My take on the spam button report...

Recently there was a report released (DMNews) about the use and understanding of the "Report spam" button by consumers and that they actually report legitimate email as spam.

This is not really a surprise, experience shows that users will use the button for the following reasons:

• As an unsubscribe - ISPs are looking at ways to manage this - Hotmail was the first to implement an Unsubscribe button for "Known senders".
• By mistake - Users are potentially reporting a number of unsolicited email at the same time and if your message/brand is not clear you might get included in the mass report. Even personal email communications get reported as spam.
• To tell you "It's just not relevant" - spam has evolved from pills, porn and gambling to stuff I (the consumer) just don't want.

Mark has a great write up summarizing a few of the other articles written about this report.

Watch the trends in your Feedback Loops to identify potential issues in your email program, group these individuals by collection source (especially if your using multiple collection locations), Types of messages being sent and the demographics of your members to focus and improve your messaging so that it becomes relevant to your subscribers.

If your not watching - be warned - the ISPs and your ESP are all watching and you might just find your self in hot water with one or both of them.

I want you!

Have you been following along for a while?

Do you think you have Privacy, ISP Relations and Delivery all worked out?

Do you know a few things about marketing, technology and networking?

Then I want you to apply for the ISP Relations Analyst position (Toronto location only).

While your at it check out the other positions available here at ThinData.

NEWS ALERT: TRANSCONTINENTAL ACQUIRES THINDATA INC

TRANSCONTINENTAL ACQUIRES THINDATA INC (Release).

Montreal, March 11, 2008 – Transcontinental Inc. today announced the acquisition of ThinData Inc., Canada's leading permission-based email marketing services firm. This partnering of industry leaders will shape the next evolution of marketing – bringing the best of print and direct marketing together with the power and speed of electronic marketing.

ThinData's offering fits perfectly with Transcontinental's value-added services growth strategy which includes expanding its premedia, database management, direct marketing and analytics and e-marketing capabilities to deliver unique solutions to its clients and its media properties.

Full Release available.

Evaluating ESPs

More and more I'm reading questions about finding and evaluating a new ESP, so I've reviewed a number of the answers and these links will be helpful in getting you through the process

* Competitive Analysis, Evaluating ESPs
* Switching Email Vendors
* Switching Email Vendors & Messing with Deliverability

If your looking for a new ESP you can find a very comprehensive list over at the Email Marketers Club Wiki; http://wiki.emailmarketersclub.com

What would you do?

Recently on the Email Marketers Club the question was raised;

"My provider had a major issue, where another client's content was sent to my list, causing a number of my subscribers to get angry and unsubscribe from theme email lists. Should I find a new Service Provider?"

So far the responses have ranged of - get out now and fast - to send your lawyers in - to everyone makes a mistake it's how you recover from the mistake that matters...

What's your take on this? Does everyone deserve a second chance or should the current provider get left in the dust?

Q&A | Preventing an Unexpected Spike in Email Bounces

Reposting this Q&A from ThinData's Email Strategies where I answer the question, "What do I do when an ISP discontinues a domain or migrates users from one domain to another?"

A subscriber asked:

We're a large media firm sending email to subscribers throughout Canada and the United States. I've heard recently that one of the largest US ISPs has discontinued sending messages to some email domains. What kind of impact will this have on my email marketing campaign? And, what can I do about it?

Our Expert's Answer (That's me):

Here's the scoop: One of the largest US ISPs is bringing into their system a large volume of email addresses that had formerly been distributed by another ISP. During the migration of these email domains, subscribers were encouraged to switch domains (similar to a few years ago when "@home" subscribers were prompted to actively change their addresses to "@rogers", "@shaw" and "@cogeco" – based on the appropriate local ISPs).

If you are sending emails to subscribers in the United States whose email domains were distributed through the originating ISP that have not been correctly updated, you will find a dramatic spike in your email bounce rates. Under these conditions, you can take the following steps now to reduce the impact on your email campaigns' success:

1. Work with your ISP or ESP to ensure that all of the relevant domains are removed from your mailings
2. Plan for an increase in telephone calls regarding missed email messages
3. Review your email campaign content to ensure that critical subscriber information can be accessed through another method (e.g. placed on your website)
4. Have your ISP or ESP quantify the increase in bounces attributable to this ISP's actions so that you can factor that information into key elements of your campaign, such as:

• Initial conversion goals
• Delivery analytics
• Testing schedule
• Related follow-up messages

Finally, ISPs across North America are constantly changing their practices and policies which in-turn will have a dramatic impact on your email campaigns. As a result, for all of your campaigns, include time and resources to review ISPs' evolving rules as well as verify and update email addresses.

Do you have anyother tips; please share them by sending an email to contact or leave a comment here

THINDATA | New Year’s Email Resolutions

My article in the ThinData Email Strategies is up...

Every January, there are a handful of familiar New Year's resolutions that you'll hear around the water cooler – ones that we can all relate to. Similarly, marketers are reflecting on the previous 12 months' programs to identify ways of improving performance for the year ahead.

Read the full article here and plan your resolutions wisely.

When you move from one ESP to another...

What do you take with you?

Here is the minimum information you NEED to take and why:

1. Bounce information and history - Re-mailing to old bounced addresses is a good way to get blocked and cause issue with your new provider before even breaking in your new home. Most ESPs will monitor your deployments during your on boarding to look for weird or abnormal behaviour from your account. This could cause termination of your account and further interruptions of your mailing program.
2. Opt-outs - Failing to migrate these from one provider to another may result in; Excessive complaints, blocking or filtering, Legal issues (remember CAN-SPAM requires a 10 day opt-out), Privacy issues and investigations. This is a key hygiene process that should be completed before your first mailing with your new provider.
3. Your from address - You have been asking your subscribers to Add to address book for the last two or more years, why ask them all to do it again with a new domain. Chances are only your loyal readers are going to see this and without proper notice and forethought it maybe too late and your already in their junk folder. With some careful planning and a couple days to adjust your settings your entire program can migrate from one system to another with out impeding the average program.
4. Supporting Tools - Don't forget to update your analytics, CRM solution, and other supporting aplications as needed. If these are critical pieces of your program you need account for them well in advance to changing providers and time your migration accordingly.

With these items your program should progress without many hickups or issues. Have any other tips or ideas for system migrations? Email them to contact or leave a comment.

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.

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.

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

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.

Q&A Follow-up on reputation building

EmailKarma received this comment today from Kelly over at Sitebrand regarding the post "Q&A | Whats the best way to build reputation on new IPs?"

Q: What is the effect of not ramping up an IP - say if you do not have the volume needed? Can it still be done on a smaller scale?

A: Hi Kelly,

Building reputation on smaller lists is sometimes a challenge due to their smaller volume or an infrequent mailing schedule. Not to say it wont happen, reputation can and will be built but for smaller operations, it may just take a little longer. The only true way to build reputation is to send email, other programs like Habeas' Safelist, or a well known ESP, will help you overcome many of these challenges or accelerate the reputation building process of a program.

What becomes more important for smaller lists is the quality and relevance of the messages that are being sent:

• Low number of inactive accounts
• Low number of spam complaints or spam traps
• Authentication and White listing
  
• Consistency of sending; meet your deadlines and send regularly

The effect on a reputation that is not built correctly or has turned in a negative way:

• Limits on number of message per connection/hour/day
• Junk/Spam folder delivery
• Grey listing or temporary rejections of IPs for predefined periods of time
  
• Mail blocking or blacklisting

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

ESPs everywhere

Over at the Email Marketers club we started a list of commercial Email Service Providers (login required) from around the world. Who knew there were so many?

So far the list contains well over 100 ESPs from; Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the USA.

The list is growing everyday.

Drop by request an invitation and join the conversation.

Monitoring Your Reputation

Many questions are currently being asked about monitoring your email reputation and how to go about this.

Here is a short list of way you can keep track on your own:

• Feedback loops - A service offered by a number of ISPs to notify a sender when users are reporting mail as spam or junk. Most ESPs have these already in place for their clients. Each ISP has threshold that they watch for in regards to excessive complaints from their users. Among the ISPs offering feedback loops are; AOL, Hotmail, Outblaze, Road Runner, United Online, USA.net and Yahoo!
• Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services - This service provides a summary of how each of your IP addresses looks to Hotmail. Providing details on; number of message attempted, number of message accepted for delivery, Filter Status, and spam traps/complaints.
• Filtering companies offering reputation sites; Ironport’s Senderbase, Ciphertrust’s Trusted Source service.
• Companies like Habeas, Lyris, Pivotal Veracity and Return Path offer services that rate reputation with a score and a services that measure how spam-like your messages looks to receivers.
• Legal compliance monitoring from Lashback helps track Third party affiliates and your own marketing messages for several different legal or contractual violations.
  

Many ESPs have partnered with one or more of these companies to monitor your mail streams. But if your not using an ESP or wish to monitor these on your own, these tools are available for your use and some are free to use.

The hard part is understanding how to understand all of the data your being shown and taking the proper actions to build or fix your reputation.

OMMA Finalist Announced

On September 5th the OMMA Award finalist were announced. The OMMA Awards honour the brand marketers, agencies and content providers who continue to push the potential of online advertising creative. These Awards celebrate the year's most innovative and brilliant creative work in 20 categories ranging from; Video, Gaming, Banner and Email programs.

I'm proud to see that ThinData is on the list of finalist under the Category "Email Campaign".

Quick tips for subject lines

The next time your sitting around thinking about subject lines for your email campaign remember to review SubscriberMail's - Seven Dirty Words (PDF) you should never use in your subject line. This list contains phrases like: "Lower your mortgage rate", "Lowest insurance rates", "As seen on Oprah" and numerous single word subject lines.

Quick tips for subject lines:

• Short and descriptive - Explaining what the message contains in less then 30-45 characters
• Eye catching - A sense of urgency for the message
• Use personalization - Build relationships with your consumers

Switching Email Vendors

Carolyn Gardner over at Sitebrand posted a note today about the issues experienced when switching Email Service Providers and it's effect on your delivery. She points out that "with an increased rate of deliverability, you may also see an increase in the number of spam or abuse complaints".

This is very true and having worked with several different marketers in the past that have done just this here are some ideas to help with the pains you may experience;

• New IPs = New Reputation
• This is not always a good thing, having no IP reputation is in many cases just as bad as a poor IP reputation. To minimize the impact of this; keep the same mailing address, start with a ramp up program for your emails with your new provider, and consider some of the ideas discussed here for "keeping your list clean"
  
• New ESP = New Bounce Processing
  
• You may see your bounce rates changing as each ESP interprets inbound bounce messages received from an ISP differently. There are organizations working to correct this behaviour across the industry on both the sending and receiving sides.
  
• Different ESP reputation and contacts:
  
• Many of the large ESPs employ people to manage relationships with ISPs, Blocklists and mailers to ensure the continuing flow of email traffic from their mailing partners to the consumer.
• Different Reputation partners
• Many ESPs have partnered with one specific reputation provider, each of these providers has a different reach. Most ESPs will work with all reputations providers on request.
• Different campaign metrics:
• A click is a click right? Sure it should be, but some ESPs a click is also an open, find out how your new provider does this to help with your ongoing program metrics and measurements. Join EMACs to be part of the discussion around standardized reporting.

Switch providers recently and want to share some suggestions or pain points, Share them with us by email at contact or leave a comment.

Why is your ‘from’ Address so Important for Email Deliverability?

In response to the posting at trinity7 about the importance of your from address.

These are five great things to note about your campaign and your mailing address;

1) From name is not always displayed
Most email clients will show you the friendly from address used to send the email but AOL, among other, web browsers users will only see your email address.

2) Email client whitelists
Almost every email client available, be it Webmail readers (Hotmail) or client readers (Thunderbird) have built in personal whitelists for users. These personal level filters will overrule any potential filtering done by an ISP.

3) Domain Blacklisting
Domain Block listing is no longer limited to Email address, URLs are also commonly blocked by anti-spam filters check over at rules emporium to see if your listed on any of the most popular domain based blacklists. It is also very common to filter and messages containing any URL with an IP address in the message - using a Fully Qualified Domain Name is recommended for all links and images in your email messages.

4) Spam filter scoring
Many companies are now offering pre-deployment content testing for your email, even offering multiple views as to your messages appearance in the inbox. Look for Habeas, ReturnPath or Pivotal Veracity for these eRSPs.

5) Sender ID Records
We talked about The importance of Authentication last week. We also recommend that you look to use Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) as soon as your MTAs or ESP offer these solutions.