You have just changed your router and you expect a lot from the new one! That's normal. But in fact, what are the reasons that pushed you to go elsewhere? Were your emails delivered in a spam box? Were you missing some features that are essential to your emailing usage? Did the price difference justify a change? Was the customer service not up to par?
Beyond the price argument, it is often the deliverability and the customer service that are the biggest source of dissatisfaction with a router (these two points can be closely linked). But is it always justified? Not necessarily, as we will see later.
What are the responsibilities of an email router?
The first responsibility of an email router is to ... send the emails that are entrusted to it. This may seem obvious, but it involves many technical constraints. These constraints are related to the capacity and speed of sending. Is the router's infrastructure robust and scalable enough to handle the peaks of sending during busy periods such as the end of year holidays or sales?
On the other hand, email delivery is also in constant technological evolution. Therefore, the router must be able to update itself, integrate the latest authentication standards, support encryption technologies, ...
But sending an email is not based on technical criteria alone. When all the technical criteria are met, the deliverability criteria related to reputation still need to be met. And there, on the reputation issues, if the email router has a role to play (maintaining good relationships with ISPs, webmails, anti-spam industry, ...) the biggest part of responsibility is on the side of the user of the routing platform.
Beyond the sending of emails, the router is also responsible for collecting a whole series of signals. These are the traditional open and click statistics, but also unsubscribes, spam complaints... which if not captured in a reliable way can cause serious deliverability problems.
The router must detect bad practices... not remedy them
Before moving on to the responsibilities of the users of the various routing platforms, let's take a few moments to consider a concept that is often misunderstood. If when we talk about reputation in deliverability there are rarely responsibilities to be put on the side of the router itself, it still has an important role to play.
This role is to detect the bad practices of its customers, which could have a negative effect on the whole platform and therefore also on its other customers. As an advertiser, it seems obvious that you don't want your emails not to reach their destination because another advertiser has questionable practices? If this is the case, it should be obvious to you that your router's role is also to check your practices in order to warn you of deviant behavior... or to suspend you if you jeopardize the whole (or even part) of the platform's reputation.
That's why most routing solutions like ours check a certain number of criteria to monitor the deliverability of our users. Among these criteria, we will find your open rates, your bounce rates, your complaint rates, the different deliverability scores available (Senderscore, Hotmail SNDS, ...), the presence of spamtraps in your lists, ...
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What are the responsibilities of advertisers regarding deliverability?
We have just mentioned a number of indicators that allow routers to detect risky behavior or deliverability problems. But these indicators are often only a consequence and are the same indicators used by webmails and ISPs to classify emails as spam or to accept them. If these indicators are the symptoms of evil, they are not the cause. The cause is not the routers, but the advertisers, the users of the routing platforms.
The causes of deliverability incidents are 80% of the time linked to a poor quality of file. Either the file is old and is not routed regularly, or the addresses are collected without a strong commitment from the consumers, or the addresses have been bought or recovered from who knows where, or there has never been a reliable management of errors and unsubscriptions, or there was no permission to collect, or, or, or, ... the reasons can be numerous.
In all the cases we have just listed, the responsibility cannot fall on the router. It is not a question here of relieving us of our prerogatives, but unless an advertiser delegates the management of its emailing strategy to us, there is no reason for us to intervene on these subjects... because before an incident occurs (and even after), the advertiser would not think of talking to us about these subjects (it sometimes even tries to hide them).
Finally, it should also be noted that there is no need to have "very" bad practices to trigger a deliverability incident due to poor file quality. It only takes one time, an import of email addresses collected following a poorly performed action, a targeting error, ... to trigger disasters that are difficult to recover.
The router can still give a boost
Even if all the responsibility is not on the side of your email router... we will not abandon you for all that! In case of an incident, you will obviously have someone to talk to, even if he might put his finger where it hurts! In this case, don't get offended, listen religiously to what he has to say and work hard to rectify the situation.
But even outside any crisis period, your router can help you. Most of them will give you advice, publish guides, educate you to respect the best practices in terms of deliverability.
Most routers also provide their customers with many tools to analyze and control deliverability. This is obviously the role of the statistical reports of your campaigns, the deliverability dashboards that they can offer you, ... but it can also be services such as the cleaning of your lists to remove erroneous or obsolete addresses, a solution that is also offered by EmailStrategie.
As we can see, not everything is black and white when it comes to responsibility. The best thing is to discuss, exchange and establish a certain level of trust between the different parties.
