The Email Wars

Tom Bartel, Chief Privacy Officer at ReturnPath has a good article on their blog that you should read. It is a great guide to getting yourself set up with email authentication. I heard some staggering numbers about Forntue 500 and small businesses today that have yet to set this up for their IPs. If you can just follow this guide below, your campaigns will be a step ahead of those that have not in getting to the inbox.

One of the most basic elements of our work at Return Path is ensuring that clients use best practices in their email delivery processes. A common recommendation we give is to implement email authentication. Email authentication has two primary benefits: It stymies forgery of email messages and allows senders to build a positive reputation with receivers based upon their mailing behavior. Yet many companies, particularly small ones, have never heard of email authentication — and those who have heard of it have not yet initiated a project to implement it.

How does email authentication work? The most common schemes today — SPF, SenderID, and DomainKeys — use the Domain Name System (DNS) to publish “records.” Each record, which is available to the entire Internet community, details the specific machines that are authorized to send mail for a specific email domain.

Learn about setting up email authentication.

A good find by Tamara in Belgium. Really sets the stage as to why one should look to an email marketing agency like eROI.

Unless your three-year old nephew is Picasso, you would probably leave the creation of marketing collateral to a design expert. If that is your line of thinking, then you’d probably also agree that it doesn’t make sense to have your marketing, branding or interactive agency program your HTML email templates if they’re not experts in the field of email marketing.

In today’s world of email, leaving template programming to the email marketing experts is the best way to ensure delivery and action on the part of the recipient.

Here is Why >>

Spencer Kollas with Mediapost has a good article today. Helps to explain the Goodmail impact. I am actually at MediaPosts Email Insiders Conference this week and just watched Goodmail, ReturnPath, Habeas and MSN talk about Paid Delivery vs. Reputation and Best Email Practices. I will post more about them as the event progresses.

Premiere Global Services’ director looks at the real ROI of the AOL-Goodmail partnership.

It’s the latest buzz and one of the hottest topics of discussion across the industry: the AOL-Goodmail partnership.

Goodmail claims that certifying your company’s email campaigns through its system will produce a 300 percent ROI. While this claim has not yet been substantiated, most email marketers agree that certifying your email campaigns will produce some type of ROI, so the real question is how much can you expect?

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Great article by George Bilbrey, VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions at ReturnPath.

Having spam traps on your email list causes a world of problems: listings on commonly used blacklists and blocks at top ISPs. For the uninitiated, a spam trap is usually an address that was created new and never signed up to receive any mailings. Therefore, by definition, all mail going to that account is unsolicited. This is a great tool to catch spammers who will often mail to addresses that they have harvested from web sites and newsgroups where the good folks who run the spam trap network have published their spam trap email addresses.

So how do legitimate marketers get spam traps on their lists? In our experience, there are three primary ways: (1) Bad luck - when entering an email address in a signup form, the user makes a typo and suddenly you’re a proud owner of a spam trap address; (2) Bad partners - one of your data partners (co-registration, etc.) sent you some spam traps; (3) Bad actors - someone harvested a lot of addresses and bulk added them to your list. There are other ways, but this is what we see most frequently.

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Good article from iMedia Connection:

In spite of any rumors to the contrary, email marketing is alive and growing.

However, both promotional emails and email newsletters face a number of challenges in terms of deliverability, open rates and conversion rates.

One essential element to the success of every email or newsletter is the quality of the subject line.

Unfortunately, writers appear to spend a great deal of time working on the body of an email or newsletter, and give very little attention to the subject line itself.

This is curious, because unless you write a great subject line, nobody is ever going to open your email or newsletter.

Read Article

Another good read on this topic is from ReturnPath. Read More

Looks like attacks against spammers are getting personal. The story below shows some vigilante tactics that might work, but are they really worth the risk? What we need to do is work to kill off these rogue mail servers out there. I can’t tell you how many of the same crappy junk emails I get a day, but I deal with them by doing this (Remember this action) - Control + A then Delete. And voila it is gone.

In the Fight Against Spam E-Mail, Goliath Wins Again

Eran Reshef had an idea in the battle against spam e-mail that seemed to be working: he fought spam with spam. Today, he’ll give up the fight.

Reshef’s Silicon Valley company, Blue Security Inc., simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to his clients. But because those sort of requests tend to be ignored, Blue Security took them to a new level: it bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.

That led to a flood of Internet traffic so heavy that it disrupted the spammers’ ability to send e-mails to other victims — a crippling effect that caused a handful of known spammers to comply with the requests.

Read the Full Story on the Washinton Post site

I saw this interesting post from Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath. Seems AOL is losing the battle to retain customers and that email is not as sticky as they thought. It is really about the complete offering and I think that they have lost so much ground to Yahoo and others that do not require payment to have an email account.

As we’ve reported a couple times in the past, one of our interesting nuggets at Return Path is a wealth of “ISP switching data” that comes from our very large, active, self-reported Email Change of Address, or ECOA, service (consumer sign-up; client info).

I noted the article floating around last week that AOL lost about 1 million subscribers last quarter, the lion’s share in the U.S., of course.

So, where’d they all go?

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David Baker from Agency.com dropped and email that just hit me like a throw from right field to home plate ahead of the runner. (That is a good thing to me).

Many times we have encounters companies that say things like, ” I can just find a PHP email program or I am going to roll my own.” We have often told that CIO, “Go for it… how long do you want before I ccan check in with you to see how it is going?” It eventually never works right, gets the IP blacklisted, can only mail at night in small batches, does not track right, etc, etc etc. Or never gets built at all.

Read David’s words of wisdom:

LET ME PAINT YOU A picture. You have just seen a demo of a cool e-mail system, and now you dream of being able to manage campaigns, lists, bounces, replies, dynamic content and reporting in a brand-new way. You pitch the cool system to your internal technology team, and inevitably someone asks, “Why do we need to spend money on this system? Our internal system costs us nothing.”

Sound familiar? Just recently I had a client who asked me, “Why don’t we build our own?” I had flashbacks of 1999 when I was helping to launch an e-mail software company and recalled all the things we’d say to combat this question. Then I fast- forward to 2006, and this is what I come up with for an answer: e-mail is not free.

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I came across this blog post. It is worth the read. It made me think about all of the clients we have worked with that place the company emails all over thier sites. Such a bad practice. I would rec placing a form to contact you and routing it to the approporiate person. Links (or mailto:) are just going to get farmed and end up dropping spam all over your servers.

We had one client (name with held) that had the entire company directory on the site. And due to this they got over 40000 spam emails a day. I told them to remove the directory, change all email addresses (like first initial last name) and send out an email to all contacts about the change in structure.

And needless to say they had a full time person who’s sole job it was to handle spam using 3 different systems. Such a waste of time and money.

Directory Harvesting Attacks Explained

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve started to receive SPAM on an email address you’ve just created? How can this be possible if you never gave it to anyone? Unfortunately, keeping your address private does not necessarily protect you against spammers anymore. These guys know how to harvest addresses from a mail server without you even knowing about it. This technique is known as Directory Harvesting and here’s how it works.

Read the Article
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/05/directory-harvesting-attacks-explained.html

eROI: Email Open and Click Rates Soared in Q1, Peaked on Weekends

In the first quarter of 2006, the best email open and click rates were on weekends, according to online marketing firm eROI’s most recent, Q1 2006 email study. Moreover, open and click rates increased significantly in the first quarter (40 percent and 60 percent increases, respectively), compared with rates for Q4 2005, when open and click rates decreased 29 percent and 21 percent, respectively, from the previous quarter.

View the complete study and download the PDF today.

Some are ranters. Some are doers. Jeanniey Mullen, who heads up e-mail marketing efforts at OgilvyOne, is definitely a doer. You may remember, back in November Bill McCloskey delivered a rant about how trade associations were not getting the word out about the power of e-mail as a marketing tool. Jeanniey decided to do something about it.

In January she came up with an idea she proposed to members of the Inbox Insiders, a private list Bill runs for stakeholders in the e-mail marketing space. Why not, as a group, try and do something about it. Let’s not leave it to the associations. Let’s do it ourselves. Soon afterward, armed with a concept supplied by another Mediapost E-mail Insider, Melinda Krueger, Jeanniey had a concept and a team of companies willing to sign on. eROI produced the web site in 6 days and created the opt in system using thier emailROI platform. As of this last Monday, a new organization was born: The E-mail Experience Council.

The Charter of the E-mail Experience Council is to “improve the image of, and celebrate the ROI value of, e-mail marketing by conducting a broad series of e-mail initiatives for a variety of organizations that highlight the positive impact and importance of e-mail as a viable marketing and advertising tool.”

It was decided that the best way to start to achieve these goals would be for the participating companies to help a worthwhile nonprofit organization with an e-mail campaign, make it a year-long case study, and post the results. Those of us who write for various publications would cover the event and dedicate a number of articles over the next year to the project.

Learn more about it, sign up for news and apply for membership if you are interested at the site.

So just a word of advice. TEST your campaigns before they go out. And I am not just talking about you and your inbox… you should always have a seed list set up to send to multiple ISP honeypots you set up, internal team (for a second pair of error and TiPO (typo) catching eyes. Look at what a simple slip cost Kodak over 1 1/2 years old.

Kodak Settles Spam Suit

The FTC reported yesterday that a digital photo-sharing service run by Eastman Kodak Co. settled charges it sent e-mails to 2 million recipients and failed to give them a way to opt out of future messages.

Kodak Imaging Network, previously known as Ofoto Inc., agreed to pay a $26,331 penalty for violating a U.S. law aimed at curbing spam.

The FTC said it imposed the penalty to recoup the total gross proceeds from the e-mail campaign and barred Kodak from future violations of the CAN-SPAM act, which states that solicitations must also be identified as advertisements and include a valid postal address.

Read more

The issue of subject line length is something that gets debated endlessly around the marketing water cooler. Most people know that anything longer than 55 characters (and, just a reminder, the spaces do count!) will get cut off. And many have heard the maxim that 35 is really a better number to aim for. But, does anyone know how the length of the subject line actually affects response?

Response rate (as measured by clicks) goes down dramatically when the subject line is longer than 50 characters.

Click-through rates for subject lines with 49 or fewer characters were 75 percent higher than for those with 50 or more.

What about open rates? While the difference wasn’t as dramatic, we found that subject lines with 49 or fewer characters had open rates 12.5 percent higher than for those with 50 or more.

Testing your subject lines on your list is the only way to know what will work and what won’t. But, this research clearly shows that, in fact, brevity is the better part of valor.

I am happy to let you know that we have pulled together a site in a weeks time to announce the Email Experience Council. The Council is a collection of the top email marketing minds in the US who’s main mission is:

Our mission is to enhance the image and celebrate the ROI value of email marketing through the proliferation of email and digital marketing best practices, trends and cutting edge technologies through the demonstration of applied success. We are committed to conducting a broad series of email initiatives for a variety of organizations that highlight the positive impact and importance of email as a critical and viable marketing tool.

In a nutshell we have decided to combine our efforts to teach companies through real campaigns (collectively) how to do it right. Best practices in every step and different collective teams each time. The first case study is up and look for many more. Also look for a colelctive blog that we are currently constructing that will pull the top posts from the blogs of all the members into one aggregated place.

Sign up for the newsletter as well for events, resources and more.

This came from an email I got. Worth looking at as it is a sizable judgement against some major online brands. Some sources we know looked at the last 20 emails from them and the address is in place, but not clear and conspicuous as the Act requires.

Not sure how this will hold up, but make sure that you are following the act to the word.

Not sure if anyone saw this or not. http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2006/05/ofotokodak.htm

The FTC whacked Ofoto and Ice.com for not including an unsubscribe link and/or valid physical address. Since the Act is explicit about the requirements, it strikes me as odd that either one of these companies would make the mistake of not including unsub+address in a stand alone ad. Which leaves me wondering if the actions involved a newsletter instead. Many companies have the perspective that the opt-out requirements in CAN-SPAM do not apply to newsletters. So if these cases involve newsletters the decisions are would be the FTC’s way of sending a clear message about now newsletters are treated under CAN-SPAM.

If you fancy yourself a CAN SPAM master, let us know your take by posting a comment.