What happens when you finally live the paradigm of ‘less is more’?

The first thing that happens is your list gets smaller; your house file shrinks because you go through it carefully and draw a bright line separating active from inactive users. This is when something magical happens: as your list begins to shrink, the total value of your active users begins to increase.

Two fundamental changes occur when you stop sending email to users who really don’t want to receive it:

1.  Because the people most likely to complain are the ones that don’t want to receive your email, you increase the likelihood of delivering emails to those that want to receive them by proactively decreasing the potential for complaints, bounces and other negative feedback.

2.  As your overall open, click-through, and conversion rates increase, so does your reputation. You will increase the likelihood that active users receive your messages in the inbox. Essentially, by being just slightly less zealous you’ll improve all the metrics your boss cares about.

Finally, there’s an important derivative benefit: if you use a 3rd party to deliver your emails, your campaigns become more cost-effective to run, with increased ROI against a more highly-engaged user base.

Message Bus provides built-in segmentation tools to ensure compliance and best practices while providing a rich source of data through our Stats API that allows you to clearly and easily understand which of your users are engaged, and those you should stop communicating with.

This is a growing trend among mailers

Fab.com isn’t the first company on the Internet to think innovatively about their mailing practices. LinkedIn kicked off the New Year by informing subscribers to their “groups” feature that they would no longer receive group digests because they either hadn’t opened them or hadn’t clicked into the group. Since I’m guilty of signing up for groups that look interesting and promptly ignoring them, I was subsequently unsubscribed from several groups. Do I miss the emails? No, and I probably have healthier wrists from having to manually delete fewer messages.

The point isn’t to stop sending email, it’s to send email smarter by leveraging user engagement data to drive your decisions. You know your users better than anyone else, a clear definition for the meaning of an “active” or “engaged” user in your business is the key piece of information you need to optimize your targeting and segmentation by chopping off disengaged segments of your list.

The Message Bus Advantage

We’ve made a conscious decision to be different and are betting the market is ready to embrace change. Our founding principle isn’t only that email shouldn’t be hard; it shouldn’t pit senders against receivers. It should put recipients – everyone’s shared customer – at the center of the universe.

We’ve engineered a platform that respects the recipient, both the domain and the individual, by immediately processing negative feedback. Compliance across domains has been programmatically built into the application as well as a network effect in reducing the likelihood that you’ll hit a hard bounce.

The Message Bus Platform achieves messaging nirvana by applying global intelligence on a local basis. What do I mean by this? One of the advantages our sender community receives is a global hard bounce rule. When a mailer hits a verified hard bounce (55z) error with a corresponding DSN that truly denotes it as a hard bounce, we suppress that address across our entire customer base.

We’re working to make it so that not only can you be just like Fab, but you can enjoy actually reaching the customers you want to reach without managing multiple integrations and complicated IT infrastructure.

Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
Sr. Product Marketing Mgr.

What DMARC.org has achieved is testament to the group’s dedication to fighting fraudulent email. We have provided a specification that has been adopted by the world’s largest consumer email providers and the top 10 sending domains, protecting an estimated 60% of the world’s email boxes.

DMARC’s reach now far exceeds the original membership, with presence at M3AAWG, an interop event in 2012, and an open-source implementation created by the Trusted Domain Project. The swift adoption has helped create a participant community of policy and tools authors discussing and suggesting improvements to the specification.

Message Bus is one of those participants. We believe so strongly in the power of messaging best practices to effectively mitigate the impact of fraudulent email that we’ve built a platform around the idea. I’m proud to be able to say that every message transiting our cloud-native platform has been 100% DMARC-compliant, in addition to benefiting from automated reputation-management practices that meet sender’s needs while respecting recipients and receivers alike.

Many platforms are designed to send mail, the Message Bus platform goes further by dynamically adjusting to real-time feedback provided by receivers and recipients, ensuring that the only mail sent is mail that’s wanted and complies with all manner implicit and explicit sending prescriptions.

As more and more clients replace their outmoded traditional MTAs with Message Bus, we process ever-increasing volumes of mail and are on the way to monitoring and analyzing billions of messages per day and all the feedback they produce.

We’re excited about the prospect of making significant contributions to the messaging community by sharing operational experience and data regarding the performance & observed benefits of message authentication and policy.

Sincerely,
Paul Midgen
VP of Product

Regardless of the level of effort involved in your vetting process, there will always be certain factors you can utilize as “hard stops,” and that clarity will help protect two of your most precious resources: time & money.

The goal of this post is to arm you with techniques for effectively identifying the clients that simply aren’t worth your time.

Habit Three – Put First Things First

Senders find themselves struggling against content and reputation filtering – the filtering technology that receivers (mailbox providers) use to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Vetting is to prospective clients what content filtering is to unwanted email. If you’ve built an effective practice sending email on behalf of 3rd parties you will appear attractive to the ‘bad guys.’ As a 3rd party sender you represent a potential gold mine: a route to market, an avenue for success because you have a reputation ripe for plundering. Vetting helps you protect the IP and domain reputation you’ve carefully nurtured by keeping bad guys off your system.

To do this well, you must get inside the mind of a receiver and learn to leverage tools that help differentiate the good, the bad, and the ugly to ensure you only do business with the good.

Blacklists – Obviously not every blacklist has the same value, but there are certainly several that you can heavily lean on during the vetting process.  If a potential client already has a plethora of serious blacklistings, it is in your best interest to a take a pass without further investigation. Since there are literally dozens of blacklists, each with varying efficacy and wildly varied criteria for listing/delisting, it’s worth mentioning a few to pay attention to: SBL (Spamhuas), SURBL & URIBL.

Category of Sender – Identify the types of senders you know from past experience you simply don’t care to deal with because they will be problematic down the road. For example, maybe affiliate marketers aren’t your cup of tea.  If that is the case, then when an affiliate marketer comes knocking on your door, it should be a very short conversation. Set business policy that defines the scope of your services, your ideal customers and edge cases to diminish internal friction.

Alternatively you may consider certain types of content or product fraught with peril. Any product or service that has age restrictions such as alcohol, firearms or pornography, presents very unique challenges. If you’re not ready to get down in the weeds and very thoroughly understand and comply with industry regulations around specific content, then you should pass on deals that include any of the above.

Red Flags – Look for obvious red flags early in the process.

About Us – If the potential client’s webpage features an “About Us” section littered with mentions of permission, affiliate, marketing, media, advertising, premium, publishing, etc. this could be a red flag – particularly if you’ve decided senders of this nature are not the type of customer your company wants to work with.
History (or lack thereof) – If the sender’s domain was registered earlier today, it should be a red flag, especially if the client wants to send a campaign in the millions.  Sender’s domains are their brand, and a brand should have some discernible history. On the other hand, a newly registered domain might only have a few thousand emails associated with it, in which case it may be a reasonable request.

Location – You may decide that you don’t want to do business with companies outside of your geography or that exist in a region with very strict regulations you’re not ready to comply with. These are points of demarcation you should agree on with your executive team as hard stops in the vetting process based on business needs and reasons.

Volume – Eager beavers pose a unique risk and should be scrutinized. Understandably there are situations that require a massive change and quickly to a sending infrastructure, but you should be concerned when someone wants to dump a huge volume on day one. A legitimate sender will want to protect his or her reputation and transition over time ensuring smooth, uninterrupted delivery. What’s wrong with their current solution and did they break it? A deal with short time frames and pressure to push into production may not be a good fit. Remember reputations are hard to build but easy to lose.

Lack of Reputation – When you take your initial pass running some basic reputation checks, like comparing data from Senderbase, Sender Score, Trusted Source, AOL’s reputation tool etc., does everything come up “N/A”?  This may be reason enough for you to say “no thanks” without getting any further into the vetting process.

Gut Instinct –If you have a strong BS detector, use it!  Often you will find that you know something is rotten in Denmark from your very first conversation. Don’t be afraid to trust your instincts; you are protecting your company’s interests and sometimes your spidey sense may be all you have to go on.

Next Up: Think Win-Win

-Tim Moore
Director of Customer Performance

Habit Two: Begin with the End in Mind

Before starting any task, it’s always a good idea to define the task’s purpose – in other words, have a game plan that will help you achieve your goal.  Client vetting is no different. Without defining the goal, client vetting will be perceived as nothing more than a roadblock to on-boarding customers. The end result of rail-roading the on-boarding of customers leads to eating lunch alone, being mocked by the cool kids (sales), and a combination of wedgies and swirlies – basically high school all over again.  Ok, maybe not the last two but you see where I’m going – the objective and mission of client vetting needs to be clearly defined so you can begin to assemble the resources that will get you to your goal.  In the case of client vetting, the high level goal is straightforward:  on board high quality senders where that represent the establishment of a mutually beneficial partnership.  With this in mind, let’s begin to think about the steps that will speed us to our goal. . 

Create Policy that Drives Success – If defining goals is the game plan then writing the policy is the playbook.  The policy you create will be the criteria you look at when evaluating a potential customer.  This can be done through the creation of Acceptable Use Policy, Terms of Service, Email Standards, Anti Spam Policy, or any combination.  Also consider internal process documents and talking points to help communicate the overall objective and policies within your own company, department, and team.  Remember, you need to be able to clearly explain and justify any email standard or policy you create – both internally and to potential customers.

Performance Metrics – In addition to policy items, be sure you are able to measure success objectively.  Create performance metrics that  align with your overall objectives.

Executive Support and Involvement – Don’t go rouge by creating policies and standards on your own.  Involve the right executives in the discussion making process.  Incorporate their feedback and get their buy in; if they fully understand and support the objectives of client vetting, they are far more likely to allocate resources to the cause.

Resources – Consider the various resources you’ll need to accomplish your goals:

Time – Don’t rush vetting or take shortcuts.  Successful vetting is thorough vetting.  Be sure to communicate timing and set expectations appropriately.

Staff – Because client vetting is time consuming, investing in additional staff may be necessary depending on sales pipeline.

Tools – While there are a lot of great free public tools out there, there are many paid tools that will make life easier.  When researching tools, be sure to focus on value, not cost. Cutting corners can have long term costs beyond the few dollars you save up front.

Be Agile – After creating standards and policies, you may find you missed something major or you just aren’t getting the results you hoped to achieve.  Don’t be afraid of change.  Don’t lose sight of the end goal.  Be flexible and make adjustments where necessary.

Collaboration – Talk with others in the industry.  Share examples of victories and defeat when it comes to objectives, policies, and processes.  Learn from each other and work together to improve the overall email ecosystem.

These are all important areas of emphasis in building a successful client vetting framework.  Define success then put the foundation in place that will help take you there. Without clearly defined goals and ensuring all stakeholders are aware of the process, timing and the necessary resources, you may find yourself skirting through the process or glossing over key evaluations that lead to disaster. Next Up: Put First Things First

-Tim Moore
Director of Customer Performance

With so much to choose from, why did I select Message Bus as one of the seven? Part of the reason is due to confirmation bias – Message Bus’ solution hits home for me because it targets some of the pain points I experience in running my own content marketing business. Part is due to the pedigree of their management team, which includes a former founder of Twitter, and the rest is due to the fact that their value proposition makes sense even at first glance.

I can’t tell you how many startups I investigate that after pouring over their website and collateral, I still end up asking, “What exactly is it you do?” With Message Bus, the answer is simple: they intend nothing less than to tame the Wild-West nature of email.

If you’re like me, you get more emails in your inbox each day than you can ever hope to manage. According to a McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, the average knowledge worker spends 28 percent of each week wading through emails. A study commissioned by telephony company Fonality bumped that number up to 50 percent – a bit high but not completely unbelievable.

Whatever the actual number, we all know that the signal-to-noise ratio of our inboxes is way, way too low.

Some of that is our fault. We opt-in for crap we don’t really want and never should have signed up for in the first place. We send out half-formed messages that get half-formed replies, and we aren’t aggressive enough with our spam filters. Messages get lost in the weeds of our spam boxes and we expend time looking for emails we should’ve received, but due to the imperfect nature of spam filtering, missed the inbox.

Moreover, most knowledge workers rely on email as the go-to form of corporate communications, displacing face-to-face interactions and even phone calls. This means that what used to take a few minutes of conversation can now stretch out over several emails:

“Did you get the new Q1 sales strategy presentation?

“Yep. Thanks for sending.”

“You bet.”

“Oh, I forgot this important attachment.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

“Oh, wait, use this one instead. It has updated sales figures.”

And on and on and on . . .

The biggest problem with email, though, is the economics of it. If you can send a million messages as cheaply as ten, what’s to stop spammers from flooding the world with garbage? Precious little, it turns out.

However, raw dollars aren’t the only form of economic currency that matters. Another key type of currency in any functioning economy is trust. A recent article by Project M sought to answer how much trust – or lack thereof – impacts an economy:

Stephen Knack, a lead economist at the World Bank, once commented that, “basically all the difference between the per capita income of the United States and Somalia” could be explained by trust. These currently amount to 46,546 US dollars and 220.30 US dollars respectively (UN 2009/2010); a difference of over 46,300 US dollars.

Of course, anti-spam programs have done their best to factor trust into their algorithms, blocking domains that are known havens for spammers and targeting “spammy,” or untrustworthy, keywords. Complex algorithms have evolved that take into account previous recipient actions and habits in determining the spaminess of a message.

The problem with this approach is that there are a lot of civilian casualties, with plenty of good, and even business-critical, emails getting lost in junk folders.

This is a market opportunity that Message Bus intends to take advantage of, and that’s why it was so easy for me to make them one of my top startups for 2013. Take a look at the chaotic mess that is your inbox and you know from your own experience that they are targeting an important problem.

While there are tons of features in the Message Bus solution that email marketers will like, such as delivery guarantees and more granular reporting than simple open rates, the feature I like the best is called “Trusted Sending.”

For individuals and companies alike, trust is a byproduct of your reputation, and Trusted Sending helps you protect your reputation. If you can’t manage your communications reputation – something spammers try to hijack all of the time – you are part of the problem.

With Trusted Sending, only those who follow email best practices are allowed to pass their messages over Message Bus’ Global Delivery Network. This may sound trivial if you don’t pause to think about it. Yes, existing anti-spam programs already block known spammers, but what do they do with trusted parties exhibiting some of the behaviors of spammers? What do they do with the spam-like messages from colleagues, companies you do business with, the Obama campaign, your Aunt Sue, etc.?

They either treat them like spam or not. It’s a binary choice. There’s another important concept to consider: digital guilt by association. The network that sends your emails is viewed piecemeal and as a whole by receiving domains. You may be a good actor, but the network and range of IPs could be thick with spammers and so your messages will be perceived as part and parcel of a source of message abuse.

What if you had a system that warned those “trusted” users of their bad behaviors? Wouldn’t it be better than blacklisting your Aunt Sue? Wouldn’t it help improve the signal-to-noise ratio of your inbox? Wouldn’t it improve the quality of each and every email over time?

You bet it would.

Careful readers will notice that I included Message Bus as a mobile startup, yet I haven’t really touched on anything mobile. If you are like most knowledge workers, you already check email as frequently on your smart phone as on your computer. Sending spam over mobile networks is more expensive than over wired networks – for end users and carriers alike – and unlike all-you-can-eat broadband connections, carriers will often pass the brunt of the costs to you with high data costs, or even data throttling.

As we move further and further into the mobile era, the cost of spam and of general poor email practices will continue to rise. An annoying email that interrupts you as you pore over accounting spreadsheets is one thing. An unwanted email that you have to pay for and which distracts you from a pleasant dinner with friends is quite another. A nuisance email that interrupts an important sales call and incurs huge data fees as you roam overseas is far more than a nuisance: it’s a drain on productivity and your travel budget.

Keep an eye on Message Bus in 2013. I see big things ahead for them this year and beyond, and if they can manage to tame my out-of-control inbox, I’ll be watching them for a good long time.

##

Jeff Vance is a technology journalist and the founder of Sandstorm Media, a copywriting and content marketing firm. He regularly contributes stories about emerging technologies to CIO, Network World, Forbes.com and many others. 

Easy, right?

Whether your potential customer is a Fortune 500 brand or a startup, there are significant benefits to establishing a thorough client vetting process:

Cost Reduction – By weeding out customers that will present a variety of compliance and deliverability issues, you will reduce back end costs.

Improved Reputation – By doing your homework on prospects, you’ll help improve the overall reputation of your IPs. There is a most definitely guilt by association; doing business with bad actors will have serious repercussions.

Improved Performance – With the improvement in reputation comes the added benefit of an improvement in performance. What you’re trying to avoid here is the paradigm of garbage in-garbage out.

Value Add to the Customer – If best practice recommendations are made during the vetting process, not only will you proactively solve potential issues, you’ll also provide the customer with a valuable service before they send their first email.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.  There are plenty of other benefits.  Of course effective client vetting doesn’t come without its challenges.  In this series, we will offer some tips and recommendations when it comes to creating highly effective client vetting.

Besides the reasons we outlined above, there are numerous other benefits to good customer vetting. If you know your customer’s you can better service their needs, address their pain points and help them build a successful business. Like the habits employed by the most efficient workers in the world, we think there’s a construct to describe good customer vetting practices. We’re calling this the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Customer Vetting. To be clear, this isn’t the only way to do it, but it’s worked well for us and may help you tighten up your own standards to ensure the success of your existing and future customers. Without further ado, the first of our 7 Habits of Highly Effective Client Vetting:

Habit One: Be Proactive

No Free Passes – Start with consistency and a level playing field for all customers and prospects. Regardless of how you came in contact with a potential customer, through a referral, your mother’s cousin’s brother’s in-law’s best friend from summer camp, or through a lead gen campaign, it’s the same process. The associated risks are the same for a referral or for an inbound lead, they must be vetted in exactly the same way in order to ensure best practices, positive engagement and ongoing good reputation.

Get to know your potential client.  Understand the entity as a whole.  Look at items such as tax records and other public records.  Can they pay their bills?  How long have they been around?

Understand their relationship with their own customers.  Use public resources such as the Better Business Bureau to research customer complaints.  Are there reports of fraud?

Get to know the executives at the company – have they worked for known abusive senders in the past?  By get to know we’re not suggesting you go through their trash like in a spy thriller, but take the time to see what they’ve done in the past and the kind of companies they’ve worked for or with.

Gain a full understanding of the business.  Does it make logical sense? Creating a business and website is easy, as a matter of fact, for the latter there are an estimated 644 Million websites in the world today. To give you an idea of scope, that’s roughly twice the population of the United States.  As we’re all aware, not every website is there to benefit the humanity, some are malicious attack sites that have but one purpose: to defraud anyone that visits them.  Sometimes detecting a fraudulent business is as easy as just using common sense and taking a critical look at what their Internet properties are trying to accomplish.

Contact information is valuable  - any contact information the potential client shares is a valuable data point so use it, research it, and validate it.  Utilize Google to look up names, physical addresses, phone numbers, contact names, and email addresses.

Another way to think about vetting, or the need to be thorough during the process, is the difference between our system of justice where you are innocent until proven guilty and the Napoleonic code where you were guilty until proven innocent. This is not unlike the shift in how ISPs viewed IPs with no mailing history. At some point in the evolution of IP and domain reputation, ISPs began to view an IP without a mailing history as potentially suspect. Once upon a time, new IPs were worth their weight in gold. Because of abuse the posture that ISPs assumed with new IPs was one of reserve and scrutiny. We’re not advocating paranoia, but a healthy level of suspicion isn’t a bad idea.

The more proactive research you do on the way in, the more protected you are in the long run.  Think of a customer as a potential investment.  Before you pour money into a potential investment, you do a fair amount of research.  This is no different – the Internet is expansive.  Utilize it to the best of your advantage.

Coming Soon: Habit Two: Begin with the End in Mind

-Tim Moore
Director of Customer Performance

That one sentence doesn’t fully convey the complexity of this task, so let me break it down for you. Cloud means flexible – scale up, scale out, scale down, scale to meet unforeseen and massive demand. Oops! There went a VM, hope you didn’t need that one. No monolithic scaling here. What if the entire cloud (I’m looking at you, Amazon) goes down? Ok, stop, review, reset, redo: better make that cross-cloud redundant. This data doesn’t have to be kept forever, but it will be heavily queried. Analytics only work if they’re accurate which means this isn’t a job for an in-memory store. Get it to disk, and get it broken down.

The answer to this is obvious, isn’t it? Divide and conquer; sharding (horizontally and vertically) with inheritance. What kind of weapons to bring to the challenge? No, not pistols at dawn or rapiers in the park, rather PostgreSQL. The nature of the beast is event driven data (affectionately dubbed “spice”, for it must flow), which creates an ideal horizontal sharding structure. The nature of our data, our spice if you will, is event driven: message send logs (delivered by harvesters) are completely independent of unsubscribe events, which are both detached from API events as one example. Even more valuable than that, this is log data. That means that so long as it is written once it doesn’t have to all be in one place, in fact it works better if it’s not. Each cluster, in each location can have one, or many databases all receiving data of the same type. Each with slaves of course, for failover and read distribution.

That leaves us with one final pain point – table row count. Colossal tables are bad, m’kay? It’s bad for indexes, it’s bad for queries, and it’s bad for backups. I am going to assume that by now you are screaming vertical partitioning at the screen, unless you are a developer who has ever had to join x^n tables together or run x^n queries in parallel and crunch the result. Excuse me while I go put on my “I <3 PostgreSQL” shirt for this next part: inheritance.

A single empty parent table, with child tables, constrained by date, creates a hierarchy where queries, schema changes, updates, and deletes are simplified so that only the parent need be specified. In other words, those commands cascade though the parent to all applicable children without having to join them all explicitly, saving you from certain insanity.

Now that we have outbound data confined to bite sized chunks, we can back them up one by one, making cold storage viable. You can purge dated data with a single table drop rather than a targeted delete that would spawn a vacuum process draining precious system resources. Best of all, your queries become efficient, simple, and the holy grail: readable.

The result of this approach is a data skeleton that is down right elegant. It’s more flexible than a Mongolian contortionist and easy like Sunday morning. Add an analytics warehouse (Alia – as if you couldn’t guess) and we have a structure that with ease fills all the needs of a start up growing at break neck speed.

Happy coding!
-Samantha Billington