An Email Snob Interview with Al Iverson

I hope you aren’t tired of the Email Snob Interview Series yet. Today, I’m pumped to talk email with Al Iverson, the Director of Privacy and Deliverability for ExactTarget and author of Spam Resource.

ScottWritesEverything.com: Al, thanks for jumping into the mix. I’m looking forward to it.

Al Iverson: My pleasure. Sounds like a lot of fun.

SWE: I’d love to know how you got your start in email marketing. Tell me a bit about your background.

AI: I tend to lurch from career to career based on a combination of aptitude and serendipity. Once upon a time, I was in graphic arts. Mostly prepress for print advertising. That employer started to dabble in the Internet (circa 1995) and I ended up helping to manage those efforts part-time, then eventually, full-time. Then I developed my own spam filtering in response to the unwanted mail co-workers were receiving. I started swapping filters with like-minded Internet friends. One thing led to another, and I ended up running my own widely-used blacklist. That led to a position working for MAPS (the Mail Abuse Prevention System), working with a like-minded group of spam fighters.

Working at MAPS was interesting. I was there for ten months, and I spent 9.5 of them looking for another job. The lesson I learned there is that you should never let the geeks run the company… and I say this as a geek myself. The company was brimming with talent and lacking in business sense or even a common direction.

Things would happen. You would check in at work to find one of the owners decided to settle a lawsuit against the company on a whim, after having been up all night trying to drink away a toothache. People would randomly get assigned to different positions in the company because it was Tuesday. One guy didn’t want to wear shoes on sales visits. All of these things are hilarious–in hindsight… and after years of therapy.

After MAPS, I took a position as “Consumer Privacy Manager” with a large e-commerce service provider. Nobody used the term “deliverability,” but it was very similar to modern deliverability to consulting. It was all about making sure that the company was kept out of trouble so that ISPs and blacklist groups wouldn’t block them. The company handled email marketing for various customers and there had been a few different run-ins with anti-spam blacklists in the year or so before I came on board.

On paper, my goal was a simple one: Write down what the spam police want you to do, and translate that into marketer speak so the marketing managers can execute on it, making money while making sure not to cause trouble. The position was challenging, but very rewarding. I took pride in designing an easy double opt-in backend that could handle many thousands of signups daily.

Combine all that together, and that’s where my deliverability expertise comes from. Creating spam filters, helping to block and sanction bad actors, working with marketers to help them proactively avoid the wrath of email administrators, then actually helping with campaign planning and executive. It has all come in handy in my current role as Deliverability Director for ExactTarget.

SWE: Very interesting background. Kind of done it all. You’re also heavily involved in the “conversations” of the industry concerning deliverability and spam prevention. What would be your recommendations for someone who’s looking to get involved in those conversations?

AI: I focus on various anti-spam or deliverability associations and discussion groups. MAAWG (the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group) is valuable for both email marketers and Internet Service Providers. It’s a collaborative forum for all involved to work together to stop spam and other types of abuse. Mailing lists for various anti-spam projects and blacklists are very helpful, like the SPAM-L mailing list.

Both of these can be pretty daunting for somebody new to the space, though. It’s probably much safer to start by reading various blogs.

SWE: Let’s talk about those blogs. What would be your top email marketing/deliverability/anti-spam blogs?

AI: I read so many blogs, but here are a few of my favorites:

• Box of Meat
• John Levine’s Internet and E-Mail Policy and Practice (a dry name for a great blog)
• Word to the Wise Blog (run by Laura and Steve Atkins)

I also have my own blog: Spam Resource. Keeping in mind, again, that my focus is deliverability and anti-spam, not the broader universe of email marketing.

SWE: We’ve talked blogs. How about books?

AI: Man, I wish I had a good answer here. My wife would kill me, as she’s a writer, but I have to ask: What is this book thing you’re speaking of? This environment changes so fast that any tome on best practices and deliverability is likely to be outdated the second it hits the bookstore. Blogs are industry interaction and taking your own notes are where it’s at.

SWE: Excellent point. Let’s stay on the topic of industry interaction, and more specifically, influence. Who is your biggest influence in the email marketing industry? Why?

AI: It’s a tie between two people:

First, Steve Linford of Spamhaus. A number of blacklist operators have come and gone, collapsing under their own hubris. Steve is one of the few exceptions to this, having been active in this space for more than 12 years. Today, he is still leading a group of anti-spam experts in an active battle against bad actors. That’s not to say I totally agree with every action Spamhaus has ever taken, but overall, their mission is a positive one and I strongly support them. The Spamhaus lists are widely used by the top ISPs and I believe that it’s because the blacklist is well run.

Second, Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise. She’s a true leader in the deliverability space. The depth and breadth of her expertise is singularly impressive. She’s also done something that few others in the deliverability realm have done: a successful consulting business. She has consulted with so many different kinds of companies sending email that she’s probably seen it all before. A lot of other folks seem to focus more on their ability to build relationships and schmooze. She builds the relationships, but goes beyond that, actually doing things to fix problems beyond just picking up the phone and calling “a friend at the ISP.”

SWE: You’re one of the industry’s leading minds and thought leaders on deliverability and spam fighting. What do you think are the biggest challenges facing email marketers today in those areas? How can these challenges be best fought, in your opinion?

AI: The biggest challenge is that permission standards are tightening up. Marketers get away with things today that they won’t get away with tomorrow. They got away with a practice yesterday that would get them blocked today. Sadly, some people ignore best practice guidance because they think they’re just fine the way they are.

If you want to stay in the inbox forever, your practices have to keep getting better. The ISPs stack rank everybody sending them marketing email, and knock the bottom senders out. Eventually, you’ll be that bottom sender; don’t wait for them to get to you. Keep improving!

I get upset when people ask me how close to the line they can be before they will be in trouble. If that’s the question they’re asking, they’re thinking about it wrong. Instead, they need to think about how to embody best practices in a way that obviates the need for periodic remediation. Walk the right path and you’re not going to have to pause periodically because you got blocked due to complaints.

SWE: What affect do you think mobile technologies will have on email marketing? How do you think it will affect deliverability?

AI: I think the real challenges there are going to be rendering and engagement. For rendering, making sure that emails render properly (or that rendering fails gracefully) on a mobile device, making it easy for a recipient to be able to view the web page version of an email, etc.

For engagement, it means making absolutely sure that this messaging is truly, absolutely desired by every recipient. Not just something you shovel at subscribers because you can get away with it. Engagement is such a big part of deliverability nowadays, and the growth of email on mobile devices only reinforces that. My own personal use case reinforces that. Mobile email is personal. I want one-to-one communication, and I welcome transactional messaging like order confirmations and shipping notices.

But most marketing communications, I’m not reading it on mobile. I set it aside until I get back to the desktop. And then I often forget to look at it again when I’m back on the desktop. So, I wonder if open rates are lower for marketing messages or poorly targeted messages sent to lists with significant mobile users.

SMS and mobile social media? They’re not email; they’re different animals with different processes, measures, and metrics. There are other far more qualified to speak to these things that I am.

SWE: I agree with you on engagement. Goes back to respecting the subscriber. And speaking about respecting the subscriber, this might be the funniest question I’ll ask, given your reputation. How has your work in email marketing affected your personal use of email?

AI: I can tell you that I’m a BAD person to send spam to. If you spam me, odds are I know who to contact at your ESP to get your account terminated, without even having to look it up. I end up chasing down some weird issues outside of work. One time when tracing what happened to cause me to receive a certain spam, I ended up determining that an employee of a local neighborhood bar stole the bar’s email list and sold it to a wine store. Legal action pending, supposedly.

I consider myself a power user of email and I’m also pretty good with email filtering. If somebody sends me an email I don’t want, it is very unlikely that they will get the opportunity to do that a second time, even if I don’t report them for spam. I just set up a filter and their email vanishes or is filed away, never opened and never read. Occasionally, I’ll look later and find that somebody sent me 19 more messages even though I’ve been filtering their mail away unread for more than a year. Apparently some marketers aren’t smart enough to divest themselves of inactive subscribers.

I also enjoy watching some marketers deservedly land in the spam folder of my Gmail account. Knowing what I do about deliverability, I know it’s because they’re probably not respecting their subscriber base. Ironically, the entities most guilty of this seem to be marketing-related publications.

SWE: Let’s switch gears a bit. What’s your favorite thing about email marketing?

AI: I really enjoy the ever-changing technical landscape that gives me a seemingly limitless amount of opportunity to continue to polish my skills. It’s a lot of fun to be able to figure out weird, new things and create new tools and processes for monitoring and abuse prevention.

SWE: Okay, what is your least favorite thing about email marketing?

AI: Fighting the same battles over and over against. Too many new marketers observe bad practices and complain when we try to gently guide them away from the bad path.

“Hey, I see company X breaking the law. Why are you telling me I can’t do that?” Just because the FTC hasn’t gotten around to throwing a bad actor in jail yet doesn’t mean he’s demonstrating best practices that you should copy.

“Hey, company X sends company Y mailings to their mailing list, why can’t we?” Uh, because it’ll get you high spam complaints and blocking.

The problem is that marketers see that one message that got through the spam filter this one time, and they don’t see the 90 other messages that got bulk-foldered. They don’t see that other marketer struggling to remediate a delivery issue. They just see that one email get through and think, “Wow, how come they’re allowed to do this?”

SWE: Great points. Okay, last question. What’s your “elevator speech” for email marketing?

AI: I think I’ll pass on this one. I’m not a sales person. It’s not really my area of expertise. And I’m one of those people who isn’t eager to sell my worldview to everyone I run into

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About Al Iverson

As the Director of Privacy and Deliverability for email service provider ExactTarget, Al works with anti-spam blacklist groups, Internet service providers, and industry groups to help both senders and receivers address spam, list management, and deliverability issues.

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