tools are less useful than they were, but can still provide interesting information.

Another useful thing to consider is to identify what filters your mail goes through. We do this by taking the MX for every domain on a mailing list, and then identifying the number of email addresses behind each MX.
Overall, you want to make sure you’re looking at the same metrics over time so you can be aware of significant changes in delivery and marketing effectiveness. Depending on your mail types and volumes, there are numbers you’ll want to look at daily, others weekly or monthly, and still others only as needed. Ultimately, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to what metrics matter to businesses — it’s up to you to determine what matters most to you.

Confused about delivery in general? Trying to keep up on changing policies and terminology? Need some Email 101 basics? This is the place to ask. We can’t answer specific questions about your server configuration or look at your message structure for the column (please get in touch if you’d like our help with more technical or forensic investigations!), but we’d love to answer your questions about how email works, trends in the industry, or the joys and challenges of cohabiting with felines.

The post Ask Laura: What should we be measuring? appeared first on Word to the Wise.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a potential client. He was all angry and yelling because his ESP had kicked him off for spamming. “Only one person complained!! Do you know him? His name is Name. And I have signup data for him! He opted in! How can they kick me off for one complaint where I have opt-in data? Now they’re talking Spamhaus listings, Spamhaus can’t list me! I have opt-in data and IP addresses and everything.”

We talked briefly but decided that my involvement in this was not beneficial to either party. Not only do I know the complainant personally, I’ve also consulted with the ESP in question specifically to help them sort out their Spamhaus listings. I also know that if you run an open subscription form you are at risk for being a conduit for abuse.

This abuse is generally low level. A person might sign up someone else’s address in an effort to harass them. This is a problem for the victim, but doesn’t often result in any consequences for the sender. Last week’s SBL listings were a response to subscription abuse happening on a large scale.

We’ve generally accepted that low friction signup forms are a win for business. There aren’t many consequences to the business to maintaining them. That doesn’t mean all signups are low friction. Almost any social networking site will require some sort of confirmation before allowing full access to their platform. Certainly the big platforms – Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to name a few – require new users to click a link to confirm their address. This is standard process that most internet users are familiar with.

Not all “networking” sites require confirmation, though. Over at Spamtacular Mickey talks about the Ashley Madison hack. He’s been reading through the report from the Canadian and Australian governments. He quotes the report:

The level of accuracy required is impacted by the foreseeable consequences of inaccuracy, and should also consider interests of non-users. This investigation looked at ALM’s practice of requiring, but not verifying, email addresses from registrants. While this lack of email address verification could afford individuals the ability to deny association with Ashley Madison’s services, this approach creates unnecessary reputational risks in the lives of non-users — allowing, for instance, the creation of a potentially reputation-damaging fake profile for an email address owner. The requirement to maintain accuracy must consider the interests of all individuals about whom information might be collected, including non-users.

The lack of email address verification creates unnecessary reputational risks in the lives of non-users.

At one point there was an argument that confirmation was an unfamiliar process and senders couldn’t trust the end users would confirm. That was true. It’s not longer true, though. While Facebook doesn’t publish their confirmation numbers, informal discussions tell me well over 90% of signups are confirmed. Confirmation is a standard process for users to go through these days.

One of the things some of us discussed, related to the Spamhaus issue, was that if enough government officials were hit then there might be legislation requiring some level of confirmation or protection. I don’t think it will happen any time soon. I don’t even think it’s likely. But there are the possibly apocryphal story of congress passing the TCPA because their fax machines were inundated with junk faxes. Could a similar attack on email addresses lead to legislation about open subscription forms?

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