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.
It still amazes me when I see someone using a noreply@ address to send an email, and I have to wonder – what kind of impression do you think it leaves with the recipient? Don’t forget that those who get these messages are customers – or could be. Emails like this are basically telling them you don’t care if they have feedback and are not interested in what they have to say.
As if that wasn’t enough, did you know you are hurting your delivery at the same time?
Using a noreply@ address is not a good idea for the following reasons:
Compelling evidence to give up the noreply@ address, right? Here’s what the Pros have to say:
The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business
“Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.” Learn more here.
MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices:
“Senders should have the capability to process email-based unsubscribe requests. Senders should also consider making offline unsubscribe mechanisms available. The sender’s ‘From’ or ‘Reply-to’ email address should also be able to receive unsubscribe requests, unless otherwise indicated.” Learn more here.
Email marketing can be a great way to keep your customers engaged and foster two-way communication, but if you’re using a noreply@ address, your conversations will always be one-sided.
If you are using a noreply@ address, it’s time to change. Start by sending an email informing your customers you will be changing your address shortly and encourage them to add the new one to their Safe list. Tell them you welcome their feedback with open arms and show them they actually mean something!
Bye for now,
Kevin
PS: This is one of many topics we will be covering in our soon to be released CakeMail Deliverability Whitepaper – so stay tuned!
For those of you who were reading back in the fall, you might remember that we talked a little about Bill C-27, the Electronic Commerce Protection Act, a bill under review in Canada to deal with the issues of spam, phishing, spyware and malware. And now, an update!
Bill C-27: Electronic Commerce Protection Act is now Bill C-28: Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act. It was introduced in the House of Commons on May 25, 2010 and has passed first reading. To review the new bill click here.
The new act would establish a regulatory framework to protect electronic commerce in Canada and would:
If you would like to stay informed on the progress of this Bill and want to encourage the adoption of important anti-spam laws like this, feel free to sign up with CAUCE (The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) here.
Stay tuned… and bye for now,
Kevin
The primary purpose of email authentication is to verify that the sender of the message is in fact the party responsible for the message being sent. A few types of email authentication also help to protect against issues like domain spoofing and phishing attacks.
DKIM is a method of email authentication that has been around for a few years and has become increasingly popular with many ISPs looking for a cryptographic solution to the email forgery issue. Recent evidence indicates that many ISPs are now using it to filter mail based on whether the sender authenticates or not – meaning in this case that a sender adds a digital signature within the email header that is verified against a published key for the domain or user in question.
CakeMail has been using DKIM as one of our methods of authenticating emails since our inception. After several recent tests using the same content and sending emails from the same IP, the CakeMail Delivery Team saw a distinct increase in email being sent to the inbox (with images and links enabled) that would have otherwise gone to junk. Although most, if not all, of the large ISPs are verifying using DKIM, we saw the best results at Gmail and Yahoo!.
For more information on authenticating your email using DKIM, please contact our Deliverability department at support@cakemail.com or visit our Support page.
I received an excellent study today from the folks at Project Honey Pot about Spam.
Project Honey Pot was created in 2004 by Unspam Technologies, Inc and they have built a community of tens of thousands of web and email administrators in more than 170 countries around the world to help track online fraud and abuse. They also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Recently, they received their 1 Billionth Spam message to one of their trap addresses and to commemorate this milestone they decided to release the data they have accrued over the last 5 years.
There are many fascinating things in this study, for example.. Did you know Monday is the busiest day for Spam and Saturday is the slowest? Assuming the average size requirement for a spam email is 4KB, over the last 5 years the total storage requirement imposed on the Internet by just the spammers sending the top-20 spam campaigns was over 2.5 petabytes! If you don’t know what a petabyte is, it’s BIG (roughly 2.6 million Gigabytes). Lastly, it’s interesting to note that in 2008 there were virtually no Facebook phishing messages, but today Facebook is the second most phished organization in the world and predicted to be #1 in 2010.
For the complete study, click here.
Project Honey Pot is still a little behind McDonald’s, who apparently served their 1 Billionth hamburger back in 1963 and although the menu has changed a bit, today’s estimate has them well over 100 billion! Let’s hope Project Honey Pot is successful and we don’t see the same kind of growth with spam!
Bye for now and Happy Holidays,
Kevin
