A few weeks ago, I had the chance to talk for an hour with Florent Destors who is a deliverability consultant at Selligent. This was an opportunity to go back over certain trends in terms of deliverability, but above all to discuss a specificity of Selligent, which is the massive use of an infrastructure based on shared IPs of very high quality for their best customers. In many ways, this strategy is the opposite of what their competitors are doing on the market. We will try to understand why such a practice exists and how it is implemented.
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Jonathan Loriaux - Are there big differences in deliverability between the different sectors of activity that we can find on the market?
Florent Destors - Rather than talking about business sectors, the big difference I see is more between B2C and B2B. There is a real difference in maturity with regard to deliverability issues and today there is a huge amount of evangelization work to do with regard to the B2B sector. The rules are not necessarily the same. We work with a multitude of domains, a very high volatility of email addresses too. So the challenges are not the same and above all, the knowledge of deliverability issues is much weaker than with pure players, for example, who are increasingly aware of the rules and good practices.
JL - In B2B, we have a reconcentration of domains, today there is Office 365 which is becoming more and more important, there are many professionals who migrate to Google's pro emails...
FD - Yes, of course, we also find domains such as OVH, ... but we realize that at the level of the customer base, the cleaning of invalid email addresses is not done regularly. We find ourselves with a lot of bounces to process. The collection of addresses in B2B is not subject to the same rules as for B2C. It is therefore more of a fundamental work and evangelization of the respect of good practices of deliverability.
JL - So, with regard to the B2B customers you may have, what is the big difference in their support, in their onboarding, ...?
FD - We systematically offer our customers deliverability support through a best practices workshop that covers all aspects of deliverability, from a technical and practical point of view, but also on how to clean up their database. We will teach them to be attentive to the indicators of deliverability, opening, clicks, ...
JL - Selligent has made a rather different choice in terms of its deliverability infrastructure compared to the rest of the market, since you massively use shared IP addresses, whereas other players at your level in the market are more oriented towards dedicated IP addresses. What is the reason for this choice?
FD - Speed is clearly the primary reason for this choice. We see that the market is dominated by four major domains. We have Yahoo, we have Gmail, Hotmail, and now Outlook, all of which are sized with a large bandwidth to accept a high volume of email quickly. But in the European market, we have a concentration of three or four ISPs, but by country, with big differences between their infrastructures. Pooling meets this need. More IPs means more possibilities to send emails per minute. It's really a question of speed.
JL - Whereas most players who prefer dedicated IP addresses do so for reasons of compartmentalizing deliverability risks. How do you manage to avoid these risks of using IP addresses by several different customers?
FD - What you need to know is that a customer who comes to Selligent always has a dedicated IP on a local MTA. In order to access the GRID, our shared IP technology, we will require several steps. The first step is to audit their list, in terms of the quality of their email addresses. We will check the domain names and the syntax of the email addresses. We will compare the list with a database of unknown addresses that we have identified. We will flag all dangerous addresses, such as spamtrap, disposable domain addresses, etc. We will ask the client to clean up his list. Then, in the second step, he will have to make a first basic round on his dedicated IP address. As soon as the campaigns exceed 98 % of deliverability, the customer has access to the GRID, while retaining the possibility of routing via its dedicated IP. All these steps allow us to protect ourselves from accidents at the level of shared IPs. And our customers are relatively protected thanks to these safeguards. Today, we have no incidents to deplore at this level. It is also important to know that from the moment you enter the Grid, you can also leave it if you are a bad student.
JL - In fact, in a way, you go into quarantine at startup on a dedicated IP address and when you've proven yourself, you get access to shared IPs.
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FD - It doesn't have to be a quarantine because the dedicated IP you keep throughout your use of Selligent.
JL - Absolutely, but you can eventually fall back into it exclusively if you don't perform well enough?
FD - Yes, that's it, we can fall back on it... Shared IP addresses are a plus compared to dedicated IP. Afterwards, we have certain customers who are satisfied with dedicated IP because they don't necessarily have large volumes to route or speed problems. In general, grid customers are very happy with the speed of sending.
JL - Can you tell us what a deliverability consultant's job is at a company like Selligent and what your typical day consists of?
FD - So rather than typical days, because no two days are alike, let's talk about missions. As I said, list audits are one of the first missions. Then we're going to do deliverability workshops. I was talking about it earlier, these are going to be best practices workshops or type of training on deliverability issues. So they can take place over half a day or a day. Then, for new customers, we'll work with them to develop ramp-up programs and a whole support phase during their migration period. We'll also accompany them, we'll monitor their first campaign almost in real time so that we can adjust the sending speeds as needed on their first campaigns according to the bounce returns. The goal is really to accompany them from the start on all these deliverability issues. And finally, the last mission is support, because we are never safe from an accident, a targeting problem or anything else. As a deliverability consultant for France, I provide first level support for France.
JL - In terms of support, what types of problems do customers report? I know it's very varied, but just to get a sense of the types of requests you get.
FD - It is indeed very varied. It can be anything from "my email has gone to spam" to "I don't understand, my images aren't displaying". It can also be about issues that are less about deliverability, but more about campaign design or HTML. But in general, it's "I don't understand why my email wasn't delivered correctly".
JL - In the organization, apart from deliverability consultants like you who must, I imagine, be rather market-oriented, what are the other departments or teams that intervene on deliverability issues?
FD - I mainly work with the "System & Data" team, which is the technical team in Belgium that manages all aspects of deliverability, IP management, pools, email addresses, the setup of feedback loops, etc. In France, I act as the interface between the French client and the technical team if necessary and act as first-level support.
JL - Beyond that, you also have teams that deal directly with Internet service providers, webmails, etc.?
FD - Historically, it is the "System & Data" team that, through its participation in various events in the emailing world, establishes relationships with ISPs. Today, I am gradually taking over relations with French ISPs because of the language, we understand each other better. But all my actions are done in coordination with Systems & Data, according to the ISPs.
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