OneDegree | Using Email to Build Trust

Yesterday my first post to OneDegree went live.

You will find five practical short and long-term tips to help marketers build your email messages and programs that will encourage recipients to accept, open and act upon email.

These include:

1. Gather and Respect Consent.
2. Be Patient. Be Methodical.
3. Be Clear.
4. Provide Valuable Options.
5. Manage Expectations.

Read Using Email to Build Trust here on OneDegree.

Gmail talks about fighting spam and reputation

A look at the Gmail anti-spam team and the methods they use to combat spam.

Gmail has also recienly published the paper "Sender Reputation in a Large Webmail Service" for the CEAS (CONFERENCE ON EMAIL AND ANTI-SPAM - 2008). This paper discussed how a large webmail service can define and use reputation to identify and clasify authenticated sending domains to be spammy or not spammy.

CMA’s Direct Marketing Conference Follow up

Last week the CMA’s Direct Marketing Conference was held in Toronto. I wasn't able to attend, but I have been catching up on the events via these updates from OneDegree:

Impressions, Notes and Videos from the CMA's Digital Marketing Conference

Robin Whalen On The CMA’s Direct Marketing Conference

DMC: Steve Levy from Ipsos-Reid on next steps for Canadian Marketers

DMC: There is No Such Thing as Mobile Marketing in Canada

In related news, sometime in the next few days my first posting to OneDegree.ca will be made available, Keep an eye out for the update.

Q&A | The possibality of collateral damage

Is there a possibality of collateral damage if the ESP I mail with has other clients with bad email reputaitons?

Will there be an impact on delivery if a sender with a bad reputation is on the same network as my server with a good reputation?

It is a possibility that your neighbour could cause you some pains along the way
if they are not tended to by your ESP. In many cases it depends on who is doing
the blocking and the number of bad actors on the same network.

The good news - for most ISPs they will notice the difference and act only on bad IPs. That is where your revers DNS is important - to show the distinct nature/sender on each IP.

Does this mean then that a unique sending IP address given to me by my ESP is not necessarily as "safe" as we might otherwise think?

Yes this is true, but new systems are being developed by the leading ISPs and
ESPs to help distinguish one sending entity from another. Systems like Domain
Keys (or Domain Keys Identified Mail) are able to distinguish the "sender"
reputation and begin the movement from IP reputation to a domain based
reputation system.

The possibility of collateral damage bounces is greatly reduced on an isolated IP address, especially when compared to that of a shared IP address.

How do escalating blocking systems work?

Systems like UCE Protect are a good example of an escalating block pattern.

Level 1 - Contains single IP addresses

Level 2 - Lists larger netblocks based on the number of listings in Level 1 (4 or more IPs in level 1 in the same network) with increasing size based on the total number of IPs listed.

Level 3 - Lists Networks with a lot of level 1 or 2 listings, possible listing an ASN (Multiple networks) of an ISP/ESP. (more then 100 IPs listed in Level 1)

For more on this discussion and others like this please join us on the Email Marketers Club.

IMAP and Gmail?

Well it's comming - IMAP support for GMail users - comming to an inbox near you in the next few days.

How do I know I can activate this?
Login to your Gmail account and click on Settings (top right). Looks for the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" option. If you see this you can enable IMAP for your account, otherwise check back in a day or two.

Why do I want IMAP?
Imap gives you a real time look into your folders on the Gmail system and allows you to maintain a syncronized account across multiple access points (for example; Iphone, Blackberry, Thunderbird, Outlook, and webmail).

Anti-phishing education resources

As part of a user education process Paypal has launched the anti-phishing challenge. I received a notice of this to my registered paypal address (I found this legitimate message in my junk mail folder1 by reviewing and verifying the DomainKey). I scored 5 out of 5 and received the seal shown here; "Anti-phishing Champion".

Paypal is also hosting information sites on How to protect yourself and supplying information on how PayPal fights phishing and the Identity Theft Guide.

American Express has also added educational information to their "Front of the line" email program with these great tips for consumers to watch out for in phishing emails:

1. A sense of urgency created by the message. Example: Your account will be closed or temporarily suspended. You'll be charged a fee if you don't respond.
2. The e-mail addresses you by a generic term and not personally by first name and/or last name. Example: Dear Customer.
3. Embedded links within the e-mail may look legitimate because they contain all or part of the real company's name (may be slightly misspelled). These links will take you to fraudulent sites that ask you for sensitive personal information.
4. The e-mail may contain obvious spelling errors.
5. The e-mail address states American Express, but the content has little to do with American Express products

Check out these great resources and learn how to protect yourself and your financial information.

1 - Even successfully signed and verified emails get delivered to the bulk folder.

Looking for an ESP?

When looking for a new Email Service Provider (or ESP) you should consider a number of different features.

Think about:

• The fit with your internal process (ex: exports/imports, and privacy)
• Do you want a partner that integrates your email program with your current analytic partner (do you have/want an analytics partner tied to your email program?)
• Someone that offers full service or self service deployments and services
• Network Infrastructure (ex: Dedicated IP/Mail servers and Security).
• The business atmosphere, do your business cultures mesh well or will you be a little fish in a big ocean, fighting for attention and development time.

Email marketing reports has a great resource list you should review including feature articles including; Selecting a partner and How To Evaluate E-Mail Vendors.

B2B Email Marketing has some additional resources you might like to consider reviewing during your search for an email vendor.

Find a vendor near you with this World Wide ESP list (login required).

Do you have a question for EmailKarma? Email them to contact or leave a comment.

Was that an opt-in or out?

Cam Beck, of Marketing Profs, introduces us to some tricky language with the Bank of America Newsletter opt-in (opt-out?) process.

In one selection the box is left unchecked, but the language used describes that checking the box will opt you out of the special BoA offers. The default is to begin recieving these comunications. While the scond box is already checked, and ask that you uncheck it to stop notices from Customer Service.

These examples of negative response options are likely to lead your program down the path of delivery issues, and client confusion over why they are recieving your comunications.

Beck Writes: "Bank of America followed the letter of the law [CAN-SPAM], but they did so with a method that can only be described as misleading since people typically don’t read those sorts of messages, and the action required to opt out changes from one email message to the next within the same form."

Mark Brownlow from Email Marketing Reports has a good follow up to this article providing an example of a clear and informative opt-in process, while Derek Harding explains why "opt-out is spam and spam is bad for e-mail, bad for our customers, and bad for us" in this ClickZ Article.

Subject Lines

Why pass on the opportunity to use your brand in your subject line?

The group over at MyEmma have been publishing a top 10 list for B2B marketers, and this post (day 6) really stuck out as an easy win. It talks about the use of Generic subject lines "October Newsletter" or "At your request", gut don't pop with subscribers.


Supporting this is the ESPC study (pdf) that found that "80 percent [of those surveyed] decide whether to click on the “Report Spam” or “Junk” button without opening the actual message;

• 73% base the decision on “FROM”
• 69% base the decision on “SUBJECT”

Being recognizable to your subscriber is paramount... Use your email to convey your brand in the From address and the message Subject to build instant recognition with your subscriber.


This increased recognition may also help you avoid this very common scenario "Delete, delete, delete Spam e-mails gotta go"


Image courtesy MyEmma blog.

It could happen to you...

Vertical Response reciently wrote about a site that duplicated their Corporate webpage and was sending "some particularly annoying sounding political spam"[1] email under there brand.

VR did the right thing by contacting the companies involved and getting their facts set straight about the duplication and underhanded actions taken in there name...

An important lesson can be learned here - be aware of your brand and monitor what people are saying about you...

Read our tips to Help monitoring your brand.


[1] Richard, Manager of ISP Relations and Policy enforcement at VR

Advanced Email Marketing Checklist

Anna Billstrom, over at Adventures in Email Marketing, published this great checklist on the features included in an advanced email marketing system. The list includes check boxes that actually work - print this list and tick them off as you add them to your program.

Key items to include in your program:

• Preference center
• Lifecycle emails -Welcome to Sunset
• Emails render well with images off - This is a must
• Automated email hygiene process

Read the full list here

Experimental Authentication Survey #2

Back in August we conducted a quick and Experimental Authentication Survey of the EmailKarma inbox, what we found was that 50% of messages received in the month of August were not being authenticated correctly.

Comparing this to the messages received in the first two weeks of October we are now seeing that 57% of solicited messages are now authenticating. We also saw that the messages that failed authentication (no red flags), but were solicited, from August have been corrected and are now passing authentication tests.

The other item of note is our spam folder has 2% (up from 1.5%) of email passing authentication, with the majority of these messages (79%) having no records at all, meaning these domains are venerable to attack and forgery.

October's Ham to Spam ratio is running at a solid 89.1% which is slightly better then August's 91% spam percentage.



The holidays are coming - make sure all of your email is authenticated to help your inbox placement and to protect your brand.

Return Path | How to Impress the ISPs

JD Falk, Return Path's new Director of Product Management, Receiver Products, and fellow CAUCE Board Member, give some insight into getting your email delivered and the common themes and tactics that are commonly tried to get mail delivered.

• Tactics that may improve your social reputation with the ISP staff, but won't have any effect on whether your mail gets into the inbox
• Tactics that annoy the ISP staff, but still won't affect your deliverability in any way
• Tactics that will hurt your reputation with the ISP staff, and will also hurt your deliverability
• Tactics that will actually improve your deliverability, yet have no bearing on what the ISP staff thinks about you

The key note as JD says: "If your email subscribers are thrilled with what you are sending, you'll get through – no meat baskets required. And if too many of your subscribers call you a spammer, then all the free beer in the world won't help you."

Are you closing the loop?

iMedia Connection ran this article, By Lee-Ann Vermaak, last week; Use email to close the conversion loop. Lee-Ann touches on some great topics here and how marketers are missing out on subscribers by not integrating email collection into all of their customer touch points.

When calling to ask questions at a call centre every agent should be asking for the callers email, Lee-Ann says "The hotel is missing a huge opportunity by not asking for my email address and sending all the information I have verbally requested, with a link to make a reservation."

Sending a highly personalized email with highly relevant information will lead to additional sales. You have an engaged client asking about your products, why not give them what they asked for via a transactional message. At this time you should also ask the user to opt-in to your regularly scheduled mailings.

This is a very common occurrence yet business missed over and over again, do this on the phone, at the POC in your stores and in your checkout systems on your webpage.

ThinData | ASK THE EMAIL AUTHORITY

ThinData published this advice, on Viral Marketing Programs, today in the Email Strategies Newsletter.

Question:

We are a financial services firm planning to include a viral marketing component in our next email campaign. Can you recommend any best practices to reduce any potential risks and increase the campaign’s success?

Answer:

When including a viral marketing component in your email campaigns, one of your top priorities should be to demonstrate your commitment to building trust. To achieve this, at a minimum take the following five actions:

1. State Your Purpose. Be very clear about your intentions with your viral program and about what you plan to do with the email addresses that you will be collecting.
   
   
2. Respect Personal Information. Keep in-mind that the addresses you collect are not subscribers until they choose to subscribe themselves. To comply with the rules set out by Canada’s privacy legislation (PIPEDA) you should not retain this information or assume you can send any follow-up emails to them.
   
   (Visit The Marketer's PIPEDA checklists for practical tips for running online campaigns that are compliant with this Federal legislation.)
   
   
3. Clearly Identify Yourself to Referrals. When you send a triggered message to the email addresses entered by the original referral source, use your email address as the from address address as opposed to the referral source’s email address (see example below). In this way, you are demonstrating that you respect the referral source’s email identity.
   
   
4. Reduce Risks of Abuse. Use a CAPTCHA in the form that collects the email addresses. A CAPTCHA – which is short for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart" – helps to dramatically reduce the potential abuse that spammers can inflict on you or on the owners of the emails you have captured.
   
   
5. Answer the Question: What’s In It For Me? Go beyond sending the referred friend a link. Rather, describe concisely why they are receiving the email and the value of taking action.

For example, referred friends of those who download ThinData’s whitepaper "The Marketers Guide to Successful Email Delivery" receive the following message:

From: ThinData [mailto:ThinData_Tools_for_Marketer@e.thindata.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007
To: Friend’s email address
Subject: ThinData's Marketer's Guide to Successful Email Delivery

Dear (Friend’s First Name),
(Referral Source’s First and Last Names) thought you would be interested in downloading ThinData’s whitepaper entitled, The Marketer’s Guide to Successful Email Delivery. This guide includes:

• Best practices to address email deliverability challenges; and
• An action checklist

Take me to the whitepaper.

Follow these five steps and you will increase the success of your viral email marketing efforts while building trust with current and prospective subscribers.

Email Insider | The Karma Of Email

Today Bill McCloskey, from Email Insider, asks the question:

How’s your company’s Email Karma?

Senders Best Practices

MAAWG's Sender Subcommittee has published a Sender Best Current Practices document, the current version 1.1 is available. Continue to check back often for the latest versions of this document.

This BCP talks about how senders should behave and the practices that they should follow. The five main topics that are covered here include:

I. Obtain Clear and Conspicuous Consent
II. Enable Clear, Conspicuous, and Easy to Use Unsubscription Options
III. Enhancing Sender Accountability and Messaging Reputation
IV. Managing Delivery Errors and List Maintenance
V. Mitigating and Resolving Messaging Disruption Issues

This document also covers a number of common terms and definitions, links to international anti-spam and privacy legislation and groups that have endorsed and agree with the practices detailed in the BCP.

Follow up | Email Formatting

After being asked about the differences in Items 3 and 4 from Wednesday's Post, Q&A | Email formatting, a few examples are needed to show how these were intended to be used.

Item 3 - Scrubbing services accounts

A Service account is an account that should be maintained by every domain as per the standards set by RFC 2142. These addresses are reserved for specific functions relating to the management of your domain, these should not be used for commercial email. Here are a few examples; Postmaster is used for general email or mail server issues, Webmaster is reserved for Web page errors, content and broken links.

Mailing to these types of addresses will eventually land you on a blacklists or in a worst case scenario, looking for a new hosting company... Which might be a problem as may ISPs and hosts participate in industry groups and may share data on bad behaviour.

Item 4 - Reviewing your list

These types of addresses [email, spam , junk] should be flagged for visual review. You might find that a small segment of these types of addresses are found in your list and the legitimacy can be decided on by a person that reviews the email…

Example: emailkarma+nospam@example.com might be something to flag for removal but emailkarma+goodemail@example.com might be something to keep on your list.

You should add additional criteria to this based on your needs, some mailers will not allow companyname@example.com to be added to there lists, or alais@alias.com to prevent potential fraudulent subscriptions.

eBay, Paypal and Yahoo!

Yahoo users can feel a little bit more secure when receiving email from eBay and Paypal after today's yodel: Say goodbye to eBay and PayPal fraudsters.

"We’ve teamed up with eBay and PayPal to become the first Web mail service to block the delivery of unauthenticated eBay and PayPal emails, reducing your risks of receiving phishing scams or fraudulent emails. Our weapon is a technology Yahoo! spearheaded called DomainKeys, which uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender."

This is similar to the discussions in the past about Hotmail delivery issues and how to resolve them. Publishing your SPF and SENDER ID will help your messages deliver at a number of ISPs, similar to the Domain Keys implementation at Yahoo!

This is the first major announcement of this kind, be prepared for more to follow by authenticating your mail now. Not just your commercial or transactional email but also your Corporate email.

Q&A | Email formatting

Hello EmailKarma,

Q: How you feel about email addresses formatted like this: www.alias@isp.com.
I don't think they should be collected/mailed to because I've seen too many of them bounce over the years.

Please let me know if you agree or disagree.

A: Address formatting is a very common issue with regards to data collection, some times being too strict hinders people converting and subscribing to your email program, other times forms are not strict enough and can be maliciously scripted and fed bad data.

Here are some tips to consider when reviewing address formatting:

1. AOL address must meet these criteria; 3 to 16 characters, no punctuation and cannot start with a number.
2. Hotmail, for example, only allows creation of email addresses using alphanumerics, dot (.), underscore and hyphen, and will not allow sending mail to any email address containing ! # $ % * / ? | ^ { } ` ~
3. Scrubbing any and all services account is also recommended, a list can be found here; RFC 2142: Mailbox names for common services, roles and functions. ex: postmaster@, abuse@.
4. Reviewing your list for names with the word spam, email or abuse is something to consider... Watch out for MissPamela thought, she might just want your email.
   
5. The Wikipedia has an excellent explanation on the makeup and formatting of an email address

As for the validity of www.alias@isp.com, 99 times out of 100 these will fail and bounce... Scrubbing these names, and those in item 3 above, from your mailing list before sending is recommended.

Do you have a question for EmailKarma? Email them to contact or leave a comment.