random thoughts
So much going on in the past week in the world of email deliverability. Multiple email platforms (ISPs/MBPs) and sending platforms (ESPs) having problems or unexpected downtime. Multiple issues with DNS, which is one of those things that few people understand and even fewer people manage or monitor properly. Which is why you should follow Julia Evans and check out her “How DNS Works!” zine, if you haven’t already. And why we all should tread very lightly around those legacy systems that manage so much of the DNS that makes the internet work. But I digress.What’s going on THIS week is that Jennifer Nespola Lantz and I are going to present a webinar on Wednesday specifically talking deliverability as it relates to the little guy. You’re not paying a Marketing Cloud a million dollars for platinum support. It’s just you and maybe somebody else and you’re managing your sends out
Last time, I wrote about list-unsubscribe methodology specifically, but today I’d like to broaden the topic to all the different methods that senders use to offer an opt-out option for their subscribers. That could include “one click” unsubscribe links, or leading users to unsubscribe screens or profile center pages, or asking a subscriber to reply to a message using a special tagged address, or sometimes people will say “just reply to abc@xyz.example with UNSUB in the subject line.”Some are better than others. Here’s some pros and cons around different types of unsubscribe methodology, as filtered through my twenty years of watching people send marketing messages (and seeing both a lot of good senders and bad senders along the way).Unsubscribe via email: Reply-to-unsubscribe with a tagged address.Maybe your sending platform puts a tagged address in the reply-to header and tells you that if you want to unsubscribe, you should send mail…
You don’t send mail as noreply@, do you?If you discourage email responses by sending your marketing email messages with a noreply@ email address, you’re missing out on an opportunity! It’s an additional engagement signal to tell the ISP that people like your messages, want your messages, and engage with your messages. It’s not the single magic incantation that’ll prevent you from going to the spam folder at Gmail, but it will help!With Apple’s MPP really making it so one cannot rely on open rate tracking, marketing email senders are going to have to look to alternate and additional ways to drive engagement to be able to continue to maximize deliverability success.Changing from a “please do not respond to this email” model to a “reply and tell us what you think” model is one of those ways.Is this advice really that new? Maybe not. There’s a lot of other good folks out…