Recent Posts

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.

New Yahoo Domains

Yahoo announced two new email domains today.

Unsubscribe policies

Our local brewpub has an email list. For various reasons I have multiple addresses on the list and finally decided that getting 4 copies of each mailing was silly. About a week ago, I sent in unsubscribe requests for 3 of the addresses. Today I get another 4 copies of their mailing. That’s not good. Luckily, I know one of the delivery folks at their ESP so I send her an email.
I know unusubscribes can take a few days to process, but it has been seven and CAN SPAM is pretty clear about the 10 day requirement. My first email to their delivery expert is just asking how long unsbs normally take. She responds they take 3 – 4 days. Uh Oh.
I tell her I unsubscribed these 3 addresses (with the unsub links) on 6/10 and received more email this morning. I did tell her that there were multiple subscriptions and they were all legit, but the reasons were really not important. Just that I didn’t want quite so many emails and their unsubscribe process seemed broken.
Now we get to the part where it all goes a wee bit pear shaped. The next email I get back from her explains why I am on so many lists. Fair enough. The more concerning bit is that they have not only gone through their database and unsubscribed all my addresses, but they have also found Steve’s addresses and unsubscribed those too. What the email does not contain is an explanation of why their unsubscribe process broke.
At this point I am a bit annoyed. I did not want all my addresses unsubscribed, just some of them. And the bit about unsubscribing Steve? That’s just silly and unnecessary. Another round of email ensued, pointing out this is bad and please put everything back how it was except please unsubscribe these three addresses I sent originally.
Things are back how they were, although the technical staff is still looking into how their unsubscribe process broke. The initial thought is that during a technology transition they lost some unsubscribe requests.
This whole process has bothered me for a number of reasons. One is the utterly cavalier attitude of the delivery people at the ESP. Their unsubscribe process broke. This is, to my mind, an emergency. ESPs have been fined for broken unsubscribe processes. Two is the process of unsubscribing addresses that belonged to a completely different person. The ESP did explain the policy behind that, sorta.

Download Day

Today Firefox3 is released. The Mozilla Foundation is trying to set a record for number of downloads in a single day. Go download it!

Contradictions

In the span of 48 hours the following two things happened.
Josh Baer posts over on deliverability.com about GoDaddy’s policies and recommends no email marketer use GoDaddy as a registrar because they are so hostile to email marketing that they charge customers for complaints. To quote Josh:

Authenticating email in a court of law

Venkat has a discussion of authentication needed to present emails to a judge when asking for a summary judgment.

Email to mobile devices

There have been numerous blog posts about email to mobile devices, and making sure that your email displays well on the tiny screens with often lobotomized software. What few people have mentioned is the CAN SPAM laws related to sending mail to mobile devices.
While the FTC handles the bulk of the regulation related to CAN SPAM the FCC is responsible for regulating email sent to wireless devices. The act requires the FCC protect consumers from “unwanted mobile service commercial messages.” To that end there are specific regulations that apply to email sent to domains used exclusively for mobile devices that do not apply to messages that go out to non-mobile domains.
A summary of the FCC rules can be found at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/policy/canspam.html. The FCC describes the ban to consumers thusly: