Top Email Myths Busted at the NYC EEC Meetup – EEC – Email Experience Council – DMA

• Updated on: 2019-02-25
• Read original article here

Email marketing professionals gathered in Return Path’s Park Avenue 41st floor Headquarters in New York City for networking, food, drinks, and a lively discussion at the Email Experience Council 2017 New York City Meet-Up, and the view was spectacular.

Also working in tandem was the crew from SendGrid giving away shirts, stickers, and other fun items.

This EEC’s Meet-Up — hosted by the experts in email deliverability Return Path and industry-disrupting, cloud-based email service SendGrid  — featured a talk given by Len Shneyder, VP of Industry Relations at SendGrid and Vice Chair of the EEC alongside of him Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy and Security Officer at Return Path and Chair of the EEC that worked to clear up 17 common email misconceptions encountered on the front lines when working with customers.

Some of these discussions included things like how Gmail has two classes of engagement signals, positive and negative. Of the 8 or so signals they listen for in every Gmail account marketers are privy to 3 of them.

Opening an email is universally viewed as positive. Replying to a message is also positive, it shows a modicum of engagement, and also is a reason not to use “Do not reply” style ‘from addresses.’  A spam complaint is a universal signal of badness. But at the top of the badness list, deleting without opening is very bad because that shows the sender is not paying attention to who is and who is not engaged.

Also a discussion on 3 reasons to avoid mailing the unengaged. Unengaged users represent a block of recipients that over time have a higher propensity to bounce, are more likely to mark your messages as spam and ultimately, because the postmaster of Gmail said don’t do it. His contention is that all email marketers have a concept of warm up and ramp up to production volumes—they should similarly employ a framework for ramping down emails to unengaged users.

One of the more common myths that deliverability experts have struggled with over the years is the belief that a severe deliverability problem can be solved with a new IP. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The misconception here is that the IP has been tainted, and that by sending email over a new IP the sender can leave behind the ‘baggage’ and problems associated with the old IP. The truth is that the problem will follow the sender to the new IP—the problems are often tied to poor targeting, inorganic list growth, over aggressive mailing cadences or unengaging content. New IPs will not solve these issues.  Moreover, new IPs in today’s reputation-centric inbox world are not the same as new IPs of old. In the early 2000’s rotating IPs was a common tactic by spammers and unscrupulous mailers. New IPs had no negative reputation in what was then a nascent reputation construct, so they would automatically deliver. Mailbox providers decided to treat new IPs, with no mailing history, as suspect until they established a good sending reputation by delivering wanted email. Thus switching IPs whenever a delivery issue cropped up became impossible given the limitations, in terms of volume/throughput, imposed on new, unknown IPs. Mailers need to think about the longevity of their mail program—that means solving issues as they arrive and nurturing the overall reputation associated with their outbound IPs and domains, that’s the only true path to long lasting inbox success. Rotating IPs, or switching them out to avoid dealing with a problem is a common tactic employed to this day by spammers—so don’t ever do it!

Interested in participating in a Meetup in your area or joining the eec community? It’s a great way to knowledge share and network with your peers. Reach out to eec staff for more opportunities.

Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy and Security Officer at Return Path and Chair of the EEC Len Shneyder, VP of Industry Relations at SendGrid and Vice Chair of the EEC