Gmail has just announced that it’s rolling out a new “priority inbox” feature that adds new filtering features to your inbox – highlighting emails into three categories that include “Important & Unread”, “Starred” and “Everything else”. It’s primarily based on your reading patterns (in addition to the usual sender reputation and content filtering) and improves over time as Gmail follows your reading behaviour. They even made a cute video to explain what it’s all about.
While every one of us who lives with a daily onslaught of hundreds of emails ranging from “That’s the email I was waiting for!” to “Super – someone hit reply-all again about the office potluck” is excited about this new feature that might make our digital day-to-day easier, we are left wondering – what does this mean for email marketing? Will it now be even harder for marketers to get to the inbox at Gmail? What can you do to ensure your campaigns hit the priority inbox?
Most of these are exercises in being a better email marketer in general, but here are a few things you can do to give your campaign a shot at making it to the top of the list:
Engagement and “Contact List” or “Address Book” status are more important now that ever before – and not just for Gmail. Hotmail also gives its users the ability to show only emails from people in your Contact List with the click of a button and it is only a matter of time before other ISPs follow suit. To read more on Hotmail’s new “Sweep” feature, click here.
I received 2 very good questions this week concerning CAN SPAM with regards to F2F links and sending email from outside the United States.
I think CAN SPAM continues to be a grey area for a lot of marketing folk and now more than ever they are being pressured to perform in today’s economy, especially since recent reports show more than half (48%) plan to increase email marketing spending this year.
Forwarding email is something a lot of us do every day and certainly don’t think anything of it, but as an email marketer CAN SPAM applies to forwarding commercial based email only if you are offering something (as an incentive) to the person doing the forwarding and states the following:
“…if the seller offers something of value in exchange for forwarding a commercial message, the seller must comply with the Act’s requirements.” *
With regard to people sending commercial-based email outside the United States, you need to look at your list very carefully. If you have 1 address @hotmail, @yahoo, @gmail, @aol, or any other American ISP – CAN SPAM applies. If the person checking it lives in another country does not matter, they are using an ISP in the United States and your email must abide by the rules of CAN SPAM. For a summary of what is required, please click here.
One last point I think is important to mention… the CAN SPAM Act is a list of minimum requirements, but quite frankly you should be doing this anyway (regardless of what country you live in). As a general rule, we recommend all clients adhere to the strictest rules of the road to help protect their deliverability, ensure global compliance and to stay out of trouble. If you have a genuine relationship with the people on your list and you are trying to market a product, why wouldn’t you?
Bye for now,
Kevin
* We are not lawyers, please consult with your own legal council concerning all privacy laws that may or may not affect you and your organization.
Today, I wanted to talk about blacklists and spam reporting services, also what you can do if you’ve been listed.
First off, a lot of people think blacklists are the bad guys, when in fact it’s the exact opposite. The feedback they provide is not only valuable to help ISPs keep spam out of your Inbox, but they can also alert you (the sender) to potential problems as well. You should think of it like your child’s report card in school, if your child fails a class wouldn’t you want to know about it so you can help them?
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Yahoo or Hotmail use these services to help determine if the email you are sending them is Spam. If they receive spam from you or too many people complain, they will send your email to ‘Junk’ or just delete it. These services let you know if anyone on your list did not remember signing up and/or they are not happy receiving your emails anymore (perhaps because they requested to be removed). All of this helps protect your delivery and allows you to judge the quality of the list so you can take action.
What Can I do?
If you have been listed, you first need to look at your mailing list (or segment) and decide whether or not it is still worth using. Strengthen your sign-up process and make sure it’s crystal clear. If you have no relationship with the people on your list, or you are using a publicly available or purchased list – it should be discarded. If the list is legitimate and made up of people who have opted in to receive your email from you directly, then perhaps it is time to reconfirm they want to stay on your list. If the list is old, or you haven’t used it in a while (+6 months), or people are no longer interested in receiving your email – the list should be “cleaned”. This is done by sending an email asking if they want to keep receiving emails from you. If they do not reply, they should be removed. You can also put a link in the email asking them to click if they want to stay on your list or better yet, visit your website to sign up again! The people who are left would remain and anyone that didn’t reply or click should be removed. Depending on how often you send emails and how big your list is, this should be done every few months.
Bye for now,
Kevin
Previous posts:
Thinking of Using an ‘Old’ List? – Part 1: The Risks
Thinking of Using an ‘Old’ List? – Part 2: Prepare your Re-Opt in Email
Hi again, in my last post we talked a bit about reviving old lists and dealing with hardbounces, but I never really got into how important they are. Sure, most people know what a hardbounce is, but I don’t think many people know what kind of an impact sending to them can have on your deliverability.
Very simply a hardbounce is a bounce generated when you send an email to an address that does not exist. It may have existed in the past, but not anymore. Just like calling a phone number that’s been disconnected, you usually get a recording saying “This number is no longer in service..” – which is effectively the same thing. The big difference is, the phone company doesn’t block the rest of your outbound phone calls because you dialed too many wrong numbers!
ISPs look very closely at the number of hardbounces a sender generates. Too many from a given network can indicate a potential Directory Harvest Attack and ISPs will put up a block (usually done automatically) to prevent slow downs which may cause further harm to their users. Have you ever sent an email to a friend and wondered why it took so long to get there? Think about it, if an ISP is being bombarded by millions of spammers trying to validate a list of a ‘gagillion’ addresses, it’s going to slow down the legitimate email from getting through and people will inevitably start complaining.
In order to prevent these blocks, it’s very important to keep your list(s) up-to-date. This means sending on a regular basis and removing hardbounces as you go. CakeMail automatically does this for you, but if you haven’t used the list in a while or like we talked about last week, you’re thinking of using an older list, you need to be very careful. As a preventative measure, which we’ve also mentioned several times, you should be confirming any new leads. When somebody signs-up, you should (at the very least) be sending that address a Welcome email. Not only will this prove they have access to the address, but it will get rid of hardbounces right away and prevent you sending a whole bunch at once. It also gives you an excellent opportunity to send them your From address for Whitelisting and thank them for signing up in the first place!
Bye for now,
Kevin
If you have any questions, Kevin can be reached at: postmaster@cakemail.com or feel free to use our Help Desk.
Note: this blogpost was originally published on January 5 2009.
We know you’ve already planned to lose weight, quit smoking, and start exercising to improve your quality of life. And we don’t want to overwhelm you with MORE resolutions but simply having better email marketing practices can diminish your complaint rate and improve your deliverability, lowering your stress level and making your life in general better! Aren’t we thoughtful? 
Whitelisting 101 on CakeMail and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group – MAAWG Senders Communications Practices Guide (PDF download) will help you keep your resolutions.
Have a great, successful and healthy year in 2009!
