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Finding your relevancy

Ken Magill reported today that Responsys has unveiled a tool to measure the relevancy of email marketing programs. This tool is intended to help marketers implement the advice “be more relevant.”

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That's spammer speak

I’ve been hearing stories from other deliverability consultants and some ISP reps about what people are telling them. Some of them are jaw dropping examples of senders who are indistinguishable from spammers. Some of them are just examples of sender ignorance.
“We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer speak. The speaker sees no value in any individual recipient, so instead of actually figuring out what about their mail is causing problems, they are going to drop 30% of their list. We talk a lot on this blog about relevancy and user experience. If a sender does not care about their email enough to invest a small amount of time into fixing a problem, then why should recipients care about the mail they are sending?
A better solution then just throwing away 30% of a list is to determine the underlying reasons for  delivery issues, and actually make adjustments to  address collection processes and  user experience. Build a sustainable, long term email marketing program that builds a loyal customer base.
“We have a new system to unsubscribe people immediately, but are concerned about implementing it due to database shrink.” First off, the law says that senders must stop mailing people that ask. Secondly, if people do not want email, they are not going to be an overall asset. They are likely to never purchase from the email, and they are very likely to hit the ‘this is spam’ button and lower the overall delivery rate of a list.
Let people unsubscribe. Users who do not want email from a sender are cruft. They lower the ROI for a list, they lower aggregate performance. Senders should not want unwilling or unhappy recipients on their list.
“We found out a lot of our addresses are at non-existent domains, so we want to correct the typos.” “Correcting” email addresses is an exercise in trying to read recipients minds. I seems intuitive that someone who typed yahooooo.com meant yahoo.com, or that hotmial.com meant hotmail.com, but there is no way to know for sure. There is also the possibility that the user is deliberately mistyping addresses to avoid getting mail from the sender. It could be that the user who mistyped their domain also mistyped their username. In any case, “fixing” the domain could result in a sender sending spam.
Data hygiene is critical, and any sender should be monitoring and checking the information input into their subscription forms. There are even services which offer real time monitoring of the data that is being entered into webforms. Once the data is in the database, though, senders should not arbitrarily change it.

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Comcast FBL open to the public

The Comcast FBL has been moved out of beta testing an into production. ISPs and senders can sign up for the FBL at http://feedback.comcast.net/
All of the applications are currently reviewed by hand, so there may be some delay as they deal with the launch rush. Please be patient. If you currently have a FBL through the beta program, you do not need to do anything, the FBL will continue.

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Email related blog communities

I have recently become aware of 2 new blog communities based around email marketing.
One is a feedburner community Email Marketing Expert
The other is Box of Meat
Enjoy.

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Signup forms and bad data

One thing I frequently mention, both here on the blog and with my clients, is the importance of setting recipient expectations during the signup process. Mark Brownlow posted yesterday about signup forms, and linked to a number of resources and blog posts discussing how to create user friendly and usable signup forms.
As a consumer, a signup process for an online-only experience that requires a postal address annoys and frustrates me to no end. Just recently I purchased a Nike + iPod sport kit. Part of the benefit to this, is free access to the Nike website, where I can see pretty graphs showing my pace, distance and time. When I went to go register, however, Nike asked me to give them a postal address. I know there are a lot of reasons they might want to do this, but, to my mind, they have no need to know my address and I am reluctant go give that info out. An attempt to register leaving those blanks empty was rejected. A blatantly fake street address (nowhere, nowhere, valid zipcode) did not inhibit my ability to sign up at the site.
Still, I find more and more sites are asking for more and more information about their site users. From a marketing perspective it is a no-brainer to ask for the information, at least in the short term. Over the longer term, asking for more and more information may result in more and more users avoiding websites or providing false data.
In the context of email addresses, many users already fill in random addresses into forms when they are required to give up addresses. This results in higher complaint rates, spamtrap hits and high bounce rates for the sender. Eventually, the sender ends up blocked or blacklisted, and they cannot figure out why because all of their addresses belong to their users. They have done everything right, so they think.
What they have not done is compensate for their users. Information collection is a critical part of the senders process, but some senders seem give little thought to data integrity or user reluctance to share data. This lack of thought can, and often does, result in poor email delivery.

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Social network sends spam

Yesterday we talked about social networks that harvest the address books of registered  users and send mail to all those addresses on behalf of their registered user. In the specific case, the registered user did not know that the network was going to send that mail and subsequently apologized to everyone.
That is not the only way social networks collect addresses. After I posted that, Steve mentioned to me that he had been receiving invitations from a different social network. In that case, the sender was unknown to Steve. It was random mail from a random person claiming that they knew each other and should network on this new website site.  After some investigation, Steve discovered that the person making the invitation was the founder of the website in question and there was no previous connection between them.
The founder of the social networking site was harvesting email addresses and sending out spam inviting people he did not know to join his site.
Social networking is making huge use of email. Many of my new clients are social networking sites having problems delivering mail. Like with most things, there are some good guys who really do respect their users and their privacy and personal information. There are also bad guys who will do anything they can to grow a site, including appropriating their users information and the information of all their users correspondents.
It is relatively early in the social networking product cycle. It remains to be seen how much of an impact the spammers and sloppier end will have. If too much spam gets through, the spam filters and ISPs will adapt and social networks will have to focus more on respecting users and potential users in order for their mail to get delivered.

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Address harvesting through social networks

The next killer ap on the Internet seems to be social networking. Everyone has a great idea for the next facebook or or myspace. All of these sites, though, have to find users. The site will fail if there are no users. One way to get new users is to ask all your current users to invite all their friends to join. This tends to lead to the marketing / product decision to insert functionality into the social networking site which allows current users to upload their address book and the site itself will send out invitations to all your friends and contacts.
This is not actually as great as an idea as it sounds, however. First, you end up with situations like what happened to me this past week.  On Wednesday I received the following email:

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Judge rules in e360 v. Comcast

Yesterday Judge Zagel ruled on Comcast’s motion for judgment on the pleadings. I think the tone of the ruling was clear in the first 3 sentences.

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Dealing with ISPs when you are blocked

Here is some advice on dealing with ISPs over a blocking issue.

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Email related laws

I’ve been working on a document discussing laws relevant to email delivery and have found some useful websites about laws in different countries.
US Laws from the FTC website.
European Union Laws from the European Law site.
Two documents on United Kingdom Law from the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Data Protection Laws.
Canadian Laws from the Industry Canada website.
Australian Laws from the Australian Law website.

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