Viewing all posts categorized as 'Private Eye'

Microsoft has recently announced enhancements to its Windows Live Hotmail, including features that “help busy people with full lives.” The CheetahMail deliverability team has reviewed these new features and offers these thoughts on their potential impact on senders.

Some of the new features that should have a positive impact on email deliverability include:

• Trusted Senders Icon — Hotmail will now help visually identify ‘trusted senders’ in your inbox, particularly banks and other senders most commonly impersonated in phishing scams, by putting safety logos next to those senders recognized as legitimate. While the exact details on this feature are limited right now, it will most likely be based on a combination of authentication and a consistently positive mailing reputation.
• Tabs — Organizational tools will appear at the top of the inbox that will allow the user to display messages received from specific contacts, certain social networks (such as Facebook notifications), pre-selected email groups, or all of their mail. In addition, “Quick Views” will be available that will automatically sort four types of emails into their respective folders: Flagged, Photos, Office Docs, and Shipping Updates. These tabs can benefit senders by addressing inbox overload issues.

One of the new features that should have a negative impact on senders and deliverability as a whole:

• Time Traveling Filters — Microsoft’s filters can retroactively remove messages that were placed in the inbox if the reputation of the sender later turns out to be poor and the recipient has not yet opened the message in their inbox. That means there’s no longer a guarantee that a message delivered to the inbox will actually stay there until the recipient acts on it.

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As marketers increasingly create niche brands or become consolidated within ‘parent’ companies, it may seem like the ideal opportunity to cross-promote products and services across ‘sister’ brands to reach prospective customers, expand subscriber lists and increase revenue.

Unfortunately, sharing subscriber data across brands has the potential to negatively impact reputation, which can adversely influence inbox placement for all of the sending brands. This practice may not only generate increased complaints but, if executed improperly, could also result in lower engagement and higher unsubscribes due to subscriber frustration or irrelevancy of sister brand outreach.

Here are some tactics to positively introduce subscribers to ‘sister’ brands:

• Implement a branded welcome email series that familiarizes current subscribers with related brands. This serves to boost interest as well as brand recognition of the sister brand. Furthermore, this association will begin the process of persuading subscribers to click-through and check out other content. Be sure to include all brand logos in the footer or elsewhere in standard messaging or cross-promotional messages as that will further increase awareness and credibility for all of your affiliated brands.
• Place the unsubscribe link at the top of the cross-promoted marketing message to encourage subscribers to opt-out of co-branded promotions rather than complain to their ISP or unsubscribe from all emails from that ‘sender.’* Complaints are the most important consideration by ISPs in their filtering decisions, so providing subscribers a highly visible unsubscribe helps to maintain low complaint rates and a good reputation.
• Utilize clear and conspicuous language at the point of email consent so that subscribers have realistic expectations of potential cross-branded communications.
• Refrain from changing the ‘from’ address of the originally subscribed-to brand. Any other ‘from’ address will surprise recipients and increase complaints.
• Direct recipients to a preference center when they join or leave your program and utilize it to expose subscribers to other brands’ subscription options.
• Ensure that the cross-branded emails include a significant promotion that provides value and encourages future receipt of these types of emails. Alternatively, use some existing space within an email to solicit subscriptions to an affiliated brands email list.

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In my last blog post, I spoke about ‘mostly dead’ email recipients who are closely monitored as an anti-spam measure because their accounts are being neglected. Not only do ISPs investigate these accounts, but Microsoft just announced they’re suing an emailer for deceptively creating accounts with the intent to game their anti-spam filter. Clearly this is not something that legitimate senders would do, but it does relate to a question I get on occasion; should we tell our recipients, friends, family and co-workers to help us get out of the spam folder by clicking the ‘not spam’ button?

The short answer to the question is yes, this can be helpful. But the reality is it will only work if:

1. You’re not trying to get around a genuine reputation problem.
2. You’re really popular.
3. The response activity is genuine.

Companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! spend millions of dollars and labor resources fighting search engine click fraud. The fraud scenario is no different with email when users click ‘not spam’ using dormant or otherwise fake accounts. As a result, be mindful that these and other email providers can tell the difference between genuine user responses and an attempt to game their system, as Microsoft is showing with their latest lawsuit.

Here are some recommendations to engage recipients to legitimately help regain inbox standing: Read More »

Recently, our strategic services team presented a webinar on re-engaging inactive users. In that discussion, they focused on the tremendous ROI benefits from focusing on users who aren’t regularly engaging with your email. During the webinar, the speakers spoke about testing mailing frequencies for your less engaged segments. They did not suggest suppressing inactive subscribers entirely. From a deliverability perspective this is an important detail for mailers looking to maintain long term list health to consider. There are three categories of ‘inactive’ subscribers that apply to deliverability and sender reputation:

• De-activated users: Every ISP and webmail provider handles de-activations differently, and most don’t publish their user activity requirements. Some providers such as Microsoft have publicly stated that they use old, recycled, addresses to identify potential spammers. Of course, defunct addresses will bounce. A smaller percentage of addresses that are not regularly mailed risk hitting these formerly active, but now converted to ‘spamtrap’ addresses, with subsequent mailings. The key to avoiding this situation is to never let an inactive email segment or other email list sit for longer than 6 months. Ideally, all addresses should be mailed at least once per quarter to ensure continued activity.
• “Mostly dead” users: One of my favorite movies is the Princess Bride, especially the scene with Billy Crystal as Miracle Max where he says “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.” Some ISPs and webmail providers will start the de-activation process, yet still enable successful email deliveries. Yahoo! publicly states that accounts are de-activated after 4 months of inactivity, but gives users a grace period to come back and re-activate their accounts. AOL and other ISPs have confirmed that they closely look at these types of accounts to identify potential spam activity since spammers will regularly create these accounts to mitigate their overall complaint rates directed to other users at the same ISP. These mailboxes will not generate a hard bounce error code — as would normally result from users who reach their storage limits (mailbox full), unknown users or unavailable users (resulting in bounce error MAILER DAEMON). It’s hard to distinguish these three types of subscribers, which is why it’s important to implement proactive marketing campaigns to target those subscribers on the brink of lapsing.

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For many years, the public impression of how email deliverability works has been shrouded in mystery. Most seem to assume that email service providers hire deliverability experts because they know some sort of ISP black magic — or even better, that they have a direct ‘Bat-Phone’ to call ISP postmasters whenever a problem arises. While ISP relations are still critical to ensuring high delivery rates, the days of relying solely on ISP phone calls or emails to fix delivery problems are a thing of the past.

It’s important to note these key issues about ISP postmasters:

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Here at Experian CheetahMail, we allocate multiple dedicated IP addresses to each of our clients. We do this primarily so that we can send email faster, especially during the holidays. A secondary benefit of this approach is that if an ISP blocks/filters one IP address, it does not impact the other IP addresses sending email.

But now that filtering technologies have now moved beyond IP address reputation to domain-based reputation, it is critical to understand how this shift fundamentally changes how email is filtered by ISPs.

• The good news: For most senders, this change will actually benefit their delivery rates. The fact remains that ISP filters still have ‘false positive’ situations where an individual IP address is singled out due to insufficient data or a glitch in the system, while the same sender’s other IP addresses are highly reputable and reach the inbox. With domain-based reputation, the filter looks at all of the data associated with the domain — therefore the singled-out IP address is overshadowed by the other approved IP addresses. In addition, domain-based filtering incorporates the reputation associated with transactional email sent from the same domain, which will most certainly help overall sender reputation.
• The bad news: If there truly is a reputation problem from anywhere within a sender’s domain, it will effect most (if not all) of the mail coming from that sender. This means that senders must be mindful of their complaint rates and email acquisition efforts because they both will affect their domain-based reputation — and by extension, their ROI. Equally important, if a sender is using the same domain for transactional messaging, those emails may also see their deliverability rates decline.

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There really is a baby in that bath water.

I’ve never used that idiom before, but in this case, I feel compelled to use it in response to an article in BtoB Magazine that actually promotes the use of unsolicited commercial email (UCE). In the article, Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex, says that “there’s nothing prohibiting a marketer from sending an e-mail to someone who hasn’t opted in. The recession has forced us to drop this etiquette.”

Everyone has a different definition of what spam is, yet I think we can all agree that at a baseline it starts with unsolicited commercial email — promotional messages sent to consumers who have not requested them. My feeling is that just because we are burdened by an economic recession right now does not give us license to abandon the principles of responsible, permission-based email marketing. By lowering our standards when the going gets tough, we risk losing our industry’s credibility with consumers altogether.

I’ll keep my underlying point here brief: PLEASE DON’T SEND SPAM! If you’re still new to email or striving for more education, please refer to these best practice guides which include recommendations and guidelines that the vast majority of the email industry follow:

• Direct Marketing Association US
• Direct Marketing Association UK
• Email Sender & Provider Coalition
• Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group