Return Path Email Marketing Water Cooler

Domain Reputation: Hope or Hype?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:27:34 +0000

By George Bilbrey
President

Fred Tabsharani has a thought-provoking article on Deliverability.com about domain reputation.

I have a few thoughts on the "gold rush" Fred describes, based on my conversations with major ISPs and others in the industry:

1) The industry is making WAY too much out of domain reputation

The manic nature of a "Gold Rush" is exactly what the raft of articles about domain reputation feels like. It feels like a lot of marketers are saying the equivalent of "Now that domain reputation is in place, all my delivery problems will disappear." Sure, domain reputation has some advantages such as reputation portability (as Fred points out). However, there are two things to note:

* Domain Reputation has been in place for a while at a lot of the top ISPs, but overall delivery rates haven't improved (at least much) for commercial mailers.

* Domain reputation isn't the only tool that ISPs are using. IP reputation will continue to be used. It's the cheapest way for most ISPs to get rid of the bad stuff before accepting messages. Therefore, marketers and their service providers still need to be manage their IP reputation. Meanhwhile, ISPs will continue to use content filtering, URL reputations and other tools as well.

This is not to suggest that domain reputation isn't important -- it definitely is. However it is not a panacea for deliverability challenges.

2) There is still a lot of confusion between "reputation" and "certification"

It's not clear from Fred's post what exactly he is proposing as the future business model for the companies/organizations that he mentions. There may be a few vendors who will be able to give marketers a view into domain reputation. Return Path does this by taking data from ISPs and giving mailers a view of what their mail looks like from the ISP's POV. This sort of reputation monitoring is very useful and will be more so in the coming years. Domain reputation could be expressed as an index. But that is all different from certification which is something else entirely. In most cases ISPs use Certification to easily identify mailers who have great reputations and great mailing practices.

Which brings me to my third point:

3) The kind of reputation data the ISPs have shown a willingness to use is reputation data from their own networks and from other ISPs/receiving networks.

Sometimes these data are shared by third parties (like Cloudmark or Return Path). They will accept some vouching from third parties as to the practices of a mailer when combined with ISP-provided reputation data. But every ISP I've ever talked to has a bias towards data from (directly or indirectly) ISPs and other receiving networks.

So tell me: what do you think of domain reputation? Are you confused by how it will affect your program? Are you expecting a huge change (positive or negative) to your inbox placement rate (IPR)? We'd love to hear from you -- leave a comment below.

[Ed. note: an earlier version of this post attributed the article on Deliverability.com to Chris Wheeler. The article cited was actually written by Fred Tabsharani. Return Path regrets the error.]

Hotmail Reputation Panel Data: What It Is, How It Influences Inbox Placement Rates (Part 1 of 2)

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:35:20 +0000

By Tom Sather
Director, Professional Services

As discussed in my previous post, email providers have long used engagement metrics to determine email reputation and deliverability. These metrics include "This is Spam" (aka TiS) data, "This is Not Spam" (aka TiNS) data, panel data, Trusted Reporter data, and Inactive Account data. In this post, we're going to focus on the largely unknown, yet highly effective use of panel data in Microsoft's anti-spam filtering technologies.

Panelists, or Windows Live Sender Reputation data as Microsoft calls them, are a small group of Windows Live Hotmail users that come from every corner of the world, and classify up to 300,000 messages per day as "junk" or "not junk." These users are selected at random (sorry, invite only!) and can come from any type of email service that Microsoft offers, like Windows Live or MSN. These panelists are actual subscribers on your lists and are asked to evaluate messages that either have landed in the spam folder or in the inbox and determine if it's something they expected to receive or not.

Microsoft's use of panelist data helps with sender reputation scoring in its own anti-spam filtering product, SmartScreen, as well as Return Path's Certified product. Microsoft factors panelists' votes to determine a sender's reputation. Their decisions can negatively or positively affect your email deliverability. Let's say, like in this example for Coach, that most of your email gets delivered to the spam folder. Randomly selected panelists, who are also subscribers in your program, are asked if your message is something they expected to receive in their inbox, or something that they didn't expect to receive. If a majority of panelists vote "Not junk e-mail," your chances of reaching the inbox are greatly increased to prevent a false positive. As a result, panelist data had a direct positive impact for your email delivery.

The same holds true for the inverse. If it lands in the inbox and most people respond by saying it's a message that they didn't expect to receive, like this message which is clearly spam, future messages will more likely be delivered to the spam folder. False negative averted!

Microsoft uses panelists for training SmartScreen as it's more reliable than Bayesian content filters or even "This is Spam" and "This is Not Spam" votes. What's more, it's a system that can't be gamed or abused. The message from Microsoft is clear. You can jump IPs, hop domains, try to manipulate complaint data, but you still can't hide from panelists. Since these users are not known, are selected randomly from Microsoft's most active users from around the world, and are given messages at random to vote on (without consideration of the sending domain or IP), the chances of changing the outcome of this filtering process are highly improbable. Additionally, panelists can only vote on a message when it was received within 24 hours, so the timing of the send and complaint can't negatively impact the sender's rating, something that frequently happens with other feedback loops.

Marketers can access this data in two ways. The first is through Return Path Certified as it is part of the compliance checks to remain in the program. The second way is through Microsoft's Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) through its filter results. While they don't display the actual panelist votes, they do have a color coded result (green, yellow, and red) which is based off of their SmartScreen filtering product. SmartScreen is widely used in most of Microsoft's email products ranging from their free webmail services, Exchange, Hosted Exchange, as well as Outlook. SmartScreen looks at things like a properly configured mailing infrastructure, authentication, content, spam traps, unknown users, complaints, as well as panelist data. If the data you have access to is showing that you are fully within compliance at all of these metrics, and your filter result is red, you most likely have a problem with panelist votes.

What can you do to make sure that panelists recognize your email as wanted and vote you into the inbox? In Part 2 of this post my colleague Bonnie Malone will discuss strategies to help.

Report from the UK: Acquisition and List Growth Advice

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:28:42 +0000

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting

Last week, I attended the first in a series of email marketing customer lifecycle seminars to be held in London over the next 10 months by the DMA UK. This first session focused on the first stage of the lifecycle: acquisition and list growth.

The panel of speakers included Jeanniey Mullen, co-author of "Email Marketing: An Hour a Day" and founder of the Email Experience Council; a joint presentation from Marc Munier, Commercial Director at Pure360 and James Hamlin, Online Marketing Director at Seatwave; and Stephen Groom, Head of Marketing and Privacy Law at Osborne Clark.

Inspired by Charles Dickens and "A Christmas Carol," Jeanniey spoke about the past, present and future of email marketing. With the channel in constant flux, Jeanniey recommended that email marketers avoid relying on old best practices and assumptions that what's worked in the past will necessarily work going forward. Email marketers need to continually assess and test their programs, and when it comes to list growth, it's important to try a variety of acquisition methods, including sweepstakes ("prize draws" for those in the UK), social media, SMS, internet advertising search and list rental. The more strategic the effort, the more engaged that new subscriber will be with your messaging and your brand.

Jeanniey shared some interesting stats about the present state of email marketing, including the fact that 87% of people share product recommendations to friends and family through email and 62% use social networks regularly. Rather than signalling the death blow for email, social media can greatly enhance the performance of a marketer's email program and a brand's relationship with their email subscribers. Jeanniey quoted a study that found that 5% of subscribers will click on a "share this email with your network" link featured in the body of an email message, and that the average user has at least 100 friends or followers. By tapping in to this network, marketers can leverage their viral power and increase reach and conversions.

When it comes to the future, Jeanniey advised marketers to remember that their emails will be viewed on more than just a desktop PC. Alternate devices include handhelds, net-books and e-readers, gaming devices and internet-enabled TVs. As a result, video and rich-media may become more relevant to the email experience.

Marc and James reminded the audience to monitor their unsubscribe rate, as one of the first crucial steps with acquisition is ensure you don't "have a leaky bucket." They discouraged users to not make the unsubscribe process difficult or hide the opt-out link, but rather add value to subscribers' lives in order to keep them engaged and prevent opt-outs. In addition, it's important to set the proper expectations at the point of sign-up so that subscribers know what they're signing up for. Then, it's the marketers' responsibility to deliver on that and continually provide subscribers with useful and relevant information.

Lastly, Stephen ended the session on a humorous note with his witty presentation about the differences between opt-in and opt-out collection methods and showcased some case studies of marketers who bent the rules (or broke them all together) and whether the law sided on the side of the marketer or the subscriber.

When it comes to compliance, UK marketers need to pay attention to the EC Directive of 2003, the Data Protection Act of 1998 and the CAP Code published by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Stephen recommended that marketers make opt-in (including an empty box that the subscriber must check if they want to receive email) the default acquisition method, especially as laws across the European Union differ and apply to the country the email is being received in (not the country the email is being sent from).

Other best practices that marketers can follow for optimizing the acquisition stage are sending welcome messages, collecting preference data at the point of sign-up to better inform future messaging and including a link to the privacy policy directly on the sign-up form.

Are you following best practices during the acquisition stage and across the email customer lifecycle? Take our Quiz and find out. Would you like to attend the next DMA lifecycle event in March 2010? Click here to find out more.

INDUSTRY ALERT: COX has a new Postmaster Page

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:46:55 +0000

By Melinda Plemel
Senior Receiver Relationship Manager

Congratulations to our partners at COX for launching a new postmaster site.

Lots of ISPs have postmaster pages, so what's the big deal about this one?

It's frequently difficult to get all the information you might need to understand the rules of the road at an ISP. The Cox postmaster pages provide error code definitions, preferred connection configurations, instructions on how to sign up for Cox's feedback loop (which is proudly powered by Return Path) and other useful information to help understand delivery issues. The pages probably won't give enough information to solve all delivery issues, but they are helpful in getting started and troubleshooting the issues yourself. Remember, you should always follow the steps suggested in any ISP's postmaster pages before escalating to the ISP abuse team. That holds true for our friends at Cox.

Oh and while we're pretty partial to the feedback Loop - even better is our favorite bounce code. Which one? Why it's IPBL010 of course ... (Okay, that's an inside joke: check the Error Codes page to understand why).

Why are you hiding? What are you hiding?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:56:31 +0000

Neil Schwartzman
Director, Certification Security & Standards

False CAN-SPAM WHOIS Information Ruling may have far-reaching impact

Mickey Chandler, over at Spamtacular notes a recent decision in a CAN-SPAM case which cites 18 U.S.C. § 1037 as one of the laws broken.

Specifically, the defendant had put false information into their domain registration, information displayed in the WHOIS record.

Mickey raises an interesting question - do domain privatization services like domains-by-proxy violate CANS-PAM?

Here is an excerpt from the law:

Whoever, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly--

(4) registers, using information that materially falsifies the identity of the actual registrant, for five or more electronic mail accounts or online user accounts or two or more domain names, and intentionally initiates the transmission of multiple commercial electronic mail messages from any combination of such accounts or domain names ...

At Return Path Certification services, we have been long-standing supporters of complete and clear WHOIS records, and we don't allow domains to have private registrations in place for mail sent over Certified IPs.

If you are proud of your email stream (and clearly you should be) then clarity in all aspects of your business should be the prevailing aspiration. rDNS should describe the mail stream and who you are as best it can. From headers shouldn't be obfuscated. Subject lines proclaiming an easily identifiable branding. And, WHOIS information for all your domains in the email headers, and even the body text should be standardized, complete and entirely truthful.

Why? Well, the consequences of violating this clause in CAN-SPAM can be pretty dire, including large fines, and even jail time:

18 U.S.C. § 1037(b)(1).

A violation of section 1037 is a felony punishable by a fine, imprisonment for not more than three years, or both. Yikes!

We recommend you task your technical team with giving your WHOIS records a thorough review, to avoid any possibility of trouble in this area. Of course we also need to point out that we are not lawyers. You should always work with your legal counsel to figure out how rulings such as this affect your particular business.

See, We Told You Email Isn't Dead

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:21:50 +0000

By George Bilbrey
President

When people at email companies write articles titled "Email Isn't Dead, We Swear!" it's hard not to be suspicious. Clearly we've got some skin in this game. Nevertheless, I wrote my column for MediaPost last week on why I believe email is still the killer app. I was careful to include data to back up my argument so that it's not just about my opinion. And so I'm delighted to see more great data that confirms what we know: Gen Y still loves email. In fact, a survey of college students aged 18 to 24 found them more likely to give up watching TV, social networking and talking on the phone before they would give up email.

Check out both articles then let me know what you think? Will email remain the killer app in the years to come? What changes do you anticipate and how are you preparing all of your marketing programs to meet new challenges? We'd love to hear from you.

Report from the UK: 4 Email Tips Guaranteed to Stuff Your Stocking

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:04:50 +0000

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting

With another Royal Mail strike looming just as the busy shopping season gears up, it's understandable for retailers in the United Kingdom to be in a bit of a panic. Having signed off months ago on glossy Christmas catalogues, marketing managers will be left wondering when customers will actually see the results of their hard work (and high printing costs). Will they remain in postal sorting limbo, will they ever be delivered and when? Online retailers will be worried as well: consumers are going to be less inclined to shop online if they can't have a guaranteed shipping or delivery date for their items.

As if this year wasn't hard enough on businesses trying to keep a positive balance sheet and stay upbeat amidst the dire financial and economic predictions, now this. So what's a retailer to do? Where can a retail marketer turn during a quarter so crucial to the company's bottom line? The answer is email. Now, more than ever. Here are three ideas for surviving, and thriving, the Christmas crunch:

Build an integrated marketing strategy. Use email to celebrate your printed marketing materials - celebrate what you've printed now; there's no point waiting for them to be delivered to post boxes. Create an online version of your Christmas catalogues and circulars and invite your subscribers to check out what's on offer this Christmas season. Encourage a sense of exclusivity by offering only your email subscribers a special incentive to start shopping from the online catalogue with a discount or voucher.
Keep the lines of communication open. Email is a great way to instantly alert your customers and prospects that you're proactively addressing their concerns about shipping and delivery delays. Email subscribers are primed to engage with your brand. They've purchased from you in the past or have requested to receive your email updates. Let them know you're aware of the effects the strike may have on their brand experience, and if you are taking alternative steps to improve that, let them know. Have you expanded store shopping hours? Are you offering free in-store pickups? Do you have an order tracking functionality that updates their order status in real time? Are you offering in-time-for-Christmas delivery guarantees? Let your email subscribers know about it.
Drive store traffic. If the crowds on the High Street are any indication, shoppers are already out in droves. Use email to promote your store events, sales and promotions. Offer vouchers that email subscribers can use in store and be sure to include a ready-to-print voucher in the email. All the subscriber needs to do is print off the email, rather than write down or remember a special promotion code or click to a landing page to get a print-ready format. Use the data you collected during the sign-up process to make your store promotions even more relevant. If you have subscribers' post codes, feature their local store's postal address and hours of business in the email. Consider hosting a special after-hours makeover session or festive cocktail party for your loyalty credit card customers or frequent buyers, and send these coveted invitations by email.
Spread the word. Email is a fantastic channel for viral marketing efforts and the Christmas season is a great time of year to send an interactive game or quiz that subscribers can pass along and share with friends and family, thereby expanding your brand footprint with each forwarded message. Have a social media presence? Use your email messages to feature links to your pages and invite subscribers to become fans or followers. Encourage social media activity with exclusive prize draws or games only accessible through your network pages.

Now, more than ever, email is the channel to turn to for ROI, branding and relationship building. There's never been a better time to press "send."

This post originally appeared, in slightly different form, on the DMA-UK Email Marketing blog.

Bootcamp Lessons for Every Sender

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:27:08 +0000

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

No matter how much time you spend perfecting your email marketing, it always comes down to the basics. After you validate all the infrastructure is correct, email marketing is pretty straightforward in concept. Simply: If you give subscribers what they want (a.k.a: helpful, relevant, timely information they can proudly act upon), then they will give you what you want (a.k.a.: revenue, response, loyalty).

Relevancy. That is perhaps the most over-used word in email marketing and deliverability. It's easy to see why increased relevancy will improve results - and help your messages stand out. Most marketing is ill timed, poorly targeted and un-interesting. Do the opposite and your messages will be welcome and earn higher revenue. You will have more loyalty, lower complaints and higher inbox placement.

So go ahead and do that - make your email program more relevant.

I presented that sage advice in the Email Bootcamp session at the DMA Annual event in mid-October. I then paused. A hundred or so people just looked at me, "Is she serious?" Finally, someone chuckled. (Thank goodness!)

Certainly that feels like the most unsatisfying counsel ever. Don't just demand relevancy, tell me how! Yet, I believe that relevancy is more an attitude than a tactic. It's really foundational to email marketing success - especially as the inbox becomes more crowed, more social and faces more competition from social networks and mobile commerce.

What makes email marketing hard is defining relevancy. It's like beauty - in the eye of the beholder. And each subscriber is unique. Kraft has figured it out. In their Food & Family program, they send highly relevant content from the very first welcome message - in this case, a recipe based on preferences at subscribe. They deliver immediate value to the recipient.

In the Bootcamp session, I showed a number of great examples like that one from Kraft which can improve relevancy - and thus also boost subscriber satisfaction, lower complaints (clicks on the Report Spam button) and increase inbox placement rate. As you well know from reading this blog, if you don't make it to the inbox, you don't earn a response. Email deliverability is job one.

Here are some of the ideas we discussed - all of which improve relevancy and inbox deliverability, too:

Never underestimate the power of simply thanking your subscribers.
Use the data you collect to customize the subscriber experiences. Even date of sign up can be an effective segmentation tool.
Tap your own subscribers' social connections to build your footprint - but only ask after you have provided something of real value first.
Test out new creative approaches and don't be afraid to try something crazy. Just be sure you test the rendering BEFORE you email the message, or image blocking will destroy your good intentions.
Segment prospects and customers - and send them something different. This is a critical opportunity for every email marketer. These two segments have widely different relationships with you - respect that, and nurture them both. Otherwise, by blending the two, you are effectively *not* serving a large segment of your audience with every email message sent. What a waste!
Earn permission with every message. Checking a box is not the same as engagement. Never assume that subscribers will tolerate high frequency or low relevancy, just because they gave you permission once upon a time.

What are your best strategies for improving relevancy? Email me for a copy of the full deck. I'd love your feedback. Plus, tell us in the comments section below what "basics" you keep front and center for your problem.

New From Return Path: The Email Marketing Wizards Twitter List

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:50:08 +0000

Yesterday, Twitter launched a new lists feature to all their users. Twitter Lists allow anyone on Twitter to create public or private lists of Twitterers.

At Return Path, we decided to spend several hours last night toiling away in the secret laboratory to create the Email Marketing Wizards Twitter List - 120 of the smartest people Tweeting about email marketing.

You can check out the list here.

Is this list complete? Not by a long shot. And that's where you come in. Did we miss your favorite email marketer on Twitter? Do you have your own list of email marketers that people should check out? Please let us know: @ReturnPath. We are going to keep adding to this list with the goal of making it the definitive list for smart Tweets about email.

Since Return Path was founded in 1999, we've worked hard to embrace technology to not only benefit Return Path but to benefit our clients, and all the marketers out there working in the trenches every day using email in smart, inventive ways.

Years ago, we transformed our company web page into a blog where we discuss all the pertinent issues impacting the email ecosphere. Twitter's growth is explosive, and there are lots of good conversations about email marketing every day via Twitter. Our goal with this list is to make it fast and easy for you to find good email marketing information in the Twittersphere.

UPDATE: Return Path has learned that Twitter hasn't rolled out the list feature to 100% of users yet. We've gotten lots of great feedback and we're adding the list already. If you can't see the list yet, keep checking back. You should be able to see it very soon - in the next day or so.

A Deluge is Underway; is Email Waterproof?

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:47:26 +0000

by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services

What's that we see, waving through the raindrops? Isn't email supposed to be dead? You already know I'm going to say no; as usual, once you see past the refraction and the rainbows, reality is somewhat more complicated.

The recent, ongoing launch of Google Wave has almost everything we've come to expect. It begins with a slow roll-out, with people begging for invitations. Then comes the headlines proclaiming the death of email, often based on nothing more than a short preview video and someone else's interview with Wave's creators. This all leads to gigantic, Google-sized expectations. But with Wave those expectations have yet to be met; It is either such a gigantic paradigm shift that most of us can't yet comprehend the enormity of their genius, or it's an incomplete product that shouldn't have launched until there was something more to show off than a Google-y user interface. Either way, Wave appears to have crested quickly, and we're left waiting and wondering.

Then the Mozilla Thunderbird team filled that void by introducing a new concept they call Raindrop. This, like Wave, is an attempt to reconceptualize the way we interact with messages. The difference is that instead of creating an entirely new kind of message, they're starting with the messages we already interact with: email, social status updates, et cetera; surely they'll be adding IM, SMS, voicemail transcripts, and so forth.

Both Raindrop and Wave have the potential to change (and hopefully improve) the way we communicate online. Everyone who works in email, and in messaging in general, will be watching and blogging and exchanging lots of email about it.

Thing is, the competition happening here isn't just between Google and Mozilla. It's between two entirely different ways of thinking about innovation: starting anew, or building on established successes. It's also between two entirely different ways of thinking about communication: closed, where only a few can participate -- or open for all to interact.

When the internet email protocols were invented, the network -- the whole idea of different computers talking to each other -- was still a new concept. Trading data between computers didn't just require finding a cable, or importing from one version of Word into another; often the basic method of constructing and storing data was based on entirely distinct mathematical principles. This stuff was really hard, and didn't become easy for another twenty years.

In order to get past these differences, internet email had to be both simple and flexible. Obviously it couldn't assume that everyone is using the same operating system; it couldn't even assume that everyone's byte is made up of exactly eight bits. It couldn't (and still doesn't) assume that every computer is permanently connected to a network, or that every network is connected directly to every other network. And most importantly for this discussion, the internet email protocols could not assume that mail software would always display messages in the same way.

The rendering challenges of today are nothing compared to what you would've faced back then -- so much so that nobody really worried about it most of the time. Lines would wrap where the screen ended, whether it was 80 columns or 120 or 40. Bold and italics (if they existed) were reserved for the application, rather than the email message content. People had to pay attention to their words, because the final layout was out of their control. Email was sent uphill both ways in the snow every morning after collecting the eggs from underneath the nastiest hen for three counties, and gosh darn it we liked it.

Today, with few exceptions, the email reading and sending interfaces that most people use have converged on the same basic concepts. There are folders, and there's an index of messages in each. There's a way to view a message, a way to reply to a message, a way to forward a message, a way to delete a message. A select subset of headers are shown above the message, and an even smaller subset of headers are editable by the user. There's a new feature here and there, but most people still interact with their messages the same way they always have; except for the addition of the mouse or trackpad and graphical windows, it hasn't changed much in decades. Mobile devices offer limited subsets of the same functionality, rather than trying anything new.

Wave, more than anything we've seen in years, plays around with these concepts: messages are no longer complete when sent; conversations may never end. Attached documents can (sometimes) be edited in place, and you can watch other people make mistakes as they type -- even in another language. To accomplish all that, Google also created an entirely different set of protocols underneath.

For Wave to kill email dead, everyone has to switch to using Wave. Sure, they're talking about making the protocol open, but early reports are that it's hideously complex. Existing email software built through years of experience will have to be scrapped.

Conversely, Raindrop kept the existing protocols. They're changing the interface, finding new ways to display and sort messages. They aren't changing the way those messages get to you.

Raindrop doesn't have to win out over email, because it is email. If it lives up to its' promise, it'll also be Twitter and Facebook and IM and SMS and everything else. You won't be required to use Raindrop to communicate with someone who uses Raindrop, just as you don't have to use Thunderbird to communicate with someone else who uses Thunderbird, or Outlook to communicate with someone else who uses Outlook (though Microsoft keeps trying.)

By building on existing, open, widely understood protocols, the people who designed Raindrop have simply created the next in a long line of standards-based messaging clients. I'd go further and say that Raindrop was inevitable: many others have taken steps towards the single inbox concept before, but they usually keep the same old interface we're all used to.

Facebook and Twitter are perfect examples that a centrally-managed protocol can succeed, at least for a while. So are AIM, and Yahoo! Messenger, both still far more popular than the Jabber protocol that Google Talk uses. Wave could do the same thing, if they can figure out how to make it appear exciting and interesting besides the scarcity of invitations. But will any of them still hold the same position in twenty years that they do today?

Raindrop may not be around in twenty years, either -- but a message sent using Raindrop's email mode today could be received by an email client twenty years from now, or (with a few caveats) twenty years ago. The interface may change, the security models must change (that's another article) -- but email, both as a concept and as a set of standard protocols, will continue.

Cool Email Idea: Secrets to Email that Gets Opened & Read

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:39:48 +0000

What: Secrets to Email that Gets Opened & Read

Who: BLR (Business & Legal Reports)

Why we love it: Oh, you just can't make this stuff up! "Banana Decimates Office." "Workers Test Poker Faces." "Invasion of the Robots." "Wanted: Lackey to the Stars."

The stuff of supermarket tabloids? No sir. It's HR Strange but True, the fast-growing, interactive e-zine from BLR, the plain English business compliance training and resource company. Conceived as a column for BLR's human resources website and e-zine, HR Strange but True was so popular that BLR gave it center stage as a stand alone newsletter. Following the best practice that even a little bit of content exponentially increases the value of an e-newsletter, HR Strange But True is grew super-fast - from 278 to more than 7,000 subscribers in just under a year - with a less than 0.2% unsubscribe rate. Additionally, the e-zine follows best practices for content, calls-to-action and interactivity. There is one short, tightly written article on a topic that makes you shake your head, laugh out loud or shudder with gratitude that it didn't happen to you. There's a call to action for training or a book that helps protect subscribers from the featured foul. Other links invite HR pros to share their own story, take a weekly challenge and forward the article to others. The combination of these best practices makes for a viral, responsive email file that drives new revenue for BLR.

What would make it better: Make the call to action more prominent. Although it's in the best place, right under the first article, make it pop with a button, larger headline or image of the item for sale.

Bonus points: BLR includes a prominent newsletter subscription box in each newsletter, as readers do hit the forward button! Never assume that everyone reading your newsletter is a subscriber. Cross-promotion works. This fun approach to a serious subject builds trust in the brand and drives sign-ups to other BLR e-zines.

Check it out: Sign up here

Think your email qualifies as a cool thing? Send it to us!

The Battle Up North: Canada Fights for a Spam Law

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:44:45 +0000

By Tom Bartel
Chief Privacy Officer

No, Canada is not being invaded by Russia, or even Greenland, although that might be an easier battle than this. Like many in the email and privacy space I am keeping tabs on our colleagues to the north as they work to pass Canada's first national spam law. Canada is the only G8 nation that has not already enacted such a law.

The process began many years ago, but it only really got rolling this past April. The draft law was introduced, read, reviewed and referred to committee in June, where experts and others testified publically in support of the law. The process was well underway and seemingly on track.

But over the past few weeks things have taken a turn that could lead to the law being weakened or scuttled altogether. In particular, the Canadian Marketing Association, having already stated their broad support for the law, recanted on some points and began lobbying on a number of issues, including subscriber consent.

As I watch this unfold I can't help but think that this process of vigorous debate is ultimately what will ensure Canada gets a solid, useful spam law that actually matters.

Recently here in the US, the state of Maine passed a law -- the Act To Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices against Minors. It follows a long line of efforts to protect children online that, while clearly well-intentioned, are not constructed in a way that makes them viable against the business realities for those who would have to comply. Beyond that though, what I note is the lack of real debate in Maine. The authors of the bill, certainly impassioned about the issue, put great effort into the Act - and then, for whatever reason, it was met with little critical review or resistance. In other words, it passed through the state legislature and went into effect before anyone noticed. The lack of debate or engagement meant that a well intentioned but systemically flawed bill became law. Now, the industry and the state are left collaborating on a retrospective cleanup effort which is likely to mean repealing the law and starting over. Remember that old saying, about just do it right the first time?

I'm glad the Canadians are arguing over their draft law now, rather than later.

In the US our CAN-SPAM Act has been in force for nearly six years, but is generally subject to criticism that it lacks any real teeth. What it has ultimately done for us here is to drive business and industry, in particular email marketing, to self regulate and set tougher standards well above and beyond the baselines set in the Act.

Every good marketer ought to know by now that healthy and successful business on the internet relies on the trust of internet users. That trust comes with how you treat your customers. With communications and email, that starts with permission. If you are employing weak permission standards that just barely meet the base standards of the law then chances are you don't have any actual engagement with your subscribers. This means you probably have a poor sender reputation and aren't getting much email delivered anywhere - certainly anywhere that matters.

Canada: Here's to you for laboring through the process and hammering out a law that will be tempered by input from all stakeholders and which will set a strong example for business and marketers to better match the high standards of other national spam laws and industry best practices around the world, and here's to you getting your law. Onward!

If you would like to voice your support for Canada's Bill C-27 - please sign your name and add comments to the CAUCE (The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) petition. And, you can keep tabs on the latest debates happening now, on the CAUCE North America blog. CAUCE is also Tweeting issue-by-issue - just follow @cauce.

How Engagement Metrics Influence Deliverability

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:56:07 +0000

By Tom Sather
Director, Professional Services

Many senders have noticed changes in the way that ISPs do their filtering, notably at the big four of AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, and have been scratching their heads as to what changed, and what can they do now to get delivered back to the inbox. The answer is in how ISPs are calculating sender's reputation scores (hint: it's really not that new). Less than savory senders are always looking for ways to game the system to bypass current filtering methods. As a result, ISPs and email providers are constantly changing and improving their filtering methods.

The major email providers are already using, or plan to use, a broad set of engagement metrics to determine inbox placement, not just clicks and opens as has been widely reported, to determine the level of user engagement for different senders. These include:

"This is not spam" (a.k.a. TiNS) data - Used by all email providers who also have a "this is spam" button. It's the tried and true test to see if a marketer's emails are relevant and desired, as well as a way to gauge if the email provider's spam filters are working or not. If your subscribers really want your email, they'll look for it in the spam folder and vote it back to the inbox by clicking the "This is Not Spam" button. This measure of engagement is still as important as ever.
Panel Data - A panel of users that the email providers employ to verify if spam folder placement is correct and warranted. These users are real subscribers, but have to take the extra step in analyzing the email they received and asking themselves if they think it's truly spam or not. Their decision is based on qualitative requirements that the email providers specify.
Trusted reporter data - As my colleague JD Falk alluded to in his previous posting, ISPs have weighted complaint and "This is Not Spam" rates based on subscriber level data to determine if they're real users and not mailboxes set up to game the system. They also take into account users that are overzealous in voting everything as spam or everything as "This is Not Spam." As a result, only trusted reporters are calculated into the engagement measures.
Inactive accounts - No, not unknown users, but users that haven't logged into their email account for long periods of time. This indicates to ISPs that you could be trying to pad complaint rates by not removing inactive accounts, or that you have issues with list quality. By keeping these on your list, you're only lowering your "This is Not Spam" rate even more and further reducing your chances of moving out of the spam folder.

Again, it's important to know that all the major ISPs are using, and have been using, a much broader set of engagement metrics, like the ones mentioned above, which can more accurately predict subscriber engagement, relevancy, and deliverability. For example, transactional notifications in which users often just read the subject lines and then delete would have deliverability issues due to low opens and clicks if not for "This is Not Spam" votes and Panel Data.

So what should marketers being paying attention to, besides complaint rates, to keep their deliverability rates up? Sophisticated marketers will look at the data they currently have at the subscriber level to see when subscribers clicked, opened or converted in addition to data available through Return Path.

Here are a few ideas:

For starters, obtain the highest level of permission possible for your business model. Set expectations accordingly from the start on things like offer type and frequency, and send a welcome message that reminds subscribers of all these items and allows them to unsubscribe easily if they get cold feet.
Create a preference center. Offer your subscribers more of a choice in things like frequency of messages or types of messages received based on their interests. Encourage your subscribers to change their preferences over unsubscribing to keep them happy and engaged.
Look at your cadence, a measure of engagement, as opposed to frequency which is a measure of volume. Only send to these addresses when they are in the market and more likely to respond. If certain groups are only in business, or responsive, once a quarter, only send to them once a quarter. Mail your active users more frequently and as long as they are active and in the market.
Send a win-back campaign to your inactive subscribers at least every three months, and make sure you do optimization testing for all of your campaigns to drive higher response rates. It's especially important only to send relevant campaigns to this segment as relevancy and response are highly correlated. If your subscriber has only bought men's clothing, don't send them campaigns on sales of women's clothing.
Use segmentation techniques on clickthrough behavior, something already available to most marketers. Fine tuning your list this way likely will generate more revenue from your existing list. It also prevents email delivery from worsening and as well as unnecessarily spending more money to increase list sizes.

Try to reach a higher level of sophistication with your data to achieve these results. Marketers, now more than ever, need to lose the "batch and blast" mentality for the sake of both response and deliverability. Return Path can also help solve marketer's delivery problems with the data that's available to us. Learn how we can help.

Why I joined the DMA Board, and what you can expect of me in that role

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:34:12 +0000

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

I don't normally think of myself as a rebel. But one outcome of the DMA's recent proxy fight with Board member Gerry Pike is that I've been appointed to the DMA's Board and its Executive Committee and have been labeled "part of the reform movement" in the trade press. While I wasn't actively leading the charge on DMA reform with Gerry, I am very enthusiastic about taking up my new role.

I gave Gerry my proxy and support for a number of reasons, and those reasons will form the basis of my agenda as a DMA Board member. As a DMA member, and one who used to be fairly active, I have grown increasingly frustrated with the DMA over the past few years.

1. The DMA could be stronger in fighting for consumers' interests. Why? Because what's good for consumers is great for direct marketers. Marketing is not what it used to be, the lines between good and bad actors have been blurred, and the consumer is now in charge. The DMA needs to more emphatically embrace that and lead change among its membership to do the same. The DMA's ethics operation seems to work well, but the DMA can't and shouldn't become a police state and catch every violation of every member company. Its best practices and guidelines take too long to produce and usually end up too watered down to be meaningful in a world where the organization is promoting industry self-regulation. By aggressively fighting for consumers, the DMA can show the world that a real direct marketer is an honest marketer that consumers want to hear from and buy from.

2. Despite a number of very good ideas, the DMA's execution around interactive marketing has been lacking. The DMA needs to accept that interactive marketing IS direct marketing - not a subset, not a weird little niche. It's the heart and soul of the direct marketing industry. It's our future. The acquisition of the EEC has been one bright spot, but the DMA could do much more to make the EEC more impactful, grow its membership, and replicate it to extend the DMA's reach into other areas of interactive marketing, from search to display advertising to lead generation. The DMA's staff still has extremely limited experience in interactive marketing, they haven't had a thought leader around interactive on staff for several years, and their own interactive marketing efforts are far from best practice. Finally, the DMA's government affairs group, perhaps its greatest strength, still seems disproportionately focused on direct mail issues. The DMA should maintain its staunch support of traditional direct marketers while investing in the future, making interactive marketing an equal or larger priority than traditional direct marketing. We have to invest in the future.

3. Finally, I think the DMA suffers from a lack of transparency that doesn't serve it well in the hyper-connected world we live in here in 2009 - that's a nice way of saying the organization has a big PR problem. The organization does a lot of great work that never gets adequately publicized. This whole proxy fight episode is another example, both in the weak response from the DMA and also in a lot of the complaints Gerry lodged against the organization, many of which the organization says are untrue or misleading. Senior DMA execs or Board members should be blogging. They should be active thought leaders in the community. They should be much more engaged with their members to both understand member needs and requirements and more aggressively promote their agenda.

In short, I will be an independent voice who advocates for progress and change in the areas that I consider to be most important, and I will be transparent and open about expressing my views. I've already been clear with the existing DMA Board and management that I do have this agenda, and that I hope the organization will embrace it. If they do, even if only in part, I think it will be to the DMA's benefit as well as the benefit of its members. If they reject it wholesale, my interest in long-term involvement will be fairly low.

That's the story. As I said up front, I am taking up this new role with enthusiasm and with the belief that the DMA is open to change and progress. We'll see how it goes, and I will blog about it as often as I can.

Do you have thoughts on the future of the DMA? I'd love to hear from you. You can leave a comment below or email me directly at matt at returnpath dot net.

How Can Non-Profits Send More Engaging Email?

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:38:44 +0000

By Bonnie Malone
Director, Response Consulting

Retailers aren't the only ones gearing up for the holidays -- it's a big season for non-profits too. But just how well do non-profits use email to connect with subscribers (and potential donors), engage them in a cause, and spur them into action? Return Path's new research study, "Telling Stories: How Non-Profits Can Create More Engaging Email Marketing Programs," focuses on answering these questions by measuring email use among 50 well known non-profit organizations.

Assessing the entire subscriber experience for 30 days, the study analyzes practices across a wide spectrum of organizations - from children, to health, to politics, animals, and museums. The study identified several areas of strength among these mailers, including 62% of organizations that sent a welcome message immediately upon subscribe (something only 40% of for-profit counterparts do), and a strong integration of social media elements.

However, there were a number of areas where non-profits fell short. Content strategy - a crucial element in connecting and engaging with new subscribers, and building support for the cause - was surprisingly one glaring opportunity for improvement. Many organizations leaned heavily on generic newsletters as their primary use of the channel, missing a huge opportunity to customize the experience with subscribers and potential advocates/donors of their organization.

Learn more about the non-profit study findings, view email samples from the organizations studied, and get recommendations for improving your organization's strategy, just in time to optimize response for the 2009 holiday season! Download the research paper now.