Have you noticed the trend with List Mailers and Safelists?
For years owners have insisted that you must have a Gmail account or they would delete your account. I understand why. Other mailboxes and even domains were just bouncing the emails, no doubt partially due to the volume of mail hitting the mailbox.
I've been noticing bounce tests from various mailers for a while. At first, it was a trickle. Right now it's becoming a flood.
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The reaction of various program owners has been quite enlightening.
Some are pretending that there is nothing the matter. Others are trying to offer a solution. Others who I thought better of are ignoring support requests.
I have no doubt that the events of the past couple of weeks are the result of a Google algorithm change.
I also have no doubt that various servers and domain names are pretty much blacklisted. It's a long way back from there.
Some professionally run mailers seem to be running without being hindered in any way. A prime example of this is the Darren Olander group of advertising sites. Darren ruthlessly polices his membership list and places inactive members on forced vacation mode. It's a good policy. He never advertises a huge membership base but his activity and click-through rates dwarf mailers with advertised membership levels ten times the size. Other mailers have been moving to on-site traffic models for some time. Herculist for example uses a variety of mechanisms to improve click-through rates for emails sent. My testing reveals that most traffic from Herculist comes from on-site rather than email.
Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to people in the List Mailing industry.
For a while there, it seemed an hour wouldn't go past without a new mailer launch. Most of these offered little innovation and served little real purpose other than to clog up the system.
People rarely close advertising accounts. They just drift away...and the emails keep getting sent to largely dormant mailboxes. Eventually, domains and more particularly, various headlines get flagged...and mails start to bounce.
The team at ListNerds saw this coming.
When they relaunched the site, they made a conscious decision not to deliver emails and to require people to log in to view emails. The concept of proof of mail and voting probably assisted in that regard but the decision to not deliver emails was a masterstroke.
So, where will this end?
I suspect we're at the beginning of a major change that could be every bit as challenging as the Paypal purge of several years back.
The well-run mailers should be OK, but many of the 2nd tier mailers and safelists are going to struggle for relevance and service delivery. I'm a member of well over one hundred mailers. I know that the 80/20 rule is pretty much in effect with them. (80% of the business comes from 20% of the mailers). It's probably time for a cleanout and a reassessment of how we use them and what we expect from them.
List Nerds points the way forward. It's new, it's difficult at first to get your head around, but it's worth being involved.
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@markhodge - spot on post. I'm in the knee deep total membership of mailers, but at the end of the day; I'm pretty much focusing on those that are still viable and I'm sure some of those will sink with the Titanic that is coming.
At the end of the day, even if they don't go with putting their mailer on a blockchain; they will be forced to have the mails on site option to survive - if they even care.
Good post Tom. If list mailers are going to survive they are going to need to step up their game. It seems that on-site mail is the way to go right now.
We just spoke about the refusal for some in the 'old marketing world' to adopt and adapt...And it's going to be a rough time for those that haven't done much to improve their situation....Great post man, timely!
It's an interesting thing to look into but I think Google and other mail systems just considered the mails coming in as spam. Rather than deal with which ones were good, they might have decided to just cut this person off. I never thought about why they did everything inside the system but this is a valid reason why.
I consider it a privilege to be on a platform with a team that has great foresight. I've been reading for quite some time from other Hivers that the kind of service ListNerds is introducing has transformed the rule of the game. Thanks for such a confirmation!
That makes a lot of sense. Creating their own platform for the mails gives them some control over what is coming in and going out. That is pretty cool. I found this post via List Nerds. Email has definitely changed quite a bit from when I first started working in IT. I remember my first email account I had to access from the command line in a Linux console. It was crazy!
The problem with the marketing industry is that for decades some practice less than ethical business policies and they ruin it for everyone else. Google Gmail has one of the strongest most problem-free mail services on the net. You can even use it like Outlook and hook up your other email accounts to it.
ListNerds saw this coming because for years Google has been working toward making its services very unfriendly to online marketers. You have to figure that @jongolson literally wrote the book on Traffic Exchanges, and a safe mailer is just another version of a traffic exchange.
When an article is great I can't seem to stop talking and this article is great.
I think only the "big-name" mailers are going to survive. Even some of those will probably go down. A few months ago, I belonged to a "big-name" mailer that gave me the worst delivery rate I had ever had. I was paying monthly not to get my emails delivered. Thanks for your post.