Deliverability in Brazil

In Brazilian companies, the teams in charge of email marketing are usually very limited.  A single person may have to handle strategy, design, marketing offers, technical issues and basically anything related to this communication channel. That makes the communication easier as all the information is centralized and also offers the flexibility to experiment.  For instance, by following best practices, we can already see some of the expected and steady results!  However, most of the time the decision maker is someone else who doesn’t really pay attention to details. This is one of the common difficulties we have to face in Brazil.

There are 4 main Brazilian Internet Service Providers (ISP): Uol/Bol (up to 5% of databases), Terra (2%), IG (less than 1%) and Globo (0.5%). These ISPs offer a mailbox with their ADSL subscriptions, and that’s what most people use as their email address.

The usual global ISPs make up the largest part of the database, with 40% for Hotmail, 30% for Gmail, and 15% for Yahoo. These well-known platforms have Postmaster pages, Feedback-Loops, support teams, and even useful tools such as SNDS or Google Postmaster Tools. On the other hand, the local players have limited technical resources to deal with deliverability issues as they’re probably busy trying to block spam or other threats. I think that local ISPs should follow the lead by the larger ISPs and provide more resources for monitoring or troubleshooting as that would help increase the market maturity.

Brazil is a growing market full of opportunities with an expected growth rate of 10% for e-commerce and the retail industry for the coming years.  While marketing strategies from abroad are still being adapted locally, it’s likely that we’ll also develop local strategies dedicated to the consumers of this specific market.

On the challenging side, the country lacks regulations, laws, and penalties to deter companies from collaborating with spammers, or even hackers. Some can purchase databases with full user information, then go to some ESP and start to send right away. No consent is given from the recipients and how the data was initially collected also remains a mystery. We saw in the past few years several cases of databases poorly secured and were easily stolen with not much resistance. But the worst part is that many people honestly don’t know that this is a criminal practice. Some, however, know perfectly that it’s not “correct”, if not just illegal, but consider that as everybody else does it, they have no reason not to make some “business” as well. And many ESPs will tend to accept spammers as long as they’re paying.

Of course, ISPs rules, and anti-spam filters are more efficient than laws, and that’s why we can demonstrate that by following good practices (and common sense), it is possible to build a durable business. Unfortunately, many companies are not mature enough and focus only on immediate earnings, with the risk of going out of business short-term, instead of a sustainable growth of their business.

Another trend is the performance business model: the more emails are sent, the more sales are made. But it requires sending many more emails to grow sales just a little, and that affects negatively the overall deliverability. Here again, more maturity is required to realize that other models that focus on targeting, re-targeting, content personalization and ROI, are more efficient and for long-term growth — but also require more efforts.

Users are slowly starting to question and challenge these behaviors, as spam and other abuses are not considered “normal”. Reversing the trend will take time.