How often do you get emails spoofing or looking to be from a brand name that you trust? I get them every now and then but this one had me double taking, looking at the headers, and opening it up to code to see what or who it was really from. Now when you go to this length to use a brand like CNN and deliver creative that makes even me think, it has to impact your brand.
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.
Gmail is having a systemwide outage affecting multiple countries, and a whole bunch of its 100 million users are screaming about it on Twitter
. Around 20 million people visit Gmail each day, according to Comscore, and they’re all seeing the same message. The first outages were reported at about 2 pm PST, 44 minutes ago. The Gmail blog is silent on the outage, instead giving readers some useful tips on customizing web clips.
Email: A New Target For The DEA
According to AOL Mail’s fourth annual Email Addiction Survey, 46% of email users said they’re hooked on email (up from just 15% last year) and 51% check their email four or more times a day. One in five said they check their email more than 10 times a day.
27% are so overwhelmed by their email that they’ve either declared “email bankruptcy,” deleting (or planning to) all their email messages to start anew. 20% of users said they have over 300 emails in their inboxes! 24% admit they’ve signed up for a new email address to start fresh. 69% of email users said they have multiple email accounts, up from 52% in 2007.
Regina Lewis, AOL Online Consumer Advisor, noted that “We really do live in a 24-7 society and it’s not uncommon to be online and checking email at all hours of the day…”
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.
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.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..
1. Viagra
2. XXX Fun
3. Nigerian Bank Assistance
Spam Lit (also known as Lit Spam and Literary Spam) is defined as snippets of nonsensical verse and prose embedded in spam e-mail messages. Some of the snippets are made up, others are passages from public domain works (such as Edgar Allan Poe and The Bible), and others are conglomerations of several creative public domain works, which can often be copied off the web and included in e-mail messages hawking software, male enhancement pills, and computers.
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).
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.
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.
I know that many of you that read this email marketing blog might relate to what I am about to share with you. The names have been removed to protect the crazy. Now not saying that this person was crazy, just passionate about getting off a clients opt in list. Every once in a while we get people that do not want to use the unsub link or reply to the sender to remove them from their list. So what do they do? They look at the headers of the email and find out who the email service provide (ESP) is and send us the email.
I know many of you have got these. We take them very seriously and reply immediately and take action even faster. But this one illustrates the fun in the ESP world we get to experience. Totally transparent with all of you here.
I have actually written a post some months back that I am still on the fence about posting from an amazing phone call I got from a guy that got an opt in email from one of our clients. Still don’t know if I will ever post it. We will see. It is insane, as was the caller.
But here it is in all of it’s glory. Is it clear what this person wants? And how long did it take to create this email? If I take the rules of clarity in copy writing into practice, this person nailed it. Consider yourself removed. But what client were you emailing about? Love this industry?
Hi, My name is Dylan and I work for a company called eROI. We have an ESP product called emailROI. We use it for our own email communications and are quite happy with it. So why in the hell would you send me an offer to get a Vertical Response account? I love these third party list rentals. They never know much about anyone on their list. Just happy with the CPM of an email address, and wham bam thank you mam… here you go Dylan an offer you just can’t refuse.
Wow. When I do a list rentals for clients I make sure to suppress against know addresses of comp, etc. Vertical Response you need to do the same. I know the shot gun approach can work from time to time, but you are not displaying industry leading best practices and most likely attracting clients that will do the same.
Best part about this is they are using my emailROI email address that I stopped using over 4 years ago. And this sender is something that I have never heard from before in my life nor have I got emails from them before. Crazy. Like the line in Animal House, “Pledge him, we need the dues.”
If you do any list rentals or partnering use this as a lesson of what not to do, or call me and I will be happy to walk you through best practices.
How New CAN-SPAM Rules Affect Marketers
The FTC has just announced it has approved four new rule provisions to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. MarketingSherpa’s Senior Reporter Chris Heine discusses the changes with Jeff Mills, Director of Sales and Strategy at eROI. Listen to our podcast to discover how these changes will affect email marketers and what they’ll have to do differently to be in compliance. The provisions are expected to take effect this summer.
Wow. This is one for the books. I was stunned this week at a client that moved to Eloqua, which I thought was a great system, when I was told that unless I was using Internet Explorer I could not unsub from the link. This is one of the craziest things I have ever seen with my own eyes in email marketing. Why would a profile system or an unsubscribe process be built to be platform or browser specific? Love that they gave me a link to download IE? I have it already but don’t use it as my default browser.
So in a world where web forms should work in any browser why can’t Eloqua make this investment to be cross browser compatible? I open this post up to any comments and explanations from them if they want. Please enlighten me? If I was a client and this happened to my email recipient I would be ticked. It is basically not allowing me to unsubscribe from an email with a simple opt out. Right? Or am I just a bit crazy?
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