Interview with a deliverability manager: Jérôme Gays - Cabestan

The problems of deliverability in E-mail Marketing take every day more place. That's why it is interesting to discover a function that is a little bit particular in E-mail Marketing, the role of deliverability manager.

Jérôme Gays has been working at Cabestan for more than ten years, he is responsible for deliverability and ISP relations since 2006.

Interview

In a few words, what is the role of a "Deliverability Manager"?

That's a good question and I think it's interesting to take a quick look at the history of the emergence of this specialty called Deliverability. I've been working in email marketing for 10 years and I've seen the market transform over the years.

At the beginning, the challenge for routers was mainly "technical", it was to develop tools that would support the email problematic of marketers.

At the level of message sending and delivery, there was no problem, routers could send large quantities of emails without delivery concerns because the filtering chain of incoming emails on the ISP side was simpler, made from filters based mainly on the content of the messages, it was necessary to ensure to have a valid content to see these emails succeed.

Due to the ever increasing volume of spam, this filtering system soon showed its limits, so ISPs offered their email users to report emails they considered as SPAM and decided to use the reporting statistics to filter incoming messages, this was the genesis of "Reputation" filtering of the sender.

This led to the emergence of new problems for routers and their customers, requiring research, analysis and relations with the various players in the chain, for which it was necessary to identify those responsible: this is the emergence of Delivery Managers and ISP Relations.

The role of the Delivery Manager is to ensure the proper delivery of email campaigns to be sent.

This includes setting up a routing environment that is technically compliant with the recommendations, as well as daily monitoring of campaign performance and analysis and resolution of delivery issues. An important part of the job is also to educate the customers by transmitting them the good practices of email marketing.

Isn't the deliverability manager seen as an obstacle by the marketing teams? Isn't he considered as the "yes but" man of e-mail marketing?

Indeed, for the reasons mentioned above, the shippers had to change their practices and this was not always easy to understand, both for the customer and for the router for whom these new rules led to new costs.

On the side of the routers, an awareness was necessary on the need to require more commitments from their customers to force them to respect certain rules, which can sometimes go beyond the legal context that governs electronic communications.

Today, in case of a problem of complaints or blacklisting because of a customer, the router must imperatively ask him to change these practices and in case of refusal, apply a suspension of service. This is paradoxical because these constraints potentially lead to less business for the router.

On the side of the final customer, some understood very well the new rules and adapted their practices but others wanted to completely hide them and chose to change routers without changing their practices. The people who work in my position at the different routers have seen the same customers with the same practices and therefore the same problems, sometimes several times! Until these companies understood that it would be better to solve their problem rather than move them.

So yes, we can say Yes, the Deliverability Manager is often considered as the "Yes but" man of email marketing because he knows the numerous constraints of the email chain, from the click on the "send my campaign" button by the marketer, to the delivery of the email in the recipient's inbox.

As far as relations with ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are concerned, are they "a priori" or "a posteriori"? Do you really have direct contact with the big ISPs?

Yes we do! They are a priori and a posteriori. But not all ISPs communicate with senders in the same way.

There are two main families of ISPs: webmails that provide free email services and ISPs that provide primarily an internet connection and a mailbox service. For the latter, email is a necessary service for their customers and represents an important cost center, mainly because of the cost of protecting their customers' mailboxes.

In general, webmails put the rules of the game in a clear and consise way on their website on pages called "postmaster".

These pages are public and dedicated to bulk emailers. They provide information about the ISP's handling of emails such as the authentication standards used, the interpretation of SMTP messages, the public blacklists used and sometimes even a possibility to check the reputation of a sending IP online.

But just because you have a relationship and can talk to a representative at an ISP or ISP doesn't mean that they accept all of our emails with closed eyes.

The filtering rules are the same for everyone and there is no preferential treatment for this or that router, contrary to all the arguments that can be used in sales pitches!

Having relationships with ISPs makes it easier to diagnose certain cases, but it is important to keep in mind that ISPs are not at the disposal of senders.

From a pedagogical point of view, it must not always be easy to explain certain mechanisms to novices. Feedback loop, certification, DKIM, reputation, ... How do you manage to popularize all these concepts?

This is the difficulty of this type of position: explaining to marketers technical phenomena that may seem complicated.

It is necessary to find the right words to make the analogies with everyday life but with the democratization of the subject and a little experience, we can do it!

The field of reputation and deliverability in e-mail marketing is constantly evolving. What do you see as the challenges in the coming months?

ISPs are stepping up their efforts to serve their email users better. This means protecting them from threats such as viruses, phishing and official spam (viagra, casino, porn) but also letting only the emails they are interested in through their inboxes. This means that filtering techniques will continue to evolve. We are starting to see new techniques appear such as domain reputation and the inclusion of reactions in reputation calculations.

During a discussion with an anti-spam manager at Yahoo, he told me about the difficulty they had to identify precisely the senders responsible for the campaigns that caused important complaints from their subscribers. He realized that the reputation on IP was not necessarily the best because the IPs belong to the router and are not necessarily dedicated to the customer in question. This creates injustices because once an IP is burned at a sender, nothing prevents the offender to burn another one at another router.

Domain reputation is a way of not simply attaching a reputation to an IP address but taking into account the IP, the sending domain and the domains present in the email to identify a sender. Pushed to the extreme, this technique allows an advertiser to be accountable for its email marketing practices, regardless of the means it uses to send these emails.

The other challenge ahead will be the inclusion of user feedback in reputation calculations. Filtering incoming emails on user complaints requires, to be fair, to reduce the volume of complaints to a volume of received emails, so as to obtain a "complaint rate". If a large number of users do not react to the email in question, this rate may be artificially low because the user has not been subjected to its appreciation. To remedy this, reputation calculations will increasingly integrate user reactions (opening and/or clicking) in their calculation.

Coupled with a better identification of the sender thanks to the authentication on the domain, this will necessarily make the rules evolve by forcing the senders to target their campaigns more and to include the behavior of the Internet users in their targeting.

One thing is for sure: in email marketing, the days of "Batch, Spray and Pray", i.e. the regular mass sending of a single content to an entire base, are over.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jerome for agreeing to participate in this interview and for taking the time to answer my questions in depth. Feel free to follow him on his Blog Email Way or on Twitter.