The Email Wars

Today a new service was launched in the UK that is using the term “reverse search”. This is a very interesting idea, as we met with a US based company that was looking to get into this a few months back. It is the idea of a customized page that you can build an advertiser portal that can target you. Not too different from adwords, but enough to stand out.

Basically you can create a profile and post things that you are looking to buy or interested in, advertisers can then buy in to target you based on your personal profile. Think of it as an eBay, Craigslist, Google Adwords Mashup.

Good idea and already 120K subscribers in the first few days in the UK. But what really makes this different from opt in or affliate co-registations? The verdict is still out.

Learn about it

I noticed this AM a new yellow bar in my MSN account that shows if an email is not sender ID complaint. Altough this email came straight to my inbox, once opened, it flagged a yellow bar at the top letting me know that it might be one not to be trusted.

The funny thing about this is that this was an email sent to my msn.com address from my msn.com email address. So is msn.com not sender ID compliant itself? We will watch and see.

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Could this be the end of Spam and a signal to the end of the WAR? I doubt it, just another system of blocks and tackles. But as an email marketer, you should be aware that your data can skew if people are not loading tracking images.

Only hours after Sun Microsystems Inc. released the newest version of its StarOffice desktop productivity suite, Microsoft posted an update to its own Office desktop software.

Microsoft’s Office 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) was posted on Tuesday. It adds an improvement to Outlook that helps prevent phishing, as well as improved handling of spam, Microsoft said. Junk e-mail is now rendered as plain text and links are disabled within the message.

So Google talks about if you sign up for gmail, you get less spam. Well what about when multuple gmail IPs show up in SpamCop as blocked IPs. Do you get less of you own mail delivered? And how can SpamCop block and ISP like Google? This IP and others, have been flagged for days and are listed as the top sending IP addresses.

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I love this. They are promoting that they can control spam more than others. I have used gmail since the BETA and I do get less spam than with MSN and Yahoo, but that might be because it is only used for select opt in marketing lists and not to sign up for anything else.

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Interesting Study posted today by emarketer.com. It shows just how many hours a day the US population spends reading email. I know from those in the business world I interact with and work with that this must be a Higher number.

In the consumer world I would expect that time per day would be 1-2 hours at most for personal and transactional emails.

How much time do you spend reading email?

Report: Can Spam Compliance Down In August

JUST 3 PERCENT OF MARKETERS who sent unsolicited e-mails in August appeared to be complying with the federal Can-Spam law–down from 4 percent in the first seven months of the year, according to report issued last week by MX Logic. Those numbers are based on a random sample of 10,000 unsolicited e-mails a week. To determine whether a message satisfies the requirements of Can-Spam, MX Logic assesses the subject line, whether there’s a way to unsubscribe, and whether e-mails relating to pornography are tagged with the phrase “sexually explicit” in the subject line.

We are growing our client’s use of SMS opt in messaging. It is a great medium to target people on the go and the lower age demographic. Here are some challenges we expect to see grow.

Court: Federal Law Bans Text-Message Spam
An Arizona appeals court has ruled a 1991 federal law blocking autodialers from calling cell phones applies to unsolicited ads sent as text messages.

An Arizona court has ruled that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, which bans junk faxes and unsolicited telemarketing calls to cell phones, also applies to unsolicited text message advertisements sent to cell phone users.

Read the Full article at: http://news.designtechnica.com/article8364.html

Email Marketing Tactics - From Part of this article is taken from Email Insider on Sept. 12 on MediaPost.com (by David Baker from Agency.com). He does a GREAT Job and we thank him for providing GREAT content. You shouldsubscribe to Email Insider at Mediapost.com for all the great weekly coverage and insight.

Both our clients and eROI lives and dies by metrics. We both measure the success of e-mail programs by metrics, and justify budgets based on these very sensitive variables, yet should they all be looked at the same way?

We are huge proponents of domain modeling - that is, modeling behavior by the recipient’s e-mail domain (hotmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com). There are good reasons for this strategy. Consumers are becoming more advanced in their online behavior with broadband - they process things faster, and they have multiple e-mail accounts (2.7 on average, not sure what the .7 is actually for) and typically have different e-mail personas (work, personal, catch all for signups online). Add to that the fact that each ISP’s interface is littered with obstacles to gaining a measured response (view or click); image blocking, filtering, and preview methods.

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What pains me about this article is that is really makes it look like email is such a hard to manage and costly effort for IT Teams, that outsourcing it helps them out. I think that this is something odd as we are now over complicating email and setting up so many rules, filters and systems (which are quickly overcome by actual spammers) that they aren’t even getting legitimate email from customers and partners. They are building a wall that is preventing them from truly using one of the most powerful communications tools created to date.

Read the Full Story: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003587

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REMEMBER THE GRAND VISION OF developing one-to-one business-to-business communications, and leveraging e-mail to reach senior executives in corporate America? I do, and I also recall many of the approaches B-to-B marketers have tried. The vision looked great on paper — until companies ran into the Great Wall of Administrators and Filtering Systems.

Let’s take a look at several barriers and see what advances have been made in the world of B-to-B deliverability services, starting with a look at the filtering that exists today.

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This is good news in light of the many traps and blocks being established across the ISP world. So the reads are tracking downward this past quarter for thier clients, but conversions are up. What this means is that list hygeine should be the top priority for any company. Making sure to measure your lists and clean them regularly for bad performing email addresses is key. GET rid of the trash and move to those that want to hear from you.

Create 2 lists, one for reads and conversions and the other for everyone else.

TWO KEY E-MAIL METRICS–OPEN RATES and click-through rates–both declined in the second quarter, according to data DoubleClick released on Tuesday. Open rates in the second three months of the year dropped to 27.5 percent from 36 percent a year ago, while click-through rates dropped to 7.2 percent from 7.7 percent in the second quarter of 2004, according to DoubleClick’s numbers.

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Many marketers are starting to understand just how important delivery is when using email as a vehicle. With the flood of spam blocking and filtering systems on the consumer and corporate markets, we are actually seeing more false positives and bouncing of legitimate emails sent from opt in lists.

So if all of these marketers know there is a problem and a challenge.. what actions will they take to turn the tide. I assume most of them will not take any actions, but complain that something needs to be done. In reality if you are to employ the best practices like senderID, Domain Keys, Whitelisted IPs, double opt in, sending from the same address each time, working to segment lists based on past behavoirs, etc, they would see much better results. But alas, all of this takes time and every marketer seems to have a lack of time.

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A Great Email from Bill that just needed to be shared. Email is important.

From Bill McCloskey, Wednesday, September 7, 2005

WHEN OUR CURRENT E-MAIL AND Internet system was being developed during the darkest days of the Cold War, it was designed to allow communications to flow freely in case of disaster. Never has the need for open, free, and unfettered communication been made more evident than the events of the last week.

I spoke with Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer of CNN.com, who filled me on just how important e-mail has been in allowing victims, their families, and those that want to help communicate with each other.

CNN.com’s public information group set up a team of volunteers (staff and their families and friends) to answer a deluge of e-mails and phone calls from the public. They set up a special hurricanevictims@cnn.com e-mail address and personally responded to over 7,000 e-mails. Of those, approximately 4,000 needed information on how to search for or register their missing loved ones and approximately 3,000 came from those asking how they could help.

CNN.com set up a special “Safe List” on their site where people who e-mailed in could post that they were safe for their family and friends. Currently over 1,000 people are on the list.

According to Mitch, the e-mails were sorted into different groups:

1. Safe. These were e-mails from people announcing they were out of harms way. Some of the subject lines Mitch read to me were “Safe, but looking…” and “Okay in Ark.”

2. Missing: The group of heartbreaking e-mails from people looking for loved ones: “Help me find my kids,” “Can’t find Mom,” “Looking for you,” and just plain, “Help.”

3. Leads: These were e-mails from folks trying to provide information. In one e-mail a woman said that she saw a TV interview of someone named Shela who was looking for her sister. The woman said she was working as a volunteer and talked to a woman who was missing a sister named Shela and could they be the same?

4. Solutions: These included e-mails from people offering to open up their homes, and ideas on how best to help the refugees, including posting pictures at shelters of the missing and found.

From a coverage standpoint, e-mail was essential in staying in touch with correspondents in the field who often sent their stories in from their Blackberrys. In addition, CNN.com quadrupled the usual number of e-mail news alerts last week to over 2.3 million people.

CNN did special television cut-ins based on some of the e-mails that came in from viewers. In one instance, news anchor Carol Lin was able to reunite a family with their baby based on one e-mail tip.

For all our gnashing of teeth about spam and the problem of e-mail marketing, it is important to realize just why the e-mail system was created and the importance it brings to our lives. Unfettered e-mail communications is sometimes a matter of life and death and the reunion of mother and child.

Deliverability: Are Your Email Messages Trusted?

Deliverability is overwhelmingly the greatest email marketing challenge. What can you do to make sure your marketing campaigns avoid the obstacles and get delivered for the highest possible ROI?

The major obstacles to email deliverability are lack of consumer trust in email, ISP blocking and emerging authentication standards. Consumer trust in email is under assault on two fronts:

1) Trustworthiness: Can I trust that this email is coming from whom it claims to be coming from?

2) Reliability: Can email be relied upon to deliver the communications I want, need and expect to receive?

How can we make email safe and trusted again?

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