The Whole Magilla
By Ken Magill
About Ken
If there’s one word that most aptly describes Ken Magill’s coverage of online marketing, it’s fearless. For more than a decade, Magill has built a reputation for calling it like he sees it no matter who may get offended. Some marketers read his column just to make sure they’re not in it. In a trade-publishing market populated mostly by vendor representatives who must watch what they say, Magill stands out as the one guy who says what he thinks. Moreover, he often writes what others are thinking, but are afraid to say. He can even be very funny.
Having been a direct marketer, and having covered online marketing since 1997 for DM News, Direct, Chief Marketer and Multichannel Merchant magazines, Magill offers a unique, informed perspective on the evolution of digital selling. He was also founding editor of trade weekly iMarketing News and Magilla Marketing, a newsletter dedicated to e-mail.
He is currently founding editor of the recently launched trade weekly email newsletter The Magill Report.
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Some Email Industry BS We Should All Be Wise to by Now
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Don't know? Neither do I. Let's try and find an answer.
According to a list put out by ranking firm topseos, Pinpointe On-Demand—as topseos referred to it—has the best delivery rate of 10 email service providers it ranked for January.
The company name is actually just Pinpointe, but let's not quibble.
No, let's just cut to the real problem with Topseos' rankings list—that it mentioned ESPs' so-called "delivery rates" at all.
ESPs don't have delivery rates. Or they shouldn't anyway.
Why? Because every major lever that affects whether email gets delivered to people's email boxes is under the list owner's control.
Email inbox providers' spam filters have traditionally relied on three major metrics to determine whether or not email coming from a specific sender is spam: the number of spam complaints, the number of bad addresses a mailer tries to reach and the number of spam traps they hit.
And these days, ISPs are reportedly increasingly looking at engagement metrics—clicks and opens, for example, or lack thereof—to weed out unwanted mail.
All of the above-mentioned metrics are directly attributable to the sender's behavior, not the ESPs'.
Yet, some email service providers tout their so-called delivery rates in their sales pitches.
For example, Constant Contact claims its delivery rate is 97 percent. But when one reads why its delivery rate is so high, it becomes clear
"We hold our customers to high standards with good email marketing habits and practices," says a headline on the page touting Constant Contact's delivery rate.
There is nothing wrong with Constant Contact touting high standards.
And this isn't to say an ESP has nothing at its disposal that can affect delivery rates. For example, an ESP can affect deliverability by throttling-or sending the messages at a slower rate—so ISPs are less likely to block them.
Also some ESPs have better support structures in place than others. As a result, delivery rates can reportedly vary from ESP to ESP. But it's not the ESPs' delivery rates we're discussing here. It's the senders' delivery rates.
This may sound like a ridiculously minor quibble. But referring to email delivery rates as the ESPs' shifts responsibility for behavior that helps ensure high delivery rates from where it belongs—the sender.
Senders of commercial email must continuously be made aware that the responsibility for ensuring high email delivery rates lies mostly with them and there's not an ESP in the world that can magically overcome the deliverability consequences of sloppy email address acquisition practices and poor list hygiene.
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