The Deliverability Forum winds down with today’s conversation with James O’Brien, Director of Marketing at Lashback. James is the evangelist of record for email compliance driving protection of reputation, long term profit, and sustainability for email marketers. As Director of Marketing for Lashback, he is a strong advocate for the email industry and consumers.
Chris – Q) How critical is authentication to your filtering heuristics? Or does it even play a role in your unsubscribe policy enforcement?
James – A) As LashBack educates and implores the industry and clients alike to follow all best practices, authentication is clearly a major attribute of “trusted” email messages. However it does not directly impact deliverability in the way most senders would think or would like. A bad actor could authenticate email for example, so in and of itself it is not enough. Authentication’s power comes from combining it with other aspects of reputation. For example one major receiver has discussed how senders who authenticate enjoy a 6-8% lift in deliverability. Another is combining authentication with use of the list-unsubscribe header and a good unsubscribe reputation to power a safe unsubscribe mechanism for consumers and is determining how this level of trust could impact that sender’s reputation on future campaigns.
Chris – Q) Do you anticipate moving towards a recipient engagement model instead of a binary complaint and/or bounce algorithm in the future? Again, how do you see unsubscribe compliancy playing into this?
James – A) For LashBack specifically, unsubscribe performance data is focused on the binary choices of whether an unsubscribe request was honored or whether a suppression list was abused. The third unsub check is whether an unsubscribe mechanism is visible and operable. If senders are failing these basic requirements they are hurting themselves by inducing recipient complaints impacting the sending IP and most likely the brand as well. LashBack does have an unsubscribe feedback program in beta which enables clients to receive direct, positive and negative feedback from actual recipients. Consumers want to be involved and more email marketers should be engaging them about their email programs as well as through them.
Chris – Q) What is your definition of an engaged recipient?
James – A) LashBack embraces a much broader definition of engagement in the lifecycle of a customer, which is generally the context of the commercial email messaging we monitor. Unsubscribe is as important an engagement mechanism as permission or click through. And LashBack has advocated for marketers and consumers alike that the rules of the engagement model need to be smart, broad and able to properly interpret a consumer’s inbox behavior. Some may leave commercial messages untouched for months in some complex hierarchy of folders because they are waiting for the right time for them to purchase. LashBack understands that many receivers are sophisticated enough to take this type of scenario into account as engagement increases influence in reputation. But marketers need to know, it is desirable to be un-engaged as the consumer’s preference so you can build trust when they want to call on your offer again in the future. Email will be there.
Chris – Q) How do you see the multi-channel communication “net” affecting email’s use as a conduit of information? Marketing?
James – A) LashBack loves email, but we are unabashedly addicted to Facebook and Twitter. And the most email most of us received in 2009 was from Facebook. Multi-channel may have converged to fractionalize big media’s broadcast model undercut print’s overhead but email has proved itself to be the workhorse of interactive and the bridge to and from direct marketing. Email is used by almost every business, because it has the highest ROI of any channel on or offline- it can broadcast cheaply but its power is in narrowcasting to segments and one-to-one relationship acquiring, building and retaining with virtually anyone. Email is proven revenue before, during and after social figures out what it wants to be when it grows up.
Chris – Q) If there’s one thing you could say to marketers to do differently or better, what would it be?
James – A) Find the organizational discipline to engage email marketing compliance as an ongoing process of improving your email marketing program with the goal of increasing revenue and profit.
Chris – Q) Are there any exciting and new innovations on your horizon that you would be able to give us a teaser on?
James – A) 2010 is a huge year for LashBack as we launch a new platform for our existing services, continue a truly global build out and ready the industry for the first Email Compliance Summit complete with new features and service to create more efficiency, greater collaboration and a better user experience and integration with our customers’ total organization and email ecosystem.
Many thanks to James for taking the time to talk with me and share with us his take on these important deliverability questions. This wraps us my conversations with leading deliverability experts, but that’s not all! I’ll be posting a recap of the series along with my take on the conversations I had. Did I agree with James’ answers? Would I back George Bilbrey’s take on the recipient engagement model? Stay tuned on Wed, Jan. 6th, 2010 to find out!
Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability at Bronto
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Chris,
I just wanted to thank you for putting together a great series of interviews with industry leaders. It helps those who may never have the opportunity to sit down and talk to them hear their point of view on email deliverability subjects.
Kent McGovern
You are most welcome! The whole point of this series was for education through the voices of other industry leaders in their own words. It helps give folks a wide breadth of opinions of folks who are not in the ESP space but have a lot to do with email as a meaningful channel and are committed to its continued success.
Hopefully a second generation of this will be an ISP interview series to get the POV from folks on the receiving side.
Thank YOU for reading! :-)
@ChrisAWheeler
Nice and great work Chris. You really deserve a great thanks for putting together the interviews from the giants of email marketing. It really helps me a lot and give me a great opportunity to know the way they feel.
Thank you. Let me know of any other suggestions you or anyone else might have for a future series!
@ChrisAWheeler
We send for a few clients that use the ‘reply-to email’ as their way of opting people out of a list. Is this process going to be looked at as less desirable? Should we be stressing to clients to also have an auto / one-click opt-out link for just this reason?
Thanks!
Two names that come to mind that I wouldn’t mind seeing interviews with are Laura Atkins and Al Iverson, I’ve learned a fair amount from the both of them.
Indie, the “reply to email” unsubscribe method is a compliant process per Can-Spam but you are correct that it is not a best practice. A web-based, as close to one-click unsubscribe as you can get is the best practice. In fact, in one unsubscribe-related enforcement action by the FTC, the service provider was getting the clients reply-to email unsub requests ironically caught in a spam filter. This problem went on for some time until consumer complaints caused the FTC to try to unsubscribe and when they could not an investigation began and and enforcement action later came down for I beleive what was a $55,000 fine. Definitely have your clients switch to a more reliable web-based unsubscribe process and make sure you are consistently monitoring that process to ensure it is working properly. Also don’t wait 10 days to unsubscribe consumers. Opt them out ASAP. Cheers! -JOB
James — thanks for the insight. That’s what I thought, so I’ll be pushing that more now, and with some great reason why ($55K!).
Thanks!