Dearest mailer,
My fearless leader Phil Schott pointed me at this Ken Magill article today. It's all about blame. Who really is responsible when your email gets blocked? We've been together for so long and there's so much that we could point to.
I don't want to talk about blame. I gave up blame for Lent one year and never picked it up again. I replaced it with personal responsibility and owning my actions. Since I can't own your actions, I can't own all the responsibility for your email getting blocked. Blocking happens for a very select number of reasons. I will own responsibility if your email getting blocked happens for one of the reasons that are in my control if you will own your part.
The things that I can do wrong that might lead to blocking include some technical things you shouldn't have to worry about like mail servers are otherwise behaving obnoxiously or outside of internet norms.
1. Too many concurrent (or simultaneous) connections.
2. Too many recipients sent per connection.
3. Too many connections per IP.
4. Too many connections timing out during the transaction.
5. Transactions are being retried too often.
This is the part that I, as your ESP, own. I have control over this part. I'm set up to act respectfully to the internet. Otherwise, my business model wouldn't work. I want things with us to work out. If you have a problem with an individual domain, I can make changes for them, I promise! I am set up to be as respectful of ISPs and the rest of the internet as I can possibly be. I really want this email marketing thing between us to work! This is a relationship, a true partnership and it takes both of us working at it to make it work right.
I know it may sound like a lot, but the rest is up to you. Your list quality, user engagement, not mailing to older segments, sending relevant content to the right segments, regular re-engagement campaigns, knowing when to let go of old addresses... This is all up to you. I’ll even talk to ISPs for you. You just need to tell me honestly what you're doing and work with me as a team. I rely on you, my dearest mailer, to also act respectfully or all the work done on my side will make no difference for when it comes to your deliverability.
I really am doing my best to do my part. Some of these things change and there are so many moving parts to keep up with. There are things like sender authentication, too, that I have to know. Laws change all the time and I have to keep up with all of those to give good guidance. Will you work on keeping your list segmented and fresh? Will you make sure you have true permission to send to your recipients and that you’re sending relevant content? Do you send out regular re-engagement campaigns to people who haven't responded to you in the last six months to a year? Are you willing say goodbye when a recipient hasn’t opened or clicked in the last year to eighteen months? That’s what we both need to make this work between us and with the ISPs.
Yours always,
ExactTarget Deliverability
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