Ask the Expert: Chris Wheeler, Director of Deliverability, Bronto

We are pleased to introduce our new “Ask the Expert” series on the Pivotal IQ blog, featuring behind-the-scenes interviews with some of the email industry’s most interesting and knowledgeable people.

Our first guest, Chris Wheeler, director of deliverability for Bronto Software, works closely with ISPs and marketers to promote best practices and optimize email deliverability. He has become a well-known industry expert through his active participation in key councils and committees, and frequent contributions to the Deliverability.com blog, Email Experience Council blog, The Email Guide and The Email Zoo.

We asked Chris to share his unique perspectives as a deliverability professional, including his top 3 tips for getting email delivered to the inbox, his proudest achievement, and his take on the state of marketer-ISP relations and the future of deliverability.

1. What makes a deliverability/ISP relations professional successful?
   
   The key to being an effective deliverability specialist is having a broad understanding of email marketing purposes coupled with the technical aspects of how email works at the data transport layer. How does one in the deliverability space know what is acceptable? By listening to and keeping up with what the ISP’s publish as best practices and the expectations these ISP’s have for inbound email. What does it usually boil down to? Treating recipients with respect and not ambushing them with unwanted email. 
   
   You must remember that your customers being marketed to via email are the same customers of ISPs, and keeping these goals as much in alignment as possible ensures that mail recipients want gets to them. Of course, as a deliverability specialist, you must also know that ISPs have as their main goal to keep out spam and this is where having the technical knowledge to ensure your network doesn’t mirror that, regardless of best intent, that of a spammer.

 

2. Which ISP(s) are the best to work with, and why?
   
   Each ISP has its own expectations of mass mailers. While some can be seen as more draconian in their subjective review of email and broad (and sometimes unfair) labeling of legitimate senders as spammers, most ISPs have the same objective – to keep spam from clogging up their servers while ensuring that their customers are getting the content they desire. 
   
   Now, some ISP’s such as AOL and Yahoo! have very elaborate and well versed postmaster pages that essentially walk a sender through all of the steps to ensuring compliance; but some don’t.  Every ISP is different since there are no real enforceable standards that ISPs follow, unfortunately. 
   
   Other ISP’s aren’t as transparent but those that have significant footprints with recipient mailboxes are always willing to help when you’ve done your homework as a deliverability specialist. But, you must put the work into troubleshooting and keeping your house in order before reaching out to them since their jobs have a fiduciary obligation to their customers, not to email senders – which is a hard concept for a lot of email senders (whether through an ESP or in-house) to really understand. 
   
   ISPs don’t want mailers gaming their system (which is akin to spamming tactics) so keeping abreast of the latest changes being posted and flexible with keeping your success metrics as a sender in line with the ISPs are a must.  Yahoo! and AOL recently did this with letting senders know how their inbound filters are being tweaked to capture the latest industry trends towards showing true user engagement.

 

3. Please describe your proudest moment as a deliverability professional.  What major problem(s) did your client encounter and how did you resolve it?
   
   As the Director of Deliverability at Bronto Software, my proudest moment was seeing a client of ours have that “Ah ha!” moment. They got it. 
   
   Background: The client had been sending email that wasn’t targeted, their lists weren’t being managed well (all permission based but with no real investment in keeping a clean and structured list hierarchy), and their content just plain sucked.  As a result, recipients were complaining since expectations weren’t being properly set, folks were being emailed in a random manner with no real marketing methodology to follow their lifecycle, and as a result, deliverability plummeted. 
   
   This client was actually on the verge of being fired as a client since their numbers were so egregious with spam complaints and bounces, among other indicators straight from the ISPs, that the value I could provide in the deliverability arena to make the client a better marketer and thus reach more inboxes was seemingly impossible. However, after some “tough love” and letting the client know based on real statistics around recipients clearly showing they weren’t getting the email they opted in for, we came to an agreement to work together in a last ditch effort: The customer had to drop a lot of email addresses they’d previously gathered, due to age or inactivity – not an easy thing for an email marketer to do. We looked at their creatives, and restructured the layout and call to action in each one. Also, we made it explicitly clear to subscribers why they were receiving the messages they were and how they could easily opt out. 
   
   After showing this client the real money being lost from bad deliverability (which led me to blog about it here), the client finally understood that good email marketing doesn’t revolve around just the quantity of email sent or beating recipients over the head with repeated emails when they don’t convert.  It is about taking the time to have a program built out that recognizes individual recipient preferences and is focused on creating a great customer experience. 
   
   The client went from teetering on the edge of having to end their relationship with us as their ESP to turning into a star client. Their complaints have drastically declined, engagement and conversion have spiked and the client has a more loyal following with better brand affinity through viral marketing where their own recipients find the content worthy enough to share with others in their networks via Tell a Friend and other social network forwarding.  If this client could do it (don’t get me wrong, it took time, dedication and a lot of hard work on both sides - ours, as the ESP, and theirs, as the client) anyone could if the end goal is to be a better marketer.

 

4. What are your top three deliverability best practice recommendations?
   
   
   • Pay attention to the information ISP’s already give you in a real time manner.  By SMTP transmission, you have access to bounce information. Look at the bounce messages, monitor the quantities by recipient domains sliced by IP, message, time of day, and recipient trending.  Watch the user complaints by ISP and stay on top of doing what you can to mitigate these complaints.

    

   • Stay on the right side of the law by complying with CAN-SPAM. As the FTC Spam Coordinator put it recently in a blog interview, straight from the federal government’s mouth, not being compliant can cause major issues for you as a sender and should be a minimum standard for you to maintain when sending to ISPs.

    

   • Have a trusted and well-informed advisor to go to for questions around deliverability. As opposed to other dynamic content presentation forms, email is persistent. Meaning, once you send, it’s done and cannot be reversed, rolled back or otherwise erased. In this case, asking questions and ensuring you have your plan down before hitting the send button will do you well and no one will perceive you as being weak for asking, but rather smart before launching your campaign. Otherwise, the damage is permanent if you’re not spot on.

5. If you could change one thing about the factors that go into email deliverability, what would it be?
   
   As the email industry goes in general with no standards, it would be great to see ISPs come together and decide on a cohesive, agreed upon and adhered to structure around what those particular factors are and acceptable boundaries for those standards. I think domestically, here in the US, amongst the largest ISP’s, this is done to a respectable degree. Start moving outward into other geographic regions of the world or dive into the smaller ISPs and it gets very murky. Not only are the laws different by region but ISP standards around such things as authentication, originating IP, paths of mitigation and definitions of spam change seemingly with no logic behind it. I imagine this will change slowly over time as different parts of the world evolve in the email space, but in the meantime, it will surely keep senders in a challenging position trying to keep up with all the disparate ISPs all the time (or as close to it as possible).