Anne P. Mitchell is the owner of GetToTheInbox.com. She has a relevant background as an attorney, having graduated from Stanford Law in 1992. In 1998, she closed her private practice and had the great fortune to be brought in-house by Paul Vixie for his anti-spam organization, MAPS. This opportunity marked the beginning of her career on a trajectory that even she could not have imagined at the time.
It included significant contributions to writing part of the Federal email marketing/anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM. Moreover, she is credited with inventing the concept of ’email deliverability‘ and coining the term ‘deliverability.’ Anne was also deeply involved in creating the email marketing best practices that are still followed to this day.
Read on for my review.
One key insight that many people may not realize is that email deliverability, determining whether an email lands in the inbox or the spam folder, is directly tied to online reputation, particularly one’s email reputation.
Far, far too many businesses take email for granted, thinking of it as something that you can just send with no consequences. So they keep sending and sending, not realizing that with every send that is not optimized for a good email reputation they are actually *hurting* their email reputation, which causes more and more of the email they send to end up in the spam folder (and may even lead to their email being blocked, and put on an email blocklist like Spamhaus). The thing is that the inbox providers are taking note of every single email that you send, and of the content and technical setup of every single email you send, so it’s really easy to hurt your email reputation if you aren’t doing everything exactly right, including the content of your email, how much email you send and how often you send it, and, of course, whether your email authentication (SPF, DKIM, etc.) is set up correctly. They take note of your email sending domain, and check to see whether it matches your website domain. And they take note of the email sending service that you use, and if it has reputation problems of its own, your email inherits that poor reputation. All of these things go into email reputation, which in turn goes to whether the people to whom you are sending your email ever see it at all.
Anne P. Mitchell’s favorite quote —
The difference between coincidence and opportunity is what you do with it.