{"id":1133,"date":"2013-05-31T11:55:07","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T11:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/new\/?p=1133"},"modified":"2014-10-27T11:56:54","modified_gmt":"2014-10-27T11:56:54","slug":"everything-that-you-know-about-spam-is-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/?p=1133","title":{"rendered":"Everything That You Know About Spam Is Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Image:<\/a>Image: Vince Lamb<\/a><\/div>\n

At least, if everything you know about it is everything that I knew about it before last week. I attended an NTEN 501TechClub event<\/a> where Brett Schenker<\/a> of Salsa Labs<\/a> spoke on how the large mail services identify Spam emails. \u00a0It turns out that my understanding that it was based primarily on keywords, number of links and bulk traits is really out of date. \u00a0While every mail service has their own methods, the large ones, like GMail and Yahoo!, are doing big data analysis and establishing sender reputations<\/a> based on how often their emails are actually opened and\/or read. You probably have a sender score<\/a>, and you want it to be a good one.<\/p>\n

Put another way, for every non-profit that is dying to get some reasonable understanding of how many opens and clicks their newsletters are getting, Google could tell you to the click, but they won’t. \u00a0What they will do is judge you based on that data. \u00a0What this really means is that a strategy of growing your list size could be the most unproductive thing that you could do if the goal is to increase constituent engagement.<\/p>\n

As Brett explained (in a pen and paper presentation that I sadly can not link to), if 70% of your subscribers are deleting your emails without opening them, than that could result in huge percentages of your emails going straight to the spam folder. \u00a0Accordingly, the quality of your list is far more critical than the volume. Simply put, if you send an email newsletter to 30,000 recipients, and only 1000 open it, your reputation as a trustworthy sender drops. \u00a0But if you send it to 5000 people and 3500 of them open it, you’ve more than tripled the engagement without soiling your email reputation.<\/p>\n

I know that this goes against the grain of a very established way of thinking. \u00a0Percentage of list growth is a simple, treasured metric. \u00a0But it’s the wrong one.<\/p>\n

Here’s what you should do:<\/p>\n