Email deliverability is a job that requires constant care and attention within any organization. The question often is, who is the best to attend to this? I see this being answered two ways
- Marketing – Those who know the customer
- Engineering – Those that develop the applications
From my perspective as the Director of Email Services at an ESP, Dyn Inc., I find that we often interface with a varied mix of marketing and engineering contacts with our customers. Let’s take a look at these different perspectives.
Marketing
For those customers which run their email programs out of their marketing department, there’s a definite attention to ROI and the understanding of the cost of customer acquisition. Each email address represents blood, sweat and tears which this marketing department has put into building their email program. Their personal mission is to the make the most out of each contact and they are dedicated to this cause.
Unless these individuals have a long history in Email Marketing, these conversations with these contacts are usually behind the theory behind what could make someone subscribe to an email program with a bad email address, why email addresses would go bad, or why ISPs would make spam traps. They’re then responsible for bringing back these thoughts to their system administrators to have the appropriate changes necessary put in place.
Engineering
For email programs that are run from an engineering perspective, conversations are usually very focused on algorithms or filters needed to minimize bounces, complaints, or remove unengaged users. Since these individuals are those that know their applications inside and out, it’s very easy to have a conversation on how to approach optimizing their campaigns.
Insights
Both departments have their strengths and advantages, which is why I believe that it should be a cross functional approach toward managing email programs. Here are the insights that I’ve seen through dealings with customers and helping with our email programs at Dyn.
- Deliverability can move fast sometimes and your engineering departments will need to segregate email lists and optimize delivery. For those customers that we’ve seen that put their engineers into a role responsible for optimizing revenues, this often has moved slow since they are often requested to prove out each change on a small subset of their list before making changes globally.
- When there’s an issue with deliverability, Marketing departments usually will find this through a decrease in revenue. This is often too late, so it’s best to have engineering monitor or build tools for the marketers to be watching engagement rates before revenue decreases.
I’m interested how others feel about their deliverability focused teams and where they live in their organization? Have you seen strengths or challenges with different approaches?
