No Reply - Why bother at all?

There have been a number of posts recently on the use of No-Reply, or some variation, as the sending address for commercial newsletters. Chad White of the Retail Email Blog, posted a Birds Eye view on the topic after a lengthy discussion on Twitter about this same topic regarding Welcome emails using the from alias of DoNotReply.

This discussion got me thinking and watching for mailers using the No Reply from address, fortunately I found that very few of the newsletters I subscribe to use this as the from address. However I did find some guilty parties... No I won't name names.

Don't let this be you - no reply is quickly becoming a way to alienate your subscribers and show them that they are just another number on your list. In the age of Social Media and two communications, join the discussion or get left behind.

Online Privacy Quiz

Further to the last entry, World Data Privacy Day, we at EmailKarma.net remembered that The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has this great "Privacy Quiz" made up of ten questions, which change to ten new questions every time you do this quiz. It's an interesting quiz based on Privacy legislation in Canada.

As well, If you were wondering about the Privacy Act of Canada and the PIPEDA (The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act), you can click on the appropriate links at this same site.

In previous articles, EmailKarma.net touched on the following PIPEDA issues:

• An Act Concerning Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Messages Bill S-235
• Comments from a far

We also recommend you check out this website for a great PIPEDA checklist guide whitepaper, which is offered by Thindata Inc., the Email Authority, a Transcontinental Company.

Thindata Inc. has a working knowledge on international Antispam, Privacy and Data-Collection legislation.

World Data Privacy Day

You probably don't know this, but today is the second annual "World Data Privacy Day". People and companies from the United States, Canada, and 27 European countries will celebrate Data Privacy Day today. Here are a few things to consider and help your own personal data privacy practices and maybe a few tips for around the office.

1 - Start today to implement a process that reminds you to change your webmail, voice mail, online banking and other web based account passwords frequently. Many companies have a policy for changing passwords every 30 days, your personal accounts should change at a minimum of 4 times a year.

2 - Look around your desk, counters and bookshelves - clean up any lose papers that might contain sensitive or personal information. File these in your desk or recycle them in secure shredding boxes found in many offices.

3 - Consider requesting your annual free credit report. There are three services in Canada and every year you can request one free copy from each. Do this every four months and rotate between them - the data should be almost the same, and this can save a lot of problems if you catch inaccuracies early: (List is Canada Only)

* Trans Union of Canada - www.transunion.ca
* Northern Credit Bureaus (Experian) - http://www.creditbureau.ca/
* Equifax - http://www.equifax.com/home/en_ca

4 - Review the security on your Social Networking accounts (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter), have you limited personal data to just your friend, relatives?

5 - Practice good office security, Remember to lock your computer when your not at it. This is very important as many companies have frequent visitors in the office and your desktop is an easy target to gather sensitive information from.

6 - Uninstall old applications from your home and work computers. Often these programs are no longer supported and left open to software vulnerabilities that might get exploited and leave your computer vulnerable. If you don't use them get rid of them.

7 - Manually check that your anti-virus and malware detection programs are up to date, and a full system scan is set to run at least weekly. Rogers and Bell offer free AV to their internet clients - if you use a different ISP, check they may provide free AV too.

8 - Install a router and/or personal firewall on your home computers. Windows has a built in Firewall tool - check that it is running.

9 - Clear the cookies on your Internet browsers.

* IE: Tools > Internet Options > General > Browsing History > Delete... > Delete all
* FireFox: Tools > Clear Private Data... > check the appropriate Boxes > Clear Data now.

10 - Remember to practice safe privacy practices everyday.

Happy World Data Privacy Day.

Event: The ROI of Rendering

I just received word that tomorrow afternoon at 1pm ET, Goodmail's Jordan Cohen, Sr. Director of Industry Relations, will be hosting a webinar titled "The ROI of Rendering" along side industry expert David Daniels, Vice President and Research Director, JupiterResearch.

They will be uncovering key findings from new executive research talking about:

• What challenges top the list of email marketers' concerns for 2009?
  
• What can email marketers do to recoup their investment in image creation and content development when only 28% of consumers bother to turn on blocked images?
  
• What can YOU do to generate, on average, 38% higher profit from your email campaigns than your competitors?
  

Registration is closing end of day today pacific time. If you aren't able to get in just shoot me an email and I'll get you in touch with Jordan to get registered.

Google Talks Spam: 2008 year in review

Over on the Google Enterprise blog there is summary of the 2008 spam year in review. Covering the trends as seen by the Postini Message Security network, which Google acquired in July of 2007.

A number of the provided graphs show surge in April of 2008 for the number of spam messages blocked followed by a significant drop is spam levels last November after McColo was taken off line. These graphs also show a disturbing yet steady recovery and continued increase in spam levels.

Most surprising are Google's statistics on the quick recover and growth of spam after McColo was taken offline:

Spam threats rose visibly in 2008, reflecting the overall trend of rising attacks. Even with the drop in November 2008, spam levels climbed 25% over 2007. Our statistics show that the average unprotected user would have received 45,000 spam messages in 2008 (up from 36,000 in 2007). All indicators suggest this trend will continue as virus, malware, and link-based attacks become both more frequent and more ingenious.

At this rate 2009 will bring us 56,000 spam messages per user...

Help, I'm Blacklisted

Over the last two weeks I've seen several people ask similar questions along the line of... "Help, I'm blacklisted! What do I do?"

First off start working with a Reputation/Delivery consultant most of the time a professional delivery person will be able to find an issue in a short period of time and offer suggestions on how to fix things.

However if you choose to work on this issue by yourself here are some suggestions;

• Start by reviewing and adopting these industry best practices, published by MAAWG, that have been agreed upon by both major email senders and the major ISPs as a group.
  
  
• Find out who is blocking the mail, there are many services but only a handful that will cause you significant issues.
  In many cases the listing criteria from Each service might point you in the right direction; too many complaints, spamtraps, bounces, etc...
  
  
• Consider how your sending message to your subscribers, are they opt-in (not bought/rented/appended) and relevant to subscribers.
  Look for a change in your program. Did you run an email append/list rental/co-reg campaign? Did you add a lot (more then usual) of new names in the week(s) before the problem started...Try suppressing the new addresses and see if it goes away? Did it work? No add another week... repeat.
  
  
• Long inactive/unresponsive subscribers should be sunset from your list, these accounts tend to complain about spam more then normal users and can become spamtraps on your file.
  Try segmenting responsive vs. non-responsive users and identify the segment causing the issue. Or try segmenting by length of time on file (1-3 months, 4-6, 6-9, 9-12, 12+) to try and find the bad spots and remove or re-confirm these members to your list.
  
  
• Did everything else fail... re-confirm all non-clickers/openers or your total file to resolve the issue.
  

Do you have any other suggestions? Please share them with us.

Good luck and happy mailing.

Yahoo! FBL is here

Well it's official the Yahoo! Feedback loop is now officially up and running. NOTE that your mail must be DomainKeys or DKIM signed to apply for this service.

Return Path is once again at the helm, managing this for Yahoo! along with several other popular ISP FBLs we talked about before.

With this addition the total for Return Path hosted FBLs is now six; Comcast, Cox, USA.net, Excite, Mailtrust and now Yahoo!.

Reminder: Lycos Europe Shuts Down Feb 15th

Just a friendly reminder, back in November we announced that Lycos EU would be closing their doors.

You now have less then one month to get the new contact information for your European Lycos and tripod email users.

Domains to be affected:

• mail.lycos.de, mail.lycos.co.uk, mail.lycos.it, mail.lycos.nl, mail.lycos.es
  
• caramail.lycos.fr, caramail.fr, multimania.com
  
• firemail.de
  
• jubii.co.uk, jubii.com, jubii.de, jubii.dk, jubii.es, jubii.fr,
  jubii.it, jubii.nl
  

The US based domains; lycos.com, lycos-inc.com, lycosmail are not currently being effected by this shutdown.

Q&A: Are you missing out?

Q: I got asked over twitter today: "How useful do you find delicious? Does it drive traffic to your blog?"

A: Here is my expanded response as Twitter limits your ability to respond.

Delicious works great for me it is usually one of the highest performers for information sharing on the site. But I only publish the Delicious feed in my twitter and site email notifications. I like to think of it as an added bonus for my subscribers. Does this sound like you - only reading online?

Here are four ways to get the full expereince:

• Subscribe to the EmailKarma.net RSS feed 
• Subscribe to the newsletter (published by FeedBurner) - over on the right side of the site.
• Subscribe to my last 15 delicious items.
• Follow me on twitter - I usually have full live discussions about email related topics here

You never know what fun or exciting things I will find and share.

IBM to Acquire Outblaze

IBM announced yesterday that they intend to acquire Outblaze, Ltd to further compliment the development of the IMB online social networking and collaboration service named Bluehouse, currently operating in open beta.

Outblaze is home to over 40 million email users and has been offering fully hosted e-mail service for over 10 years. Outblaze may best known for the domains mail.com and email.com, great geographic based domains such as usa.com, rome.com and paris.com and lastly some of the funniest vanity domains around, to name a couple: cheerful.com, and writeme.com.

ARMONK, NY and HONG KONG - 15 Jan 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced its intent to acquire the strategic messaging service assets of Outblaze, Ltd., a privately held provider of online messaging and collaboration services, based in Hong Kong. Building on IBM Lotus' market leadership in messaging software, the asset acquisition will accelerate the delivery of affordable, Web-based e-mail services in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Read the full release here: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26486.wss

We will continue to provided details about this as we gather them, and post any news regarding changes to policy changes and mail delivery processes as they occur.

Congratulations to our friends over at Outblaze!

How social is your email?

Recently I have noticed that a number of retailers are adding the function to post a message to social networks directly into their email communications... This is great, but the question is "How social is your message, really?"

From the examples I have see it appears that social network are being used to make normal every day messages, viral. Simply posting a link on Facebook or to a twitter account to the online version of the message. That is not very social and might actually aggravate more people then benefit.

With this in mind here are three ideas on making better use of Social Networks in email:

1. Make the relevant sections work with social media not the entire message. Personally I'm more likely to share one item then your entire email.
2. Be where you ask people to share. If you link to Twitter - make sure you have an account there and someone that can monitor and is empowered to take action. (example: @ComcastCares)
3. Have your customers join you and stay active. The Social Brand Index has an extensive list of Brands on twitter... Is your company listed?

Stop just being part of the network and start using Social Networks as they are meant to be used - to form a dialog with your subscribers and members. Talk to them don't just broadcast, that is so 2002.

To prove we walk the walk find EmailKarma.net here:

• Facebook; Fan Page, and Blog Network
• Twitter; (Matt V and Matt H)
• Delicious
• You can also send us email - we answer every one

Video in email without Certified Mail?

It can be done, I've seen it.

Recently Goodmail launched a new feature for their email certification platform, one that would allow video in email. However if you don't have the marketing budget for certification you can always try this...Converting video to an animated gif for email. 

I found this posted in the Email Marketers Club yesterday, by way of StyleCampaign's blog, as a potentially viable way to get a short usable video sequence in your email messages to attract users attention.   Step by step instructions are available if you want to try this yourself.

Hits:

• Great way to incorporate your video message - if a picture says a thousand words what will your video say?
• Great attention grabber - My eyes moved right to the moving portion of the email, giving it top priority in reviewing the message (I admit I was looking for it)
• No script and the images are linked to via a simple "src img=" tag - so your not adding to the size of your email message, likely the link is track able as well looking like an image file.

Misses:

• No sound - but it the draw is strong enough people will click for the full video with sound on your site/YouTube.
• Slow Internet connections might see choppy playback
• Outlook 2007 breaks animated gifs and only renders the first frame - choose it wisely

Want to see this in action yourself, use this link to forward yourself a copy.

If you read EmailKarma.net by email - did the video work for you?  Please let us know.

Holiday Observations

Well 2009 is officially here - Happy New Year to you all and thanks for sticking around over the break.

Just a quick post to start of the year with a few things I noticed over the holiday's regarding email trends:

1. Lots of discounted offers and free shipping this year,
   
2. Good use of "# of days left for shipping/shopping online",
3. Some retailers really revved up their email volume the last 5 weeks before the holiday only to go back to their regular mailing practices after Boxing Day,
4. and Heavy promotion of Online redeemable Gift Cards - Environmentally Friendly and great for last minute purchases - especially if you can send them direct to a friend.

But I think the best tips I received this year came after shipping deadlines were passed and Boxing Day shipping had yet to enter my mind - on December 23... Best Buy and Future Shop - they are actually the same company just different brands - sent out tips for getting the most out of your online boxing day shopping. These tips included:

• Login now to verify your shipping information is correct
  
• Make sure your credit card if up to date and on file for easy shopping
• Setup Verified by Visa - if your a visa member - in advance and while Visa Support is still working and not swamped
  
• Get setup with our rewards program (Best Buy only) so your purchase are qualified in the program.
• and lastly a reminder that Boxing Day shopping actually started on the evening of Dec 24th, two full days early but only online.

Kudos to the Best Buy/Future Shop team for another great example of relationship building vs. a pure last minute "Sell" to members.