February 2, 2018

Interview with Adobe Deliverability Expert Jon Burke

Last weekend I had the honour to host Jon Burke who is an Email Deliverability Consultant at Adobe. Did you know that Adobe could be your ESP? Yep, there isn’t only Mailchimp guys. 🙂

We covered a lot in this Q&A with Jon (he crushed it) and the video could have been longer if I had remembered to press record when he had to call me back due to connection issues. Damn me! Anyway, we’ll do another video with Jon in the near future.

Highlights of the video:

You have to build your own reputation when sending bulk emails. No Adobe, Amazon, Drip (they claim they have 99% deliverability or something), or any ESP can save you. If you send spam or if you send emails that people don’t bother to read, the IP reputation will not get to their inbox.
Domain Authentication is required to show that you are a legitimate sender sending from your own domain or your ESP sending on behalf of your domain. By the way, remember that if you receive emails with SPF or DKIM authentication doesn’t mean that they are not spammy emails. Spammers can also set up authentication for their domains which may resemble other legitimate domains just to get your attention (spoofing). This is an awesome article which shows what spammers can do, brilliant!
The List-Unsubscribe header is very important for your campaigns. Check out with your ESP on how you can implement this. Most ESP’s set this up by default. Make sure you give priority to the mail-to header as per Laura on WttW.
Place an Unsubscribe link on the top of your content because they reason you’re getting complaints is that people can’t probably find your unsubscribe link down there in tiny 6 font! Make it easy for people to unsubscribe, how many times do I have to say that? Jon said that lately Hotmail and Microsoft penalise senders more when somebody marks their emails as spam. Laura said that too not long ago.
Check your emails with different email clients (seed lists) to see how the email is rendered if you’re using HTML code, where does the email land, ie. inbox, spam, etc. For testing purposes, remember it’s better to use real peoples’ addresses rather than brand new email accounts as the ISP filters use machine learning algorithms to learn how to classify emails according to a specific user’s previous actions (based on experience in machine learning terms).

Enjoy the video with Jon.