Do you know where your signups are?

Here at Word to the Wise we sign up for a lot of email from our customers. There are multiple reasons we do this.

Engagement starts before the first email

These days the key to getting to the inbox is sending mail your users want and expect. We always recommend senders start the engagement process during signup. Why? Because it establishes the relationship even before email happens. People want to like the vendors and brands they interact with. A key part of that is making the recipient feel special and like they have value to you.
There are other benefits to engaging before email. The biggest is the opportunity for the recipient to look in the bulk folder for mail. When a user says “this is not spam” by moving mail to the inbox, that whitelists the mail for that user. Even better, that acts as a big positive for the email’s overall reputation. Positive signals feed into the machine learning engines and change reputation for the better.

Broken signup forms

One thing that always amazes me is the number of broken signup forms there are online. Even when the senders have effective email programs, sometimes there’s a problem with the signup.
We’ve found some recurring problems during our signup experiences.
Signup forms are hard to find. For some systems this is OK, the signups happen during checkout, for instance. But every company sending non-transactional mail to their customers should make it possible to sign up for mail without making a purchase. Make the sign up form visible!
“Rogue” signup forms. At some point site design changes and new forms are added. Occasionally an older signup form isn’t deleted and subscriptions sorta happen, but the welcome messages are sent from a system no one is aware of still being active. In other cases, the forms looked like they worked, but addresses were never added to lists. Check all signup pathways regularly!
Going through the signup process tells me a lot about an email program. Deliverability problems often start at the point of address collection.
When was the last time you signed up at your site?

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Thoughts on Data Hygiene

zombieemailOne of the big deliverability vs. marketing arguments has to do with data hygiene and dropping inactive users. Marketers hate that deliverability people tell them to let subscribers go after a long time of no activity from the subscriber.
Data hygiene is good. Email is not permanent and not forever, and the requirements for data hygiene in the email space are very different than the requirements in the postal mail space. There is no such thing as “dear occupant” in email. I mean, you can sent to occupant, but the occupant can then hit the this is spam button. Too many emails to “occupant” and mail goes to bulk instead of the inbox. These are real risks.
With that being said, there are a lot of things to consider when putting together a data hygiene program. You’re looking to remove people who are no longer interested in your brand as much as they are no longer interested in your mail. You’re trying to suss out who might have abandoned the email address you have for them. It’s complicated.
I’ve worked with a lot of clients over the years to implement data hygiene programs. Sometimes those programs were to deal with a bulk foldering issue. Other times clients have been trying to address a SBL listing. Still other clients were just looking for better control over their email and delivery. In all cases, my goal is to identify and classify their recipients into 3 groups: addresses we know are good, addresses we know are bad, and then addresses we don’t know about.
Good addresses get mailed. Bad addresses get dumped. The challenging bit is what do we do with the unknown addresses? That’s when we start looking at other data the client may have. Purchases? Website visits? What do we have to work with and what else do we know about the people behind the addresses. Once we’ve looked at the data we design a program to take the addresses we don’t know about and drop them into either the good or the bad bucket. How we do that really depends on the specifics of the company, their program and their data. But we’ve had good success overall.
There’s been a lot of discussion on hygiene this week, after Mailchimp published a blog post looking at the value of inactive subscribers. They found something that I don’t find very surprising, based on my observations across hundreds of clients over the years.

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Security, backdoors and control.

WttWColorEye_forBlogThe FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control. Apple letter to customers

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February 2016: The Month in Email

Happy March! Here’s a look back at our last month of email adventures.
Feb2016forBlogIt was a busy few weeks for us with the M3AAWG meeting in San Francisco. We saw lots of old friends and met many new people — all in all, a success, despite the M3AAWG plague we both contracted. Hot topics at the conference included DMARC, of course, and I took the opportunity to write up a guide to help you determine if you should publish a DMARC policy.
On the subject of advice and guidance, Ask Laura continues to be a popular column — we’ve had lots of interesting questions, and are always looking for more general questions about email delivery. We can’t tackle specifics about your program in this column (get in touch if we can help you with that directly) but we can help with questions like “Will our ESP kick us off for mailing purchasers?” or “Help! I’m confused about authentication.”
Continuing on the authentication front, I noted that Gmail is starting to roll out some UI to indicate authentication status to users. It will be interesting to see if that starts to affect user (or sender) behavior in any way. In other interesting industry news, Microsoft has implemented an Office 365 IP Delisting page. I also wrote a followup post to my 2015 overview of the state of ESPs and purchased lists — it’s worth checking out if this is something your business considers.
I wrote a post about security and backdoors, prompted by both the FBI/Apple controversy and by Kim Zetter’s talk at M3AAWG about Stuxnet. These questions about control and access will only get more complicated as we produce, consume, store, and share more data across more devices.
Speaking of predictions, I also noted my contribution to a great whitepaper from Litmus that explores the state of Email Marketing in 2020.
As always, we looked at some best practices this month. I wrote up some of my thoughts about data hygiene following Mailchimp’s blog post about the value of inactive subscribers. As always, there isn’t one right answer, but there’s a lot of good food for thought. And more food for thought: how best practices are a lot like public health recommendations. As with everything, it comes down to knowing your audience(s) and looking at the relationship(s), which, as you know, is a favorite subject around here.

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