Recent Posts

Spam makes only 200MM dollars a year

Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Justin Rao of Microsoft and David Reiley of Google (who met working at Yahoo) have teamed up to estimate the cost of spam to society relative to its worldwide revenues. The societal price tag comes to $20 billion. The revenue? A mere $200 million. As they note, that means that the “‘externality ratio’ of external costs to internal benefits for spam is around 100:1. Spammers are dumping a lot on society and reaping fairly little in return.” In case it’s not clear, this is a suboptimal situation. The Atlantic

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Non marketers speak

A couple quotes from different folks, who aren’t actually in marketing, but have insightful comments on marketing.

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Outlook.com in practice

I’ve seen a few people talking about outlook.com and how it’s working. There aren’t many insights here but there are a couple.

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More on Yahoo and Engagement

A friend of the blog contacted me earlier today and pointed out that the news that Dan posted about Yahoo and engagement that I blogged about last week was actually reported by George Bilbrey in a Mediapost article on August 1.

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I am, after all, a geek

Not email, but science is so cool.

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Yahoo looking harder at engagement

In a post this morning, Dan Deneweth from Responsys says he’s received confirmation from Yahoo that they have increased the value of engagement metrics when making delivery decisions.
The really great thing, for the ISPs, about engagement metrics is that they directly measure how much a particular email is wanted by recipients. There’s no guessing about it, it measures how engaged the recipient is with a mail. Even better is the fact that, unlike proxy metrics, engagement metrics are extremely difficult for the sender to manipulate. As a sender I can artificially lower complaints and bounces without improving the mail I’m sending. But I can’t improve engagement metrics without actually engaging my recipients.
As I wrote back in 2010:

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Check what now?

A client sent me a shot of a page where they were attempting to change their preferences at a website. This is one of my long time clients, and someone who has been in email marketing for years. He tells me that he spent quite a long time staring at the screen trying to figure out what he was supposed to do to opt out.

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Comcast blocking outgoing port 25

Comcast announced today they’re blocking outbound port 25 for their residential customers. What does this mean for email marketers? Not much, unless your home connectivity is through Comcast and then you’ll just need to follow Comcast’s directions in order to send mail. What does it mean for email receivers? It means a lot of us will be seeing a lot less spam from infected Windows machines.
 
 

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Outlook.com

The big news in email today is Microsoft’s announcement of the next version of Hotmail: Outlook.com. This does appear to be an attempt to compete with a host of Google’s offerings. Not only does Outlook.com include Skype and access to social media accounts, but it also includes web app versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint with 7GB of storage space.
I’m not sure how actively people will be grabbing Outlook.com addresses, as you can use hotmail.com addresses with the Outlook.com interface. Only time will tell, though, how this affects email marketing and spam filtering.

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Bounces, complaints and metrics

In the email delivery space there are a lot of numbers we talk about including bounce rates, complaint rates, acceptance rates and inbox delivery rates. These are all good numbers to tell us about a particular campaign or mailing list. Usually these metrics all track together. Low bounce rates and low complaint rates correlate with high delivery rates and high inbox placement.

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