When an open is not a sign of interest

A lot of people, including myself, are using opens as one of the measures of engagement. This, as a general rule, is not a bad measure. However, there are people who will open email not because they’re interested in it, but because they know it is spam.
Take, for instance, the email address I acquired in 1993. Yes, I still have this address. I stopped using it to sign up for lists in 1999 and stopped using it for most of the rest of my mail around 2001. This address, though, is on any number of spam mailing lists. The spam that gets through is usually sent by hard-core spammers. The ISP that hosts that mailbox uses Communigate Pro to filter mail, so much of the casual spam is filtered.
Generally, if I open an email (and load images or click through) on that account it is only in order to track down a spammer. For instance, I’m getting a lot of spam there from affiliates offering me the opportunity to purchase printing services for a very low price. I have actually been opening the mail, and clicking through. But I’m not clicking through because I’m interested in purchasing. I’m clicking through to see if my reports to abuse@ printer are resulting in any action against the spammers. (They’re not).
The thing is, though, I know that by clicking through on ads, I’ve now been promoted by the spammer to the “clicks on emails! it’s a live address!” list. Which only means I’m going to get more spam from them. Lucky me.
Using clicks and opens as a measure of engagement isn’t necessarily bad. But when using them you have to understand the limitations of the measurement and that what you may think it’s telling you isn’t actually what it’s telling you.

Related Posts

Delivery Metrics

Last week ReturnPath published a study that shows 20% of permission based email fails to be delivered to the inbox. For this study, ReturnPath looked at the mail sent by their mailbox monitor customers and counted the number of deliveries to the inbox, the number of deliveries to the bulk folder and the number of emails that were not delivered.
At US ISPs 21% of the permission based emails sent to the ReturnPath probe network did not make it to the inbox. 3% of the emails sent went to the bulk folder and 17% did not make it to the mailbox at all.  MSN/Hotmail and Gmail were the worst ISPs to get mail to. They each failed to deliver more than 20% of the mail that was sent to them. At Canadian ISPs, even less of the mail made it to the inbox, primarily because primus.ca is such a large portion of the Canadian market and they use Postini as a filter. Postini is a quite aggressive filter and takes no feedback from senders.
ReturnPath’s take home message on the survey is that one set of metrics is not enough to effectively evaluate a marketing program. Senders need to know more about their mailings than they can discover from just the bounce rate or the revenue rate or response rate or open rate.
There are a lot of reasons an email doesn’t get to the recipient’s inbox or bulk folder. Mail can be hard blocked at the MTA, and rejected by the ISP outright. Mail can be soft blocked at the MTA and the ISP can slow down sending. Sometimes this is enough to cause the sending MTA to stop attempting to deliver the mail, thus causing mail to not show up. Both of these types of blocks are usually visible when looking at the bounce rate.
Some ISPs accept mail but then fail to deliver it to the recipient. Everything on the sender end says the ISP accepted it for delivery but the ISP just drops it on the floor. This is the type of block that a mailbox monitoring program is best able to identify.
Despite all the discussions of numbers, many marketers are still not measuring the variables in their email campaigns. Ken Magill wrote today about a study released by eROI that indicates more than a third of marketers are not doing any testing on their mailings.
Now, both of these studies are done in an attempt to sell products, however, the numbers discussed should be making smart senders think about what they are measuring in regards to their email campaign, how they are measuring those factors and what the measurements mean.

Read More

Social network spam

I’ve been seeing more and more social network spam recently, mostly on twitter. In some ways it’s even more annoying than email spam. Here I am, happily having a conversation with a friend and then some spammer sticks their nose in and tweets “myproduct will solve your problem!”
It’s happened twice in the last week.
In most recent example, I was asking my twitter network for some advice on pasta making. I’ve made pasta a few times, but it’s never been exactly right. Not having an Italian grandmother to ask, I was looking for someone with experience in pasta making to answer a few questions. I was having an ongoing conversation with a friend who was helping me troubleshoot my problems. He gave me his recipe to try to see if that would work better.  I thanked him profusely and replied that I would give it a try but probably not tomorrow because it was accounting day and those tend to run late. Someone replied to that tweet suggesting I try some random accounting software to make my accounting easier.
Just… No.
Interjecting product ads in a conversation may be the “acceptable” and “best practice” way to market through social networking. But, I can promise that you’re no better the guy who interrupts conversations at parties so he can hand out business cards for his affiliate program selling herbal male enhancement drugs.
Don’t be That Guy.
Update: Today’s twitter spam was from one of the email accreditation services attempting to sell me their email delivery services.

Read More

Permission Based Emails? Are you sure?

Yesterday I wrote about the ReturnPath study showing 21% of permission based email does not make it to the inbox. There are a number of reasons I can think of for this result, but I think one of the major ones is that not all the mail they are monitoring is permission based. I have no doubt that all of the RP customers say that the mail they’re sending is permission based, I also have no doubt that not all of the mail is.
Everyone who sends mail sends permission based email. Really! Just ask them!
In 10 years of professionally working with senders I have yet to find a marketer that says anything other than all their email is permission based. Every email marketer, from those who buy email addresses to those who do fully confirmed verified opt-in with a cherry on top will claim all their email is permission based. And some of the mailers I’ve worked with in the past have been listed on ROKSO. None of these mailers will ever admit that they are not sending permission based email.
Going back to ReturnPath’s data we don’t really know what permission based email means in this context and so we don’t know if the mail is legitimately or illegitimately blocked. My guess is that some significant percentage of the 20% of email to the probe accounts that doesn’t make it to the inbox is missing because the sender does not have clear recipient permission.
When even spammers describe their email as permission based email marketing, what value does the term have?

Read More