What's in it for me?

Every email campaign is launched after answering the question, “What's in it for me?” The revenue benefits for the campaign, business relationships established, and simple needs to meet quota are all thoughts that pass through the mind of senders. All of this causes us to send emails from time to time that cause low open rates, high rates of unsubscribes, or worse spam complaints. The question that you should ask yourself before you hit the send button is "What's in it for the subscriber?" At the end of the day it is the recipient of your email that determines if it was successful. If you can't define what benefit your subscribers have in receiving your email, then you shouldn't send it. If your email is sent with careful thought of who the audience is, it will be well received, have higher open rates, encourage continued reading of your publications, and encourage passing the message on to potential subscribers. The fundamental idea here is relevancy.

The definition that email senders have of spam doesn’t match the definition your subscribers have. Where you see a “mark as spam” button, what your subscriber sees is a “Mark as irrelevant” button, at least according to David Greer of Campaign Monitor. ISPs would seem to share this view:

Yahoo! Mail - Miles Libbey: Anti-spam product manager

Operationally, we define spam as whatever consumers don't want in their inbox.

AOL - Charles Stiles: AOL Postmaster

"I don't care if they've triple opted-in and gave you their credit card number," said Stiles, drawing chuckles, but making his point loud and clear: Relevance rules, and catering to end user preferences is his top priority.

Microsoft/Hotmail - Craig Spiezle: Online safety evangelist

We need to think really a step beyond opt-in and focus on the consumer's expectations, relevancy, and frequency.

Gmail - Brad Taylor: Google Engineer

Sometimes people are afraid to report a message because they aren't sure if it is "really" spam or not. Our opinion is that if you didn't ask for it and you don't want it, it's spam to you, and it should be reported.

If your email has high complaint rates, you will be blocked because it is viewed as unwanted email. If you send to old addresses and hit spam traps, you are sending emails to people that haven't even asked for it. The primary concern for the receiving server is to protect their users from unwanted mail. Of course you are thinking, "they signed up for my mailing list, so my mail isn't unwanted". ISPs and the anti-spam community at large (which includes the network administrators that put corporate blocks in place) no longer consider permission to be permanent. If a subscriber has lost interest in your emails, got transferred to a different division in the company, retired, or simply didn't approve of an email that you sent to them, in the eyes of the ISPs and corporate net admins you no longer have permission to send emails to those subscribers. Trying to hold onto these addresses through difficult unsubscribe mechanisms, poor list hygiene standards, and other means merely exacerbates the problem and will eventually lead to blocking and blacklisting.

Every email that you send is a chance to see what your audience finds relevant. Open rates, unsub rates, click rates, and complaint rates all offer information on what content your subscribers find relevant, and equally important, what they find irrelevant. Relevancy requires vigilance to determine what you should be sending, to whom, and how often. If a particular email causes high complaint and unsubscribe rates, then you should think twice about sending similar content.

In the Beginning

I think it fitting to begin a blog on this topic by talking about how the process of getting the message to your subscribers starts, permission. There are various forms of permission:

Opt-out - A recipient is subscribed until they take an action to no longer receive emails
Passive opt-in - A pre-checked box is supplied on a form and must be deselected not to receive emails
Active opt-in - A recipient must check a box on a form to begin receiving emails
Confirmed opt-in (aka double opt-in) - A recipient opts in for emails and then is sent an email to the subscribing address which requires an action on behalf of the recipient (generally clicking a link) for that subscriber to begin receiving emails

There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these practices. Opt-out is certainly a good way to grow a list and what publisher of online content wouldn't be attracted to this benefit, however it is quite treacherous in terms of deliverability. Opt-out lists are prone to high rates of spam complaints, have higher bounce rates, and increase the likelihood of blacklisting and hitting blocks on ISPs. Worse than the fact that they have these symptoms, once you are blacklisted and/or blocked, it is far more difficult to have these lifted. Additionally, many new international spam laws might not allow this form of permission such as laws recently enacted in Hong Kong and New Zealand. If you send emails internationally, you should not consider opt-out as sufficient permission to send emails.

Opt-in whether active or passive is certainly a better option in terms of deliverability. It implies that you warned subscribers up front that they would be receiving emails from you and were given the opportunity to opt-out. Because the emails were requested, complaint rates are lower and are more likely accurate addresses. This means that blocks and blacklistings are less likely to be imposed. Further, when your mails are blocked being able to verify that the addresses opted in makes it more likely that those blocks will be lifted.

Confirmed opt-in requires the most investment of time and interest in subscribing which causes lower complaint rates, significantly lower bounce rates, and ensures an active and receptive audience is receiving your emails. Because it requires the most action for subscription, it also has the lowest growth rate, however the emails you send are not likely to be blocked or blacklisted and when blocks are imposed it is significantly easier to have them lifted. The anti-spam community certainly encourages this practice and such corporate email providers as Outblaze require it for whitelisting and may require it to have blocks lifted. This is the best way to ensure that your message gets through to those that want to receive it and doesn't to those that don't. Everyone should at least test this method as it is impossible to know the impact it will have until you do. It increases the likelihood of establishing whitelists, ensures that blocks can be lifted, and puts your message into the hands of subscribers most likely to open your emails and are responsive to your advertisers.

Gone are the days when a quick phone call or even a contact with whom you have established a relationship can ensure that your emails get delivered. Deliverability is handled on the front lines by algorithms that don't care as much about what you are sending as how you are sending it and how it is being received by subscribers. Complaint rates, unknown user rates, authentication, and reputation are all factors that the ISPs and corporate domains can see for themselves. Spam, in the eyes of the gatekeepers to receiving servers, is basically any unwanted mail, and behaviors that are consistent with spammers such as high complaint rates and unknown user rates immediately alert them that your emails are unwanted. It doesn't matter if you are B2B or B2C, the same hurdles are in place for both. Escalation and contacts at the ISPs can certainly help when you encounter problems, but only if you are following their recommended practices, since their first responsibility is to protect their users from the frustration of unwanted email. The first step to better deliverability is, in short, obtaining and keeping the recipient's permission through best practices, and that is why we begin here.

Introduction

Welcome to the deliverability blog of Tim England, Supervisor of ISP Relations at Hallmark Data Systems. Hallmark serves the B2B magazine community in a variety of services, most recently as an email service provider (ESP). The purpose of this blog is to function as an area for me to provide timely insight into deliverability issues as they arise and advise clients of new features and problems that we have in our systems. My hope is that this blog will also be useful to those who are not our clients and offer valuable insight in deliverability as it relates to the B2B industry in terms of best practices, ISP and corporate filtering, strategy, and industry buzz.

The title, Get the Message, is basically what deliverability is all about, getting the message to your subscribers. You can have terrific content and a thriving print program, but if your subscribers don't get the message, then your efforts have been wasted. Email is a powerful media to use to get the message across, but there are many spots along the way it can get lost. Content filtering, blacklisting, poor list hygiene, and high complaint rates are just a few of the areas that will be touched on over time.