The Email Wars

What happens when you have preached to people so long to add your email address to their address book so that they are a trusted sender and you now are changing that? Have you gone through this change before? It is wise to alert people prior to this change so that you do not end up in their bulk folder before you make this change. 

Marriott went above and beyond IMHO at announcing this change. Now what I loved the most was the fact that this shows that they value email as a communication channel so much that they did not even try to get a booking out of it. Nice work. Sure they had their find and reserve in the top nav, but that is a typical element in their other programs. They took the road of making sure they they did not lose people as one campaign could do more to lift their program than the long term damage in lost bookings could drive if they added more than one thing to do. 

I am not sure overall from an industry perspective of how many subscribers do take the step to add them to a “safe list” but I would bet that this had some people that had not done so before to take that step now. 

Is this something you use in your programs at the opt in? And if so do you have any data that you would share on subscribers using it? 

Ok, had to share this. You might laugh, you might say it is dumb, etc. Regardless I got a hoot out of it and I am a dog person not a cat person. The below post is really illustrative of two things. One we create bad terms and more bad terms every day. Two we need to focus on understanding what we hear before playing the game of telephone.

But what spawned this was someone today asking me if I had heard about “cat phishing”. I was not sure what to think. Many ideas ran through my brain of what it could be, but in the end after searching and searching it turns out that is was “copy cat phishing” they heard. Yes now that makes more sense. 

It is something that all brands have to consider as it is everywhere and could negatively impact your own brand and the consumer trust in your brand. But then again so could the avian bird flu, a wayward mack truck, or the news. So until you find the magic brand protection bullet (I think it is co-ownership with the consumer/partner) let’s just enjoy some cat phishin’.

Now the image is funny, but the problem is not. It is kind of like opting in for a camapaign with a name like Mr. Poopypants. I bet there are quite a few other ways we could make a dent here, like a public service campaign of education about email marketing from the DMA, EEC, DM News, and all the other ESPs and marketers. That would most likely help all of us if we took this to the public proactively instead of just sitting back and dealing with it. 

I am not sure what to think about this idea. I have had messages from other email marketing experts that have started to use this service already. I can understand WHY people might want to use this system, but as an email marketer my thoughts are still out to vote. 

I have set up an account for myself but do not have enough data or experience to tell you WHY to use it. Here is the coverage on it below from last week. 

What still strikes me as odd is that it was created by one of the earlier founders of an Email Service Provider.

“OtherInbox is a service that helps with one of the growing problems of using Web services: e-mail overload. More specifically, services that take your information and sell it to third parties–thus filling up your in-box with decentralized junk.

OtherInbox works by giving you a special address you can use when you sign up for things and it helps you filter them in a central location with tags and layout akin to Apple’s Mail application. Each “subscription” reads like its own in-box.

The service may be most useful for figuring out what services are selling out your e-mail address to other parties, but it’s also good for handling bacn–the messages you may want from a service, but not necessarily filling up your in-box. What makes it special is that users can effectively kill off that special address making the messages bounce back to the people who would be spamming you.”

When I first saw this in another email service providers email newsletter last week, I did not know quite what to think of it. My first reaction was great idea for the small business that adds one or two people a day to their email lists. My second reaction was how in the heck was this a best practice or Can Spam compliant? 

Now since I don’t have all the data on this new widget yet my post here might be a little off. And that being said I welcome anyone from this company to respond and let me know how it works. 

My fear is as follows:

1. You are making it easy for people to add emails of those that have not opted in

2. You are setting an idea in your client’s minds that it is OK to just add email addresses collected from sources outside of a double opt in form THAT they did not initiate.

3. Making is easy does not make it right

Now for the other side of my thoughts. 

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Fingerprint just finished writing their first email client market share report. It’s the biggest study of email client usage ever conducted, using a sample of almost three million email recipients.

It’s exciting for them because it’s the first time they’ve released any of the data that’s been collected through Fingerprint. It shows the top 10 email clients in use for both consumer and business mailing lists.

I have been working on deploying it for our own newsletters (have you subscribed yet?), and will share OUR results soon.

Business Email Client Use from Study: 

Read the full report

Consumer Email Client Use from Study:

I thought that using ALL images in your email was a common fact that we all know is not in any of our best interests. The fact that so many email clients have image suppression set up and that filters look for emails with all images bodes poorly for all the home and fashion brands that MUST think that they are too good or too big to have it matter to them. 

Maybe I am wrong here. IF so someone let me know. But it kills me when I see emails like this. I can commend them on the creation of a new idea of a “Falliday” but with all image email I feel more like it is ripe for a “Fail-A-Day”. I will not fault the design or the concept, just the execution. 

Does anyone have any recent studies that show the number of email clients or of subscribers that suppress images? I would wager that quite a few of their subscribers get emails that are just ALT tags at best. My advice, and yes it is free advice so take it with a grain of salt, but you are setting your campaigns up for failure if you take the design road of “Well we have this catalogue and these images, can we just use those images since we already have them and this copy we took from the print has already been approved.” 

Email is not print. 

Email Preference Centers are important. Would anyone disagree here? We are seeing more and more marketers making preference centers more front and center in their list management and data management practices? Why? Well if presented with the opportunity to change email preferences, let me tell you more about myself, and using it as an outreach point in order have you get emails you want (or get off of those you do not) we can build a better relationship of trust. Together.

Trust and understanding is important. We saw some dialogues last week that stemmed from a post on this blog about this issue. We need to set up more points of communication of a two way dialogue and conversation. Email is not only about opt in, list growth, relevant emails and conversions. It is about trust and relationships. 

As people we are inundated with email marketing messages each and every day. We have the opportunity to take the high road and give less but of greater relationship value. I have used the example from IronPort (bought in the past by Cisco) in order to illustrate the approach to starting a conversation. Now I did not need the incentive of a new TV, but it is a touch of “What’s In It For Me” as a subscriber if they did not see the value of updating their preferences.

If you are not opening yourself up to learn more and communicate in a more open manner with your subscribers, then you are setting yourself up for more data issues in the future as well as poor performing campaigns. 

When are you going to set up your preference center and if you have one already… when are you going to let people know? 

Sure is was a funny sophmoric joke, but people that mess with email marketers data with false names, fake names, friends names, or my favorite asdf@asdf.com (look at your keyboard) make our jobs hard. Now to get some mileage out of you and your buddies getting emails from a brand or person that are dynamically loaded with the fake name you opted in with is fine in your inner circles. But placing your “joke” out there about how you loaded false data into an opt in form is crap. 

When you do this do you realize how many hours a year the marketing and email marketing industry is spending to clean out crap like this? These data points go into our CRMs, our ecom sites, our lead capture systems and more. And to top this off data that is bogus can cause us deliverability issues as ISPs that we all try so hard to avoid. Do us a favor, if you want something, sign up for it with real info, if you want to streak the quad, do it on your own site. 

Now Ken you are a persona in our space, and sure you got a joke out of this. Hell I do some pretty odd things myself, but data integrity is everything to our industry and to me this is insulting to us and not funny. 

I think that as someone that covers the industry and espouses the things that make us strong, tear us down, threaten our industry, and lift us up… you of all people should be helping us out and not hurting us.

Here is the article from Frank the Tank Magill. Enjoy your weekend at Bed, Bath, Beyond.

Return Path’s Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report

Return Path recently released its  Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. Here is George Bilbrey’s high level take on what they found:

Most of the servers sending email shouldn’t be. Only 20% of the IPs we studied were legitimate, well-configured, static email servers. It’s important to point out that this doesn’t speak at all to the quality of the messages from those servers - lots of horrible spammers know how to configure a mail server. The other 80% of the mail is coming from servers that are either identifiably bad or unidentifiable and probably bad. No wonder ISPs and other large receivers feel besieged. 

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Microsoft has launched a new add on that in Outlook 2007 can add some functionality to email priority scoring while at the same time give you a little more control over your time and inbox management. Why do I find this newsworthy to share with email marketers? Well I think that this could have an impact on how people get, read and respond to email. More importantly will it change the way that office workers and users of Outlook 2007 read and act on email marketing campaigns? It is way too early to know yet, but worth keeping on the radar. 

Example: What if your marketing emails and newsletters are giving a lower priority to other emails, are shoved down in the importance scale and left unchecked? Or even worse just mass deleted? Well this bodes well for office productivity but not for your campaigns. SO in thinking about this from a high and early level we should think about the importance of the relationship, how people are interacting and responding to our emails and take the subject line to a new level of importance in our campaign planning. 

How will this impact your campaigns? Or will it? That is yet to be known or determined, but if this application has some traction we might need to think about it more in our email marketing efforts and planning.

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I wanted to share with you a dialogue from last week that I had with a subscriber to our double opt in newsletter list. We had a campaign go out to subscribers that really had not engaged much with our last few months of newsletters and guide/email marketing study releases. The email chain is posted below in reverse order so that you can see the end and read down to what occurred. 

At eROI we take subscribers seriously and we respect email opt in to the nth degree. When I see people that make changes to a profile or subscription with bogus info or setting us up for a spam trap or complaint I react immediately to see why they would take this action. The below was not an unsubscribe, but an individual making a change to a mailinator.com email address as opposed to just opting out. Why would someone do this? Well read the rest of the post to find out. 

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MAWWG released some new best practices for ISPs and ESPs to take a look at in June. I have been meaning to share this if you have not read it already. Worth taking a read if you have not seen it yet from the ISP and ESP side of the businesses. Email Marketers might not find too much in this release. 

Globally-Developed MAAWG Best Practices for Dynamic Address Sharing, Email Forwarding Now Available; Aimed at Botnets, Improving User Experience

Network operators and ISPs from around the world have cooperated on two new best practice papers addressing technical issues that will help block botnet-induced spam and improve the deliverability of consumers’ personal emails. The recommendations for sharing IP address space and for email forwarding were approved at a Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) meeting in Heidelberg, Germany last week and are available today.

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Let’s think about this expose in the NYT last week about Goodmail. Now I could agree with them in some ways, but rather if someone has a program that 1. qualifies for Goodmail and 2. Wants to pay for delivery then why is there a problem with it? Truly if the individual has opted in for your email programs you should be able to make sure that it is going to get to the inbox. If this means using a pay for delivery system (now it does not work at all ISPs as of now) then go for it. 

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Do you have some questions for the omnipitent ruler of Yahoo Mail? Well here is your chance. You have a 4-5pm Window on the 30th to fire off your questions to Mark. I will be on the beach about that time just thinking about not working… again. (It is a repetitive process to take me away from work and like any good 12 step program takes repeating things to yourself). 

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How many amazing things have we seen over the years made from junk mail? We saw the shredder that automatically prints then shreds spam/junk mail. We saw SpamObituraries where a writer uses the sender FROM to write the Obit of the person. And we now have this art. I actually love it and it was shared with me from Tricia Pridemore. (Thanks!)

I have actually made one of these my background on my laptop today. Makes me laugh as they are good.

If you are anywhere like me, I love to check out the junk as much as the good stuff. Seeing how they bait people in with the From Lines, the subject line and the fact that you might actually trust this kills me.