Ken is right. As he almost always is.
I received a cold-call voicemail yesterday from a representative of an e-mail service provider looking to do a barter deal.
Never mind I’m not the person to approach for barter deals—or any other type of non-editorial issue, for that matter—the sales rep made one statement that made me cringe.
“Our delivery rates are very high,” she said.
That statement has no place in a pitch from an e-mail service provider.
I agree with you and Ken…to a point. As I work at an ESP, I 100% agree that an individual client is responsible for their own deliverability. With that said, we, like most ESPs out there, send (most) client mail over an IP pool. Meaning that each client is impacting not only their own deliverability, but other clients’ deliverability as well. That’s why, when our sales team talks with prospects, one of the first questions asked is “What is the ESP’s deliverability?” That’s also why most ESPs employ a deliverability team – to proactively track and maintain the pool. The deliverability rates of an ESP are, arguably, tied directly with the caliber of clients, which makes that question a reasonable one.
Again, to reiterate, deliverability is 100% in the client’s hands. Policing our clients to make sure our IP pool’s deliverability is high is a piece of that puzzle.
-Kelly Lorenz