Blogs

As I am sure many of you have already heard, there is a new industry organization that is made up of ISPs and senders to help fight against phishing attacks on our end users. DMARC, which stands for "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance", is a technical specification created by a group of organizations that want to help reduce the potential for email-based abuse by solving a couple of long-standing operational, deployment, and reporting issues related to email authentication protocols.

This is a great step forward in the continued efforts to help protect all users. The technical specification seems to be fairly easy to implement and we are currently testing it with one of our customers already. As we continue through this test I will provide more information as well as any other additional industry news.

For more information please go to http://www.dmarc.org/

Without attracting too much publicity, LinkedIn has updated their privacy conditions. Without any action from your side, LinkedIn is now permitted to use your name and picture in any of their advertisements. 

Some simple actions to be considered: 

1. Place the cursor on your name at the top right corner of the screen. From the small 
pull down menu that appears, select "settings" 
2. Then click "Account" on the left/bottom 
3. In the column next to Account, select the option "Manage Social Advertising" 
4. Finally un-tick the box "LinkedIn may use my name and photo in social advertising" 
5. and Save

One thing that has always been extremely important to me my entire life has been teamwork. From the time I started to play sports I realized how important teamwork was in order to be successful. However, as we get older, we often forget this simple fact. In this day and age, even when we look at our favorite sports teams, most of the time we focus on one or two key players that are the stars and not the rest of the team that helps them achieve their star status.

What does teamwork have to do with deliverability you might be asking yourself? Well, everything. No matter what your focus is within the digital marketing eco-system, you are on a team and must work with others to ensure that you are reaching your customers and sending them relevant campaigns.

More times than I would like to admit, I have worked with various companies that had no idea who, or what departments, were creating and sending email messages. The problem with this is that if there is not a single vision and global understanding of how your customers are being communicated to, there is a chance that you will lose them as a customer in the long run.

This could happen for a number of reasons; most commonly this is due to over-communication. Without a global view of the various campaigns that are getting sent to each and every customer, there is a good chance they might find the number to be too high for their liking. Because of this, I usually present a number of opportunities to clients in order to reduce the likelihood of this occurring.

1. Perform a messaging audit. For most larger companies, there are different departments that are sending campaigns promoting their particular piece of the business. Many times there are opportunities to work together and combine various programs that potentially can increase your ROI.

2. Control message frequency. Determine the maximum number of messages a customer should receive from your organization in a specified time period. When I first started in this industry many years ago, I would have never believed that there would be an entire business model based on sending daily emails to the company’s entire list. But organizations like Groupon, LivingSocial and others have made this acceptable. The key is to understand if this will work for your business model and if you are setting the proper expectations with your customers. If your company is sending out campaigns from so many different departments that even you aren't aware of them and are surprised to see them,  don’t you think it is likely that your customers will be too?

3. Create a preference center. Allowing your customers to determine the types of messages that they wish to receive as well as how often they want to receive them enables you to maintain that customer in your database with less of a chance of losing them to an unsubscribe or a spam complaint.

As we all work hard to get through this holiday season, remember that you must respect your customers and the valuable space that they are allowing you to take up in their inbox. In order to continue this relationship, it is important to understand how your entire company is communicating with them, and work together as a team to keep them as a customer.

Don’t think that these are things that you can do on your own—you need your entire team. Together, you can continue to be successful as a brand and as a digital marketing organization, because you will continue to reach your customers' inboxes.

As we head into 2012, you should take a close look at your email list hygiene practices to make sure that you are maintaining a good sender reputation and maximizing deliverability. Good list hygiene combined engaging emails and sender authentication will help you build a solid email reputation with your top ISPs.  

List hygiene may not be the most exciting aspect of email marketing, but it is essential for good deliverability. Simply follow the seven tips below to get your lists in order for the New Year.

1. Scrub Your Lists Regularly. Keep your email lists clean by regularly running them against a register of known bad domains and removing duplicate addresses and role accounts. You can automate the latter by adding “info@*,” “sales@*,” and other common addresses to your suppression list. Your email system may also enable you to automatically suppress bad domains and role-based distribution lists.

2. Remove Bad Domains. Bad domains should be removed immediately. Closely review your failure reports, identify bad addresses and evaluate whether they are the result of a data capture problem or a non-existent domain.

3. Review Data Capture Processes– List hygiene starts with collecting good data. Make sure your sign-up forms prompt users to fix incorrect email address or syntax errors before they are submitted.

4. Actively Manage Hard and Soft Bounces – In addition to having established policies for automatically removing hard-bounced addresses due to bad addresses and unknown users, you should have similar policies for removing soft bounces after a pre-determined number of consecutive failures.

5. Promptly Remove Unsubscribes – Don’t wait the 10 days allowed by CAN-SPAM to process unsubscribes. Remove unsubscribed addresses immediately to avoid users hitting the “this is spam” button and damaging your sender reputation.

6. Mark Inactive Addresses for Reengagement – Transfer inactive addresses to another list that is designed to reengage them.  A good rule of thumb for identifying inactives is no more than 12 months – but 6 months can be preferable depending on factors related to the seasonality of your business.

7. Sign Up for Feedback Loops and Whitelists – Sign up for available feedback loops at your top ISPs to monitor the number of spam complaints generated from your mailings. Similarly, maximize your inbox delivery by signing up for whitelists offered by ISPs and other providers.

There is a great article talking from Mashable today discussing what the new FTC settlement means for Facebook and other social media websites with regards to privacy. While Facebook will have to go through a third party bi-annual audit it seems that they have already learned from their past mistakes, but this ruling is important for other social networking sites to learn from.  For more informaiton click here--http://mashable.com/2011/11/29/facebook-ftc-settlement-2/

As a member of the EEC, I am an active member in a number of their groups, including the Speaker Bureau and the Deliverability Roundtable. Both of these groups have some fantastic people involved in them, but we can always use more. So take the time, become a member, and enjoy getting to know your fellow email experts and help drive the industry in the direction of the future.

For more information, please go to the Speaker Bureau and Deliverability pages. Make sure to check out any others you might be interested in as well.

Email marketing success is dependent on many things, not the least of which is understanding the latest innovations and changes to major email services…and Hotmail certainly qualifies as a major email service.

Just recently Microsoft announced some major changes to what their webmail services such as Hotmail will look like and how users will interact with their email moving forward. One of the biggest reasons Microsoft made these changes was because they realized that getting rid of true spam was not enough. They understand that many people report legitimate emails, such as newsletters, offer campaigns and even notifications. Users might do this for a number of possible reasons

1. They no longer want to receive the email and do not trust the unsubscribe links
2. They feel it is easier to check a large number of emails at once and mark them as spam rather than going into each email and unsubscribing.

Microsoft calls this type of mail graymail, and they have created new ways to help users organize their inbox and remove the clutter. Previously Microsoft had implemented the “Sweep” feature which allowed customers to automatically move specific emails to different folders. They have now taken that technology a step further by creating a specific "Newsletter" folder where they will automatically put newsletters it delivered to users.

Another item that will potentially change the graymail issue is the implementation of the one-click unsubscribe. By utilizing this process, Microsoft will ask you if you want to unsubscribe from the mailing. Microsoft will then respond to the marketer notifying them to remove the user from future mailings. For any mailings received from the marketer after this process was put in place, the mailings will be automatically sent to the Junk folder.

Finally, another change that Microsoft has implemented is the ability to flag emails. Much like Gmail’s labels, or Outlook's flags, this functionality allows users to no longer have to mark messages at unread in order to go back and follow up on items but create flags in order to help them better organize their messages in their inbox.

As a marketer, these changes should not change your approach to your email marketing campaigns. As we have always said at StrongMail, it is all about relevancy. If your campaigns are not relevant to your users, you will not see the returns you are looking for. But if your customers find your campaigns relevant they will look for those emails no matter where they land within their mailboxes.

In addition to deliverability news found here, you can also stay connected to the Email Marketing Insights Blog for more of the latest news in email marketing.

Several companies saw greatly increased bounces from Charter on Thursday, July 14 and Friday, July 15.  Charter has indicated that they had a technical issue where both valid users and invalid addresses were rejected as invalid users.  This technical issue was resolved as of 4:30 PM Eastern Friday, July 15.

You will see these rejected addresses classified as a 2000 series bounce, normally removed after one hard bounce.  Given this information, your best course of action is to reactivate these rejected addresses from late Thursday, July 14 through Friday, July 15.  You can resend to these addresses normally the next time that you send and the invalid users will be removed normally.

StrongMail customers should log into our Spark customer community for the latest information on addressing the situation.

If anyone is interesting I am currently looking for a Delivery Support Specialist to join our team here at StrongMail.

http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=1463997&trk=jobs_biz_nprem

Over the years of working in email deliverability, I have seen a lot of things and been asked a lot of questions. The one question that I never understand coming from a prospect is: “What kind of email deliverability rates can you guarantee if we decide to use your system?” This is one that never ceases to amaze me when it is asked, because as a former marketer, I would have never even thought to ask it. The problem with the question is that the system that you are sending off of is just one component of email delivery. A more significant piece of deliverability has to do with what you’re sending, who you’re sending it to, and is it something they want.

When going through the sales process with a new Email Service Provider (ESP) and the topic of email delivery comes up, I simply suggest all marketers verify that the proposed system is technically capable of sending out their campaigns in the required volume and timing requirements, as well as handle all bounce processing, complaints and other necessary functions from a deliverability standpoint. Once the message has gone through the large list of technical checks that the ISPs look for, delivery to the inbox comes down to the sender’s reputation.

If any ESP ever promises you a particular percentage of inbox delivery, make sure you ask them how they plan on backing that up, and if they make the same promise to all of their clients? If they are making this same promise to all of their clients, what will they do if one of them rents or buys a list? What magic tricks do they have to ensure the inbox delivery of those email addresses?

In summary, if you are promised something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Please share your experiences with these types of questions and answers here—I would love to hear them.