The Email Wars

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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If you have not noticed the new header on this blog (look at the top) you will now notice that we have added the updated blogs to the masthead. We have redesigned ReturnOnSubscriber and moved EmailDays to eROIDays.com as it makes more sense. 

Look for the launch of an East Coast (NYC Office) and West Coast (PDX Office) blog soon with the daily rantings, finds, and culture of eROI from the whole team. It is a cool new blog that changes coasts based on the last post. Makes it more competitive. 

Ryan Buchanan, our CEO, is working on sharing more about the Company eROI, his thoughts on things that reach his inbox and the industry as whole. 

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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.

Google has revamped the contacts section of Gmail to let users decide who’s on their A-list.

Gmail adds a contact entry for every e-mail you use, and previously showed either the full list or the “Most Contacted” subset Google chose. Now the service divides contacts into a “My Contacts” list that users can define and a “Suggested Contacts” list with everyone else.

What does this mean for email marketers? Well my initial take on this is that it should help with deliverability by automatically placing your email address for your campaigns into the address book of your subscribers… making you a trusted sender in some ways. There might be some ways in which this is going to help, but it is a little early to know the full impact.

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Blog post from Fred Wilson - Union Square Ventures.

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/07/are-your-invite.html

I think this is interesting because Twitter is such a hot Web 2.0 company these days, and yet they’re facing the same issues that many other companies face, making sure that their emails get delivered to consumers’ inboxes.

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I am a big fan of the use of images to tell the stories in email. I know you will bash this as well images can be suppressed, but when it works and it done right pictures can evoke a click often times more that too much text. Copy, although important, is so often over used and truly just creates more things to do and drives less impact on the desired action to delve deeper into the story, item, purchase, conversion, etc. 

This example of Adobe is their newsletter which connects with people on so many levels. Not only for the fact that it is outright sexy, but that it can tell the stories quicker with images than it would with text. Simple layouts like this are growing and evident more in the movement to simplify our web interactions with the 2.0 design philosophy. 

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Eighty five percent of companies failed to personalize the first e-mail message sent to new subscribers, Return Path discovered with its new Return Path Subscriber Experiences study. This lack of customization, combined with other missed opportunities, leaves marketers unable to leverage the true power of email marketing.

Return Path, the leading e-mail performance management company, conducted the study by subscribing and studying the e-mail programs of 61 companies from the retail, consumer goods, travel, and media/entertainment industries.

The problem is not lack of data. Marketers are collecting information at sign-up that could be used to personalize their initial and subsequent e-mails. In fact, seventy percent of the companies studied collected additional information beyond a subscribers’ e-mail at sign up. Yet, 75% of the companies that collected that additional information did not use it to personalize their e-mails.

http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2008/06/research-study-creating-great.php

Return Path has recorded a webcast with Bonnie Malone Fry reviewing the study findings. Download that webcast here: http://www.returnpath.net/landing/subscribers. Downloading the webcast will also trigger an email message with a link to the study.

In a similar fashion to the Auditing The Opt In post, you need to always be checking that your opt out process is working. People make changes to code on your site(s) that can impact this flow.

Make sure to test the the footers or any links in your emails monthly.

Check that the opt out is processing immediately in your email ESP or CRM system AND any outside systems that you are using like Salesforce or MS CRM.

If you are syncing it with your ecom system make sure that they opt out is recorded there as well for marketing emails and that transactional emails are still working.

If you have a page on your site that allows to update or change your email profile, make sure that form/system is feeding the same data as the opt out.

The big red flag to me is to always look at any 3rd party data you are using and make sure to wash your internal database against it so that you are not emailing those that have opted out. I have seen my fair share of 3rd parties that email me and do not make this a solid practice.

If you did not have anything else to worry about this week, here you go… more domains. Okay, now that we are past that, you can breathe. It is going to be okay. In the past this might have been a concern, but really it is just Yahoo making a last ditch effort to slow the hemorrhaging loss they are having in trust and audience share in regard to people using email as a hook to the portal.

Yahoo is opening up some new domains that will deliver through the same delivery channels as you work on now for whitelisting and email deliverability, just throwing a new coat of paint on the outside. If you are dying to get an email address with your name instead of jimbob1234@domain.com you are in luck. And if you are reading this and thinking WOW this is great news, then maybe you are reading the wrong blog. This is a low hanging fruit play and not really that news relevant. 

So relax, work up that next email campaign, sip down that Triple Mocha Latte Quad shot extremely hot half whip beverage and breathe. Actually one thing to consider is that your ESP has a handle on it as some ESPs may not have these new domains as valid domains in their lists. It does happen.

Read the News Here>

Now I know that this is a morbid post title, but as I was driving today I had a thought pop into my head, What the heck happens to your email accounts when you die? Has anyone ever talked about this? Does your next of kin contact all the ISPs that you have email accounts with and deactivate them? Do they just live on getting more and more email? Does anyone know?

Consider this in the fact of your email list churn or non respondents. Have you ever once considered the fact that maybe the fact that they have stopped reading your email is that they have died? I can tell you I had never considered this as something to think about before this past week. How do you know? Do you send out an email with a subject line “Alive or Dead? Please confirm?”. That might be one way of taking a whack at this issue, but as we are growing the upward online demographic more and more each week, month and year we might need to start considering this in our inactive files. 

What this bodes well for is list hygiene and keeping your list in order. So many people have “dirty” lists where they are not taking the actions to cull or move non active emails to another list. They simply continue to mail to them come hell (no pun intended) or high water. So what are you doing? Are you keeping on top of your list and working on segmenting addresses based on inactivity? I hope so as unless their next of kin took a liking the the email address they had or got access to it, you are simply mailing into the ether.

So with a release a few months back from GoDaddy telling people that they now offer an email marketing platform for GoDaddy Domain owners, they release this… basically if you get a spam complaint and you host your domain with them, they will charge you $200 and $75 to get your domain back. Now everyone (trust me here) deals with a spam complaint every now and then as consumers feel it is easier to mark as spam than it is to unsubscribe. So are they now going to hold brands and companies hostage for pay anytime some marks an email as spam or junk? Or just when they file a formal complaint? I really don’t know but I think this is a bonehead move. Maybe it is just to scare their own customers hwo are using their email marketing service whom host with them as they could be non educated email marketers just happy with paying $7/mo to send emails?

From Deliverability.com

Don’t host domains at GoDaddy if you do email marketing (who doesn’t?)
A reader forwarded this GoDaddy message to me (I have anonymized it) asking for advice. Apparently GoDaddy is now charging for handling spam complaints and has a $200 “spam tax” for clients that do email marketing. If they receive spam complaints against you, they are claiming that they will hold your domain ransom unless you pay $75 to release it.

Basically, GoDaddy is saying that if you do email marketing or have affiliates that send emails linking to your site, they don’t want your business.

http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/06/dont-host-domai.html

Very excited to see Campaign Monitor continue to share with the email marketing community. Our designers love them for the help that they provide to the design community.

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In the last year, we’ve seen some changes in the email client market. Webmail usage continues to grow significantly while new versions of popular desktop clients have been released. In an attempt to stimulate some improvement on the CSS front, we’ve helped launch the Email Standards Project.

While we can hope for future improvements, it’s the present we need to design for. The time has arrived to again poke and prod the major email clients to determine just how much (or how little) support they provide for using CSS with HTML emails.

Last year’s report focused on the unique challenges of Outlook 2007. In 2008, Outlook is still an issue, but there are encouraging signs in other areas.

The release of Entourage 2008 (the Mac equivalent of Outlook) made great improvements with CSS support, bringing it on par with Apple Mail’s excellent rendering. Proof that perhaps Microsoft has been listening and we can only hope that the next version of Outlook will follow suit.

Get the PDF of the CSS Chart for email clients at the link below.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/