I’m on the road lately and find that some marketers I meet are surprised to learn how much marketing there is in email deliverability. I’d love the feedback from all you non-marketing types here!
Here’s my view: The marketing piece – all the things you do as a marketer to ensure a great subscriber experience like great content, relevant promotions, strong calls to action, effective design, frequency, permission, privacy, triggered messages, transactions — is often more essential to great deliverability than the technical aspects like infrastructure, reverse DNS and authentication. Of course, you need both to reach the inbox.
Here’s why the marketing plays such a key role – because complaints are such a key factor in determining your deliverability. ISPs view complaints as a proxy for how relevant and welcome your subscribers find your messages. Relevant messages have low complaint scores, the key factor in Sender Reputation and good deliverability. Irrelevant or too frequent messages have a lot of complaints – lots of subscribers clicking the "this is spam button."
No matter how good your infrastructure, privacy policy or even the practices of your email delivery vendor, if you want to consistently reach the inbox – and earn a response – you need to keep complaints at a minimum, and apply both marketing and technical brains to creating great subscriber experiences.\
So it’s just as true that the IT folks can’t blame us marketers and we can’t blame them (or our ESPs). The great, important weight of deliverability is a shared responsibility – and opportunity!
Last 5 posts by Stephanie Miller
- Are You Ready for the Ultra Managed Inbox? - August 30th, 2010
- Privacy Updates & Regulation Ahead for Digital Marketers - June 4th, 2010
- Half of Global Email Users Knowingly Click on Spam - March 25th, 2010
- The Importance of Inbox Placement Data - February 14th, 2010
- What Will It Take To Get You to Authenticate - August 4th, 2009
Stephanie, you make some great points.
To my way of thinking, good deliverability is a result and shouldn't be a goal. Good deliverability is a combination of technology and best practices–not any one magic "thing" or trick.
The goal should be to follow best practices with the result being good deliverability.
Many ESPs have good technology and good deliverability people, but as I've heard deliverability guru Al Iverson say, "We can't get bad mail delivered that subscribers don't want no matter how good our software or people are."
Our ideal relationship with a client is a partnership when it comes to deliverability. You bring us good lists, good content, and agree to follow best practices, and we can help you get your email to the inbox. It just doesn't work well any other way.
Stephanie-
I disagree, respectfully. You simply cannot place more importance on the marketing piece than the infrastructure that generates the email on the wire and gives you insight real-time. You’re putting the cart in front of the horse. Infrastructure is the foundation to inbox placement. Not the other way around. Following email best practices is extremely important to the equation of deliverability, don’t get me wrong.
Here is one of the main reasons why infrastructure is the key. Without having an MTA that gives you control, sophisticated traffic shaping, queue management, DKIM, bounce control management and continuous real-time visibility, your sender reputation will rapidly decline and it’s a moot point.
I agree that the weight of deliverability is a shared responsibility by both the IT team and Marketing team. The great part about email is that it’s a way to bring these disparate teams together to work cohesively for the greater good(inbox placement) and increased revenue.
@Jeff – I don't think that Stephanie is putting "more importance on the marketing piece than the infrastructure…" In fact, she's arguing that the responsibility is shared (see blog post title). I'd agree with you that infrastructure is *the foundation*, but good infrastructure coupled with crappy email practices (leading to high hard bounce rates and complaints) still equals poor deliverability. Garbage in. Garbage out. The far majority of ESPs should be able to handle the basics – if not more – when it comes to infrastructure, right?
@Stephanie – What about hard bounces and deliverability? It is not *just* complaints, right?
dj at bronto