Can publishers control email delivery?

Yesterday I had the privilege of watching Brian Morrissey and Sean Griffey record the latest rebooting podcast at a MACMA event in Washington. Relevant links below.

Brian mentioned that publishers don’t want to depend on other tech platforms. If you live by the algorithm, you die by the algorithm. And Brian is exactly right about that. Publishers have invested way too much of their time, talent, and energies on platforms that then change the rules and undermine everything they’ve done.

Handing over the distribution of your content to a platform makes you very unstable, Brian said. And he’s right.

Sean said that’s exactly why he likes email, because that’s the only distribution platform you can control. I wrote in my notes, “somewhat.”

Sean is right that you can control email better than many other options, but even there you’re subject to factors beyond your control.

The email service provider the publisher uses can have a significant impact on delivery depending on how well they manage the technical side of the process. A smart publisher will stay on top of this, but it’s not entirely in the publisher’s hands.

Popular email services such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook, have their own spam filters and algorithms that sort emails to decide which ones go into spam, which into promotions, which into the inbox, and which don’t get delivered at all.

There are additional layers of filtering behind that, depending on where you’re sending the email. For example, if you’re sending to an employee at a hospital, the hospital will have filters in place to keep people from being pestered by unwanted emails.

If you’re not careful about these things, you can end up on a blacklist and very little of your email will get through.

Even if you do everything right, and your email gets through to your reader, you also face the prospect of user error. In some email interfaces, the “mark as spam” button is right next to the delete button. Once a user marks you as spam, it can be a challenge to get delivery restarted.

Aside from all that, there are problems with email delivery metrics, which are essential to the business of e-newsletters.

Any email sent to an Apple address might be marked as opened whether or not the recipient ever opens it.

Another interesting problem with email is that when you send to a large organization, there are bots that read the email and click on all the links to make sure they’re safe before delivering the email to the recipient. This seriously interferes with standard email metrics.

And, by the way, that sounds like a great business opportunity for someone. Use AI to filter out clicks from bots.

Anyway, Brian and Sean are both correct that publishers should try to keep their own fate in their own hands as much as possible, and email is the best option for that. But it’s not without its challenges.

Sources

The Rebooting Show
https://www.therebooting.com/podcast

MACMA
https://www.the-macma.org/