Recent Posts

Analyzing email

Over at the VerticalResponse blog, Janine walks us through analyzing clicks in an email and sets herself new things to test in future mailings. Well worth a read.

I have seen a lot of companies attempt to send out customer support surveys by email, only to fail dismally. Generally, the intentions of the companies who do this are good, but the executions are appalling. Companies have found any number of ways to invite epic fail to call, including mailing to non-customers, mailing to the wrong person at a customer company and mailing to former customers.
Mailing to non-customers generally happens when companies sort abuse and support mail through the same ticketing system. Good customer support (tell us how we did) turns out to be rotten complaint support. The failure here is multifactorial, but revolves around not understanding the difference between customer support mail and abuse complaints. Abuse is not, usually, mail from your customers. More often mail to abuse is from non-customers. While it may seem like a good thing to follow up with abuse complaints to find out if the person is satisfied, generally someone who complains about spam does not want more mail from a company. The fix it to change the selection process for surveys. Survey customers not complainers.
The second failure is more common with enterprise vendors. Generally the vendor will have multiple contacts at company but send a single survey out to all contacts at the customer. Take an average website that provides statistics about web or email performance. A company establishes an account there, and then provides a logins for customer support people, a manager or two and maybe an outside consultant. These people are all using the same site, but are possibly using different parts of it. The consultant can give some feedback on the API and data access, but is not the right person to ask about pricing, packages or overall usefulness and value for money. Management can provide feedback on pricing and value for money but probably has never logged into the website, despite having a working account. Customer support can provide feedback on the user interface and overall usefulness of the site. Knowing who is who at the customer and who is the right contact for different surveys can be tricky, but it is always better a company to appear to be acting purposely.
Finally, some companies send out surveys to anyone who has ever registered for a website, or game or product no matter how long ago that registration was. They send mail to the person who registered for a website but has not logged in for 6 months, or 12 months or even longer. The recipient may have even taken positive action to close an account, such as discontinuing payments. And, yet, the company still mails them a customer satisfaction survey. If the recipient is not paying for the product, if the recipient is not logging into the website then they are no longer a customer. Sure, there are times to reconnect with old customers, and it can be done well. However, what I am talking about is the survey that is clearly designed to be answered by current users and customers.
The sad thing is, I have received customer satisfaction surveys in all of the above categories in the last 6 months.
If you as a sender, are going to use customer satisfaction surveys, do it in a thoughtful and purposeful manner. Do it in a way that brings value to your company and to the people you are surveying. If you do not, you risk higher complaint rates. Remember, people who are not your customer or who are a former customer are probably more likely to hit “this is spam” then to answer your survey. Like any mail you send, make sure you know who your audience is and have a mental model for how they will treat your mail. Do not just grab all available addresses and mail them. Do some analysis of your customer base before you mail and mail them surveys that apply to them. You will get fewer spam complaints and probably more and more accurate survey responses.

AOL converting all FBLs to ARF

AOL announced today that they are phasing out non-ARF feedback loops. As of September 2, 2008, no new non-ARF feedback loops will be created and all existing non-ARF feedback loops will be converted to ARF.
What is ARF?
ARF stands for Abuse Reporting Format. It is a standardized format intended to make processing of automated abuse reports (or feedback loop reports) easier. Word to the Wise has published tools to help recipients process ARF formatted reports and help developers create tools to handle ARF formatted reports. Abacus also supports ARF format out of the box.

Smart email marketing

Mark Brownlow has an ongoing series of posts looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer that is well worth reading.
1/29 – comments closed due to excessive spam on this post

How not to handle unsubscribes

On the heels of my unsubscribe experience last week where an ESP overreacted and unsubscribed addresses that did not belong to me, I encountered another deeply broken unsubscribe process. This one is the opposite, there is no way to unsubscribe from marketing mail at all. Representatives of PayPal have only been able to suggest that if I do not want their mail, that I block PayPal in my email client.
I had a PayPal account years and years ago. They made some extensive privacy policy changes back in 2003 and when I did not actively agree to the new policies, they closed the account. That account closure seemed to take, I heard nothing from PayPal. In early 2008, I made a purchase at a vendor that only accepted credit cards through PayPal. Normally, I do not do business with vendors who only accept payment through PayPal, but there appeared to be a way to make the payment without establishing a PayPal account, so I went ahead and made the purchase.
The receipt from that purchase came from PayPal, and mentioned that I had an existing PayPal account. I figured that because the address was the same as the 2003 account that the boilerplate did not understand ‘closed accounts’. I brushed off the notice and did not worry about it.
On June 23, I received marketing email from PayPal. The mail offered 10% off my first eBay purchase, if I set up an eBay account using the same address on my PayPal account. Yay. Spam. Oh, well, no big deal, there was an unsub link at the bottom of the email. It is PayPal, they are a legitimate company, they will honor an unsubscribe. It will all be fine.
Or. Not.
Clicking on the unsubscribe link in the email takes me to a webpage that tells me I had to login to my account to unsubscribe. But I do not have an account!
They clearly think I have an account linked to the email address they mailed. I decide to see if I can recover the account and then unsubscribe. I put in the email address they sent the marketing email to, the password I probably would have used had I actually set up this account and hit “submit.” PayPal now asks me to set up 3 questions to use to recover my account in case I forget the login in the future. Uh. What? No. I do not want to set up an account, I want them to stop sending me email. I abandon that webpage.
I then attempt to recover the password to the account. Put in the email address that PayPal is sending email to and hit “forgot password”. PayPal, as expected, sends me an email. Click this magic link to recover your account. PayPal then asks me to input the full number of the credit card associated with the account – the credit card number I do not have. What account? What credit card number? Is this from my 2003 subscription that was closed? Is this from the purchase I made in February? I abandon that webpage.
The recover password email helpfully lists a phone number I can call for assistance so I call. In order to be able to talk to someone I have to enter my phone number. And the credit card number associated with my account. I resorted to randomly pounding on “0” and telling the voice recognition software I wanted help. Eventually, it got so confused it transfered me to a real human.
Tragically, the voicemail system was actually more helpful than the real human on the other end. Distilling down hours of sitting on the phone with them, I am told the following:

Excite outsourcing email

Excite announced this morning that they are outsourcing all their incoming email functions to BlueTie. This means that the Excite FBL and whitelist are being discontinued with no plans for replacement.
Over at Deliverabity.com, Dennis is accepting feedback from senders to forward on to Excite.
Edit: I am going to close comments on this post. This is not the place for Excite endusers to comment on the new changes in the interface.

Information you should know

MailChimp is using microformats technology to allow recipients to add senders to their address book from the subscription page. All senders should tell recipients what address mail is coming from at the point of subscription and encourage recipients to add the senders to their address books. This new technology simplifies that for the recipient.
Denise Cox posts about a recent conference she attended in London looking at what makes email valuable. She has many good suggestions on how to improve your ROI, but captures the essence of getting a good ROI on mail in 3 sentences.

Conference suggestion

Seth has a great suggestion on how to make your conference staff famous and thank them for their hard work.

Language

Over on Deliverability.com Krzysztof posts about discussions going on over on the URIBL list about using “confirmed opt-in” to describe a subscription process versus using “double opt-in” to describe the same subscription process. I do not even need to read the list to know what is being said. This is a disagreement that has been going on since the first usage of “double opt-in” over 10 years ago.
To better explain the vitriol, a little history of the two terms might help.
My personal recollection and experience is that the term “confirmed opt-in” was coined by posters in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email around 1997 or 1998. There was some discussion about marketers / spammers (a lot of the posters did not distinguish between the two) trying to use the term “double opt-in” instead of “confirmed opt-in.” Many posters believed (and many still do) that this was a deliberate attempt by marketers to make the process seem overly burdensome and unworkable.
During the 2003 FTC spam hearings, Rebecca Lieb shared formal definitions for 5 different subscription types including “Confirmed opt-in” and “double opt-in”. These definitions are still up on ClickZ.

Open rate

Mark Brownlow over at Email Marketing Reports has been talking about open rates for a while. His point, one I fully agree with, is that open rate is not what you think it is. At best it is a measure of who is rendering your email. Today he links to a post from ReturnOnSubscriber. In this post, the author demonstrates that by using an alt tag saying “don’t you want to save 40%”, the open rate for an email increased 27% over previous sends.
But. Wait.
I would argue that there was no change in the number of emails that were opened and read. In fact, an alt tag can only increase your open rate if recipients are already opening and reading your mail. What is really being measured here is the number of people who load images, not the number of people who are reading your mail. Those extra 27% of people opened and read that email before they loaded an image. They had to! If the alt tag was to have any effect on open rates, then people had to read the alt tag!
Now we have this great increase in a statistic, but what does that actually mean? I know that open rates make marketers feel all warm and fuzzy, but HUF did not actually increase the number of people opening and reading his mail. The only increase was in the number of people rendering images. Much more interesting would be actual clicks or even sales. Does the increase in people loading images in an email translate into actual revenue? That’s the really critical measure.