Summary
Dealing with clients who disregard expert email marketing advice is a common challenge for deliverability professionals. Often, clients may believe their intuition or short-term business goals outweigh long-term deliverability best practices, leading to significant sender reputation issues and poor inbox placement. This situation highlights a fundamental disconnect between client expectations and the technical realities of email marketing.
Key findings
- Client-as-consultant: Clients sometimes adopt the role of the expert, proposing alternative strategies despite having limited understanding of email deliverability complexities and the reasons behind their current problems.
- Ignored warnings: Professionals often spend months highlighting issues related to email acquisition, list hygiene, and content, only for clients to suddenly care about inbox placement once problems escalate.
- Business needs vs. best practices: Clients frequently prioritize perceived short-term business needs over established email marketing best practices, which can lead to negative long-term impacts on deliverability and sender reputation. This can also happen when a company prioritizes short-term spam gains over long-term sustainability.
Key considerations
- Clear boundaries: It is crucial to establish clear roles and expectations from the outset, reminding clients that they have hired you for your specialized expertise.
- Educational approach: Continuously educate clients on the why behind your advice, using data and case studies to illustrate the long-term consequences of ignoring best practices. This can help them understand the rationale and potentially mitigate non-responsive behavior.
- Strategic exit: If a client consistently disregards advice to the detriment of their email program and your professional reputation, it may be necessary to consider whether the engagement is sustainable.
What email marketers say
Email marketers frequently express frustration when their professional guidance is dismissed by clients. The consensus highlights the difficulty in convincing clients to deviate from their preconceived notions or prioritize long-term email health over immediate (and often misguided) gains. Many marketers share relatable anecdotes of clients taking charge despite their lack of expertise, ultimately leading to exacerbated deliverability issues.
Key opinions
- Frustration with clients: Many marketers find it frustrating when clients believe they have a better plan to fix major sender reputation issues, especially when the client's own strategies led to the problems.
- Client as consultant: A common complaint is when clients begin to act as the primary consultant, undermining the hired expert's role and recommendations.
- Business needs override: The phrase "Our business has needs" is often cited as a reason clients give for ignoring best practices, even when those needs conflict directly with email deliverability requirements.
- Low adoption rates: Despite efforts to educate, marketers observe consistently low rates of client adoption for recommended email marketing strategies, particularly those concerning list hygiene or engagement segmentation.
Key considerations
- Manage expectations: Marketers should teach clients how to be effective clients by clearly defining the scope of advice and expected adherence from the beginning.
- Direct confrontation (professional): Sometimes it is necessary to remind clients that they are paying for expert advice and that disregarding it defeats the purpose of the engagement.
- Focus on the 'why': Continually reinforce the rationale behind advice, especially concerning sensitive areas like removing unengaged subscribers or avoiding unsolicited emails. Demonstrating the direct link between actions and deliverability outcomes can be persuasive.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks states that the client becoming the consultant is the absolute worst scenario. It undermines the expertise you're hired for and makes it difficult to implement effective strategies. This dynamic often leads to prolonged issues rather than resolution.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks observes that despite best efforts, there are often low rates of adoption for recommended email marketing practices among clients. This resistance often comes even after extensive education and clear advice on how to improve deliverability and sender reputation.
What the experts say
Deliverability experts often face the uphill battle of convincing clients that neglecting foundational email practices leads to severe, long-term consequences. Their perspective emphasizes the technical underpinnings of deliverability, such as sender reputation, authentication, and compliance, which are often overlooked by clients focused solely on immediate campaign execution. Experts highlight that disregarding advice on these core areas inevitably results in emails being blocked or landing in spam folders.
Key opinions
- Consequences of poor acquisition: Experts stress that client issues with sender reputation often stem from flawed email acquisition strategies, which clients are reluctant to change.
- List hygiene criticality: Ignoring advice on regular list hygiene (like removing unengaged subscribers or managing bounces) is a direct path to diminished inbox placement and potentially landing on a blocklist (or blacklist).
- Content strategy impact: Experts note that problematic content strategies, such as overly promotional or irrelevant messages, contribute significantly to recipient disengagement and complaints, yet clients often resist changes to their approach.
- Reactive vs. proactive: Clients typically become concerned about inbox placement only after major issues arise, rather than adopting a proactive stance based on expert advice to prevent problems.
Key considerations
- Data-driven persuasion: Presenting deliverability data, such as blocklist occurrences or declining domain reputation metrics, can be more compelling than anecdotal evidence. This can help them understand why their emails are going to spam.
- Long-term impact: Emphasize that ignoring advice can lead to a damaged sender reputation that takes a significant amount of time and effort to recover from a poor state.
- Risk assessment: Clearly outline the financial and brand risks associated with poor deliverability, such as lost revenue from unreached customers or brand damage from blacklisting. This can be more persuasive than technical arguments alone, as discussed by experts at SpamResource.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks highlights that the core issue is often a misalignment in understanding what good deliverability truly entails, beyond simply sending emails. Clients may not grasp that acquiring emails via questionable methods impacts long-term inboxing.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks advises focusing on the business metrics that clients care about, like conversions and revenue, and directly linking poor deliverability to their decline. This makes the consequences of ignoring advice more tangible.
What the documentation says
Official email documentation, from RFCs to ESP postmaster guidelines, provides the foundational rules for responsible email sending. While not explicitly addressing client-consultant dynamics, these documents implicitly support the advice given by deliverability experts by outlining the technical requirements and best practices for email authentication, spam prevention, and sender reputation management. When clients disregard expert advice, they are often moving away from these documented standards, unknowingly (or knowingly) jeopardizing their email program.
Key findings
- Authentication standards: Official documentation consistently emphasizes the necessity of email authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) to prevent spoofing and ensure message integrity. Ignoring these, often against expert advice, leads to emails failing authentication checks.
- Recipient engagement: Many guidelines, including those from major ISPs, highlight the importance of sending only to engaged recipients and respecting unsubscribe requests, a principle often challenged by clients prioritizing list size over quality.
- Reputation management: Documentation indirectly promotes practices that build positive sender reputation, such as avoiding spam traps and minimizing complaints, which are critical areas where clients often disregard expert warnings.
- Compliance requirements: RFCs and other technical documents define the acceptable technical format and behavior for email, deviations from which can lead to messages being rejected by receiving mail servers. Understanding these is key to avoiding issues like those described in RFC 5322 and what works today.
Key considerations
- Reference authoritative sources: When clients are resistant, citing official ISP guidelines (e.g., Google Postmaster Tools, Outlook's sender requirements) or RFCs can add weight to expert advice, framing it as compliance rather than mere suggestion. This is especially true for new requirements like Outlook's new sender requirements.
- Illustrate consequences: Explain how ignoring these documented standards can lead to severe penalties, such as increased spam folder placement or complete blocking of emails by major providers, impacting their fundamental ability to communicate.
- Long-term strategy alignment: Help clients understand that adhering to documented best practices is not just about avoiding immediate problems, but about building a sustainable and effective email marketing channel for the long term. Many ESPs, like SendGrid, reinforce these guidelines for success.
Technical article
Google Postmaster Tools documentation advises that maintaining a low spam complaint rate is crucial for sender reputation. Disregarding this by sending to unengaged users, despite expert warnings, will lead to emails being filtered to spam.
Technical article
Microsoft's sender support documentation states that email volume should be gradually increased (warming up). Clients who ignore this advice and send large, cold lists often trigger bulk sending filters, resulting in immediate blockages.
Related resources
15 resources
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