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Hotmail has recently been in the news for improving their users’ Inbox experience, enhancing tools and improving their filters. More specifically, Hotmail is trying to combat “Graymail”  or all of the newsletters, offers, social network website emails, and other email communications many sign up for and are no longer relevant to you but keep getting delivered. These are emails that users legitimately receive but no longer want – roughly 75% of email identified as spam by Hotmail customers according to Windows Live Hotmail.

At Experian CheetahMail, this Graymail announcement has left many of our clients asking how this change will affect their messages and more importantly their deliverability/Inbox performance. These enhancements go along with what CheetahMail Deliverability has always advised about mailing to your actives. Basically any mail that is sitting in a users’ Hotmail inbox untouched (not opened or clicked) after a while is considered Graymail. Hotmail is trying to reduce the burden of all sorts of offers, newsletters etc for the user and their own system.

We don’t have much insight into their filter algorithms but we can assume if too many people are allowing the clients emails to sit in their inboxes and end up as graymail, Hotmail’s filter will pick this up and can possibly start sending the emails to bulk. We have often seen a decrease in user engagement as a reason for Hotmail bulking. By mailing to your active and engaged Hotmail users this Graymail issue should become a non-issue. Additionally, consider asking users to add the client to their address book to ensure inbox delivery and avoid spam/junk foldering. Instructions can be found here: http://www.cheetahmail.com/deliverability/reach-the-inbox/

The two main features of Graymail that we DO know are:

One-click Unsubscribe

Hotmail has had an unsubscribe link in the user interface already, but how they handle these requests are changing and not complying could result in your email being sent to the spam folder. If a subscriber clicks on the unsubscribe link in the Hotmail interface now, and either the list-unsubscribe header isn’t present or doesn’t work, email from that sender will be permanently delivered to the spam folder. CheetahMail complies with this unsubscribe request.

Schedule Cleanup

Hotmail users can now decide how long they want messages from a particular sender, or all senders, in their inbox before they are deleted permanently or moved to a specified folder. This could be the best time to reach out to your subscribers and give them a choice to the frequency of emails they want to receive. This cleanup could also prove to be beneficial for senders as subscribers may not mark old, unwanted email as spam which can adversely drive up spam complaints.

Cyber Monday is here!  Are you tired of hearing about it yet?  Well here is a new fun fact that indicates just how big of a deal this last Monday of the month truly is.

Eighty-two percent more emails had Cyber Monday in the subject line this past Friday, November 18, to Saturday, November 26 as compared to the same dates last year, according to an Experian CheetahMail analysis.  

These subject lines didn’t just tout the day, they shouted out special deals and offers that were tough to refuse. Some of the subject lines that caught my eye included:

• Up to $50 off – it’s officially Cyber Monday!
• It’s Cyber Monday!  Don’t Miss Out! + Free Shipping Every Day
• 50% off Exclusive Cyber Monday Event Starts Now
• Bonus Event! 80% Off Cyber Fix Deal Starts Now

Keep the Cyber celebration going everyone – happy mailing (and shopping)!

Experian CheetahMail tracks the holiday mailing activity of 385 brands that also mailed in the 2010 Holiday Season. All metrics are based on results 3 days from send.

A common complaint about email as a medium is that it is often difficult to tell when someone is using sarcasm or trying to relay emotion. An added difficulty is when language and word usage is different between the sender and recipient. I recently came upon an article from the BBC that takes this concept to the extreme, thanks to a miscommunication caused by an email auto-response.

In this case, there was a road sign in Wales that needed to be written in both English and in Welsh. The sign maker got the English part right, but the Welsh part… well, maybe not so much.

The Welsh translation of the image above is, “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”

Apparently, the official charged with creating the sign emailed a translator asking for the proper Welsh translation. When the translator’s out-of-office auto-reply message came back in Welsh, the sign maker assumed that the auto-reply was the actual translation. Alas, somewhere in Wales an automatic out of office message is now on a road sign.

I thought I’d quickly pass along a USA Today Snapshot featured data from none other than yours truly, Experian Marketing Services. Their chart lists the top 10 most popular subject-line keywords as pulled from our study, The 2010 digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report.

• Are there any keywords that surprise you?
• Are there any that you think should be on the list that are not there?
• What about ones that you don’t think are as popular?

Share your thoughts with us!

We have all been guilty at one time or another of abandoning our shopping carts. Maybe we couldn’t find our credit card, or the shipping costs shocked us, or we simply lost interest in our purchase.

Whatever the reason for the abandonment, the simple fact is that the vendor has let untapped revenue slip between their fingers.

Experian CheetahMail’s new white paper, The remarketing report: Benchmark data and analysis for connecting web behavior to email marketing explains the value in marketing to abandoners, reporting that sending reminder emails to abandoners who do not convert after the first abandoned cart email can boost campaign revenue by up to 33 percent.

But why do website visitors abandon their carts in the first place? A study by PayPal and comScore found that 45% of US online shoppers had abandoned shopping carts multiple times in just three weeks. The average cost of abandoned goods in those shopping carts was $109. In the same study, 46% of online shoppers said high shipping charges was a “very important reason” for ditching their carts.

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It’s that time of the year again, so without further adieu, let’s talk about everyone’s favorite unofficial holiday, Cyber Monday!

Contrary to popular belief, the term “Cyber Monday” was not coined by an army of scotch drinking Japanese robots from the 1980′s, but rather by Shop.org, the prominent digital retail group who sought to create a sister holiday for Black Friday that focused solely on online commerce. Cyber Monday falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving and has become more and more recognized over recent years.

While we at Email Responsibly have touched on the topic of Cyber Monday in the past, today it’s time to look forward to see what is in store for Cyber Monday this year.

• In general, we expect to see an overall increase in the number of Cyber Monday and Black Friday mentions (by name) in email campaigns this year. This development comes on the heels of last year’s holiday season in which we witnessed firsthand the increasing usage of the actual term “Cyber Monday” in email campaigns. Furthermore, we expect to see these terms being used earlier, more prevalently and together in the same email – certainly more-so than in prior years.

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Just in time for the holidays, our friends at Experian Marketing Services have produced a valuable new research report packed with useful tips and insight for maximizing holiday marketing strategies this year. So what do we expect to see this holiday season in respect to the email marketing industry’s performance? The 2009 holiday marketer: Benchmark and trend report has some interesting points well worth your consideration, especially for all of you email marketers out there looking to gain an edge on the competition this winter.

Taking a look at the data from the report, there are a number of relevant tidbits that merit a quick shout-out:

• Email’s “eco-friendly” reputation may not hold as much sway with environmentally-conscious customers as you thought, so don’t cancel the print catalogs just yet.
  “Surprising to many, Behavioral Greens, which are the group of consumers that are most green aware according to Experian Simmons, account for nearly half of all catalog purchases.”
• Shorter really is sweeter when it comes to email subject lines during the holidays.
  “All industries with the exception of consumer products and services experienced the highest open rates when using subject lines of 25 characters or less last year.”

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