You may have seen the announcement over at Laura Atkins’ blog about Yahoo no longer giving preferred delivery to Goodmail certified messages. I’ve got no insight as to why this might be, and have zero opinion about Goodmail anymore.

But I did find this comment from Laura very relevant to something we’re doing at MailChimp:

“Quite frankly, I am unsurprised by this. My impression of Goodmail has always been they never really understood the role of a certifying agency. For any certifying agency to be successful, they must continually monitor certified customers and enforce standards. Goodmail’s initial certification process was fine, but they never seemed to follow through on the monitoring and enforcement.”

That part about how “they must continually monitor”? I can’t blame Goodmail. That’s extremely hard to do! In a way, MailChimp tried to do this sorta thing ourselves…

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On a recent ESPC call, a major ISP (who owns one of the top 3 email services) reported that they were moving away from using feedback loops as their primary method of determining the “spaminess” of a sender. Before the FBL pundits rejoice, wait till you hear what they’re measuring instead.

Now, they’re shifting their attention to measuring “engagement.” They defined engagement as opens, clicks, and having an email moved out of the spam folder. This is similar to Gmail’s approach to leaving images on if the recipient knows the sender.

How Does This Change Things?

Hmm. If ISPs are starting to look at how engaged your subscribers are, how could an email sender use this to their advantage (beyond simple list  segmentation)? Perhaps you could send email a little differently through your delivery servers, based on your subscribers’ engagement activity? For example, if you knew half the people on your list were active users, but the other half not so much, wouldn’t it be smart to deliver the campaign to the engaged people first, then the others last? It would really suck to only get a small portion of your list delivered before an ISP decided you have poor list management practices, and blocked the remainder of your message.

Yes, MailChimp does all that. Automatically, and behind the scenes. That’s the reason we launched the List Activity Score back in March. We rank every single user on your list by their engagement, then we prioritize email delivery through our network based on overall list activity score. One of the many ways our nerds in the lab keep striving to improve email marketing.

Learn more about our List Activity Score

Related:
How sending to old lists will kill your deliverability

We just had to help a MailChimp customer whose email campaigns got this strange warning by gmail:

To be honest, I’ve never seen that warning, and have no idea what exactly triggered it. As you can see, the email was also sent straight to gmail’s junk folder.

On the surface, nothing about the campaign looks bad. The general content of the campaign is fine. The sender is not in a risky business (it’s a church). Their email delivery infrastructure (ahem, mailchimp) is fine. So what gives?

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