Author: Anthony Mitchell

Anthony Mitchell is a Deliverability Consultant with ten years of experience in all areas of E-Mail Deliverability & Abuse Management.
A Blogger & Youtuber, discussing all things email

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Beginners Guide

Lesson 6, Single Opt in, Confirmed Opt in & Double Opt In

Lesson 6, Single Opt in, Confirmed Opt in & Double Opt In

The biggest factor that affects your Deliverability from the offset is your data collection process, which in turn directly affects your data quality. Here we are not just talking about who you enter into your database but also how you do that. The first thing is you need to be clear with your sign up process about setting expectations for perspective members, and making sure it is relevant to them. There are many issues that we face naturally from poorly designed sign up forms, for example if the syntax of the email isn’t checked we are likely to encounter an increase in bounces, which will in turn have a negative affect on our reputation.

That is key, now it’s time to talk about how you enter members into your database and differences in the methods. In regards to the layout and design of your subscriber form, i found this blog post which had some good tips in regards to sign up process. No matter which method of sign up you use, it’s always important to validate your data on sign up, check out a basic form here there is of course many ways of doing this. It is also important to see where your users are signing up from.

There are a few opt in processes, they are: Single Opt In (SOI), Confirmed Opt In (COI) and Double Opt In (DOI) below i will go into more detail about each form:

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Blog

Gmail auto unsubscribe and pilot FBL

Starting from last week, gmail has implemented an auto list unsubscribe in the header of the email.
See illustration below:

gmail auto unsub

 

 

 

 

After clicking the link, the user will then need to click to confirm you want to unsubscribe from the mailing list:
unsubscribe-supported

 

 

 

If for example, the client doesnt support this setup with gmail or the email is spam, then gmail redirects the member to navigate the clients unsubscribe or gmail policies to see the best way to be removed from the mailing list.

unsubscribe-notsupported

 

 

 

 

This might cause some uproar, but this is no showstopper in my mind. If a member doesnt want your email anyway, then better they unsubscribe directly than to complain. Look after your list and gmail will look after your reputation.

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Categories
Beginners Guide

Lesson 5, Spam traps & Honey traps

[Beginners guide to Deliverability] Lesson 5, Spam traps & Honey traps

Lesson 5, Spam traps & Honey traps

The key point here is your list hygiene or that of your clients. You can’t just drive your results with a good configuration, and a creative with great marketing. It helps, but its also about the data quality, and within that your list hygiene.

What is your list hygiene?

Your list hygiene in a deliverability sense is the condition of your list, and your management to try and prevent the list working against you. Often or not we are looking at such things as inactive members, repetative soft bounces, hard bounces and your unsubscribes.

For the purpose of this lesson i want to concentrate on inactive members and what part they play in regards to affecting sender reputation. The inactive segment of your clients database contains spam traps;

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Categories
Blog

Wiping the cobwebs away

I hope you’ve all had a good start to the year, it’s that time again.
Following on from the boom of the holidays, now the sales are upon us…but what’s that, a lul, a silence..

I still hear the whispers about gmail changes, out with the old and in with the new,
Spamhaus planting a gentle kiss in regards to how they deal with ESPs; what does this mean? will anything change? do marketers care, will ESPs enforce anything? isn’t it all just a vicious cycle, i mean, my emails are delivering what do i care.

In deliverability there’s always hope, and that burst of optimism at the start of the year.
Key point here is, keep your house clean, don’t worry about neighbours or external issues and concentrate on what’s on your plate.

What’s your biggest worry from a Deliverability perspective? I’d be interested to know.
This year i’ve promised myself to be more active on the blog, it’s time to get those cogs moving in time for the increase in volume.

Looking forward to the year ahead, I wish you all the best of luck.

Regards,
Anthony Mitchell

Categories
Beginners Guide

Lesson 4, Authentication and Prevention

[Beginners guide to Deliverability] Lesson 4, Authentication and prevention

Lesson 4, Authentication and prevention

As discussed in Lesson 1, the history of email, Deliverability is forever developing, not only to suit how people are intereacting with email but also to try and prevent some of the attacks that threaten ESPs, ISPs and their consumers.

One of the burning questions with email is, how do we know this email is from who it says its from, how do we know if this is a legitimate email?

Luckily for us, there are ways in which we can obtain this information and this is vital for us to have confidence in the knowledge that our emails are authenticated.

There are several types of authentication, to name the most commonly known ones they are:

SPF
DKIM
Sender ID
DMARC

Below i shall briefly describe how they work to authenticate emails and prevent the attacks mentioned in Lesson 3.

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Categories
Beginners Guide

Lesson 3, Security threats and Cyber attacks

Lesson 3, Security threats and Cyber attacks

Most of the time when talking about email, email marketing, deliverability or i’m explaining my work to my family, the first thing that is mentioned is the word ‘Spam’.
Spam

Why is this and how does the phrase come about?

You’d think that Spam is a fake meat per se, this would be a great term to coin for those annoying acquisition based emails you receive, well it’s not directly because of this. The actual term dates back to 1970, whereby there is a famous sketch by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In this sketch, based in a restaurant; some customers float in, and then you have vikings singing in the corner, the waitress comes over and then it all descends into mayhem, everything on the menu is with spam, and everyone in the room is singing ‘Spam’ drowning out the the other conversations.

You can watch the scene here.

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