They are admitting they can’t persuade, cajole, influence or pressure their companies to actually follow best practices. Some of the comments public and private comments I’ve heard from various industry leaders:

• “But my boss tells me we can’t stop what we’re doing, even though we’re getting less than 80% inbox delivery.”
• “In my heart, I believe that most email marketers have good intentions. They are not out to spam you. They don’t want to send you email that you don’t want, that you’ll delete, or that your (gasp) mark as spam. They want to do the right thing. The challenge is that their [sic] is constant pressure to squeeze more juice out of email marketing. “
• “My company can’t stop customers from sending to purchased lists, but want a list of really bad vendors so we can ban lists purchased from them. What sellers should we ban?
• “as an individual who has been doing email marketing for over 10 years now, I can tell you that there are internal pressures, IT resource constraints and just about anything you can imagine that can hinder a email marketer from doing what is right for the subscriber. Understand that as a professional, I strive everyday to become a better email marketer, but I sometimes fail. That in no way makes me stupid…it makes me human.”

I know that people want to squeeze every possible bit of revenue possible out of email. The problem is that, as the above people have admitted, squeezing every possible cent out of email means adopting practices that are disrespectful of the recipient. They are practices that cause most recipients to label mail as spam. That mail is indistinguishable from spam. Delivery is poor and contributes to the general noise in all our mailboxes.

Email marketers need to stand up and stop adopting practices used by spammers. Your recipients don’t care that it might be hard or expensive to not send them mail they didn’t ask for and don’t expect. Your recipients don’t care that you have pressure from your boss to meet quotas this month. Your recipients really only care about themselves and their mailboxes. Respect your recipients ahead of your bottom line.

Credibility is the sole currency you have in this relationship. Hoard it carefully and spend it wisely.

Delivery is not a matter of life and death, so failing to get what I need from an ISP does not result in anyone dying. But over the long term, I am much more likely to get contacts, help and information if I demonstrate that I am an ally and that I can be trusted to work with them to get their users email that they want while stopping email they don’t want.

Here’s my not-so-patented recipe for success in getting information from ISPs.

1. Never contact without first knowing exactly what it is that you want. Are you looking for information? Are you looking to get a block lifted? Do you need help translating a cryptic bounce message? Whatever it is, be clear about what you want. If you’re opening a ticket, give them all the information they ask for. If they have a text box where you can give more details do so, but be concise and clear.
2. Never lie or shade the truth. The ISP reps have heard it all before, they know that a significant portion of people with “ISP relations” in their job title will lie, cheat or run their grandmother over on the street if it will get their mail delivered better. This is the reputation (right or wrong) of our industry. You can overcome this, if you always shoot straight. Don’t promise anything your customer (or client) can’t deliver.
3. Have your data together. Have all the data you will need to deal with before opening a ticket or escalating. This means you need to know the dates the mail was sent, the IP it was sent from, what the bounce message was if it was rejected, how long this has been happening, what URLs are in the message, what the from: line of the message is. Being able to provide all the data that the woman on the other end needs to help you is going to make the process so much easier for everyone.
4. Be reasonable. You know how over worked and behind you are? How many clients and customers you have screaming at you for a response? The ISP folks are at least that behind, and are generally not making near as much money as you are. Don’t open a ticket, then send an email to the guy you met at that conference and then open an IM conversation with him. Give them a chance to get back to you before escalating
5. Be pleasant. Social lubrication is a good thing, keep it light. Again, most of us who do this are incredibly busy. “Hi, How are you, do you have a minute” is a great opening line. “Hey, what’s the new law in CA say?” is less so.  If they are open to a bit of chatter then that’s great, if they say they are busy ask your question and get out.
6. SAY THANK YOU. This is especially true when you’re escalating something and using a personal contact. Thank them for helping you. It’s even nice to send a (very brief) followup once your customer or client has fixed whatever the problem was. “Thanks for your help the other day. Your information helped me to convince client to do X, and now they are getting good inbox delivery.”

Consistency is key to establishing a personal reputation that you are someone who is both pleasant to deal with, trustworthy and not going to waste their time.

It’s well worth a read, particularly given there are at least two ISP representatives speaking out about what they think makes a good email marketing program. You’ll see many of the themes we talk about here represented in the various articles.

Good delivery boils down to a few things, the most important of which is sending mail people have asked for and want.

e-Dialog: Delivery Specialist

Responsys: Delivery Consultant

ThinData: Delivery & ISP Relations Analyst

ThinData: Privacy Analyst

Know anyone else hiring? Leave links in the comments.

A lot of folks have asked me about replacements for Delivery Monitor. There are, of course, Return Path and Pivotal Veracity, but many of the smaller mailers I talk to can’t justify the expenditure for either service.

Enter Green Arrow Monitor, a service provided by Green Arrow. This is a new seed list service aimed at marketers that need some delivery monitoring at commercial US ISPs. They’re reaching for the middle of the market. As a bonus, they’re offering special pricing for former Delivery Monitor customers.

While they don’t offer all the bells and whistles of other seedbox services, for the small to mid-size company that wants to know what their delivery is like at the major commercial ISPs this is a worthwhile service to investigate.

Full disclosure – I worked with GreenArrow to look at what parts of the market were being missed by other monitoring services and provide delivery consulting for some of their customers.

Sometimes, though, there is nothing to do. The rejections are because something broke at the ISP and they have to sort through it. Just this week there’s been a lot of twitter traffic about problems at a major cable company. They are rate limiting senders with very good reputations. They have admitted there is a problem, but they don’t have a fix or an ETA. From what I’ve heard it they’re working with their hardware vendor to fix the problem.

Hardware breaks and backhoes eat fiber. Yes, ISPs should (and all of the large ones do) have backups and redundancies. But those backups and redundancies can’t always handle the firehose worth of mail coming to the ISPs. As a result, the ISPs start rejecting some percentage of mail from everyone. Yahoo even has a specific error message to distinguish between “we’re blocking just you” from “we’re shedding load and temp failing everyone.”

The good ESPs are those that set and enforce higher standards than the ISPs. They invest money and time in both proactive and reactive policy enforcement. On Monday I’ll talk about these standards, and the benefits of implementing these policies.

The typical ESPs are those that have standards equivalent to those of the ISPs. They suspend or disconnect customers when the customers generate problems at the ISPs. They have some proactive policy enforcement, but most of their enforcement is reactive. On Tuesday I’ll talk about these standards and how they’re perceived by the ISPs and spam filtering companies.

The ugly ESPs are those that have low standards and few enforcement policies. They let customers send mail without permission. Some of the ugly ESPs even abuse other ESPs to send some of their mail, thus sharing their bad reputations across the industry. On Wednesday I’ll look at some of their practices and discuss how they affect other players in the industry.