The dark side of deliverability to Outlook, Hotmail, and Yahoo

Oh boy. 

One of my clients (the only one to use Keap fka Infusionsoft, which is, in my experience, mayhap the single worst ESP to ever grace God’s green earth) is testing a new offering to his customers. 

As such, I sent out an email over the weekend promoting this new test offer. 

And something wild happened: 

458 total emails bounces. 411 of these came from our leads list with another 47 coming from our customer list. 

Both numbers are much higher than the average bounce rate, but especially the leads list. The 411 bounced contacts resulted in a 2.4% bounce rate. Worst part? Most of the bounces had this bounce type: “mail block - known spammer.” 

Now, you might be wondering how someone as good as yours truly could let this happen.

But here’s the thing… 

This is completely out of my control. 

Turns out, Microsoft (which owns Outlook and Hotmail) and Yahoo decided to block all emails sent from Keap’s shared IP. I reached out to their customer service team to confirm my suspicions—and confirm that there’s absolutely nothing we can do to send to these contacts. 

Keap’s only “solution” if you can even call it that is to reach out to these contacts personally and ask them to switch from Outlook, Hotmail, or Yahoo to Gmail. Yeah, that ain’t happening. Not only is this audience older and less tech savvy and more stuck in their ways, but this is a weird and big “ask” to ask anyone on your list. 

And it’s completely out of your control as a marketer.

Which brings me to the point: 

Email deliverability is NEVER fully in your control. 

Yes, there are certain things you can and must do to tilt the odds in your favor. But even if you do everything right, you’re still only in control of about 60% of your deliverability while your ESP controls the other 40%. 

The only sliver of good news in this story is that Microsoft and Yahoo haven’t banned Klaviyo (which the vast majority of my clients use). But I’m not sure if they’ve only banned Keap or have started to entirely ban other ESPs too. 

That’s the bad news. 

The good news? 

There’s one platform in particular that gives you a much better chance of landing in the primary inbox each and every time you send. It’s something I offer to each of my Email Deliverability Doctor clients—a brand-new service I’m just beginning to roll out. 

Inside this new offer, I also implement a whole slew of counterintuitive deliverability tactics to help you avoid the problem of your emails not being delivered to people who have opted into your emails… which is becoming a much meatier problem affecting more and more businesses as the days pass by. 

Now, this service is even more of an investment than my other offers because fixing deliverability is not an overnight fix. It requires patience and persistence. 

If you want to get a taste of what I’m offering in this new offer, I’m in the process of creating a new ebook lead magnet. 

Hit reply if you’d like to check out the “bare bones” google docs version of this. But I ask that if you check out the ebook that you also ask me any questions you have about any of the content inside it, or let me know if any areas in particular raised more questions than it answered. 

I’d like to send this off to a designer sooner rather than later—but I’d like your feedback on it first. 

John

PS - Just interested in increasing your revenue with email? You can still hit reply, just let me know you’re interested in setting up a call instead of getting a free “bare bones” copy of my deliverability guide.