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.
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
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
Freedom is good. And CakeMail gives you tons of freedom, letting you build exactly the mail service you want so you can deliver a carefully tailored experience to your clients.
Sometimes, however, that freedom can backfire. Customers have away of breaking things inadvertently. A well-meaning client can dabble with an email campaign, making changes to the wrong part of the mail, and undo all of your hard work. While you want to give your clients access to their mails–so they can tweak and prune their content–you need a way to control what they can do.
With our newly introduced TinyMCE editor, that’s what you get. The new editing module, available free for CakeMail users, can be embedded into your site and used to lock down what clients can change within a message. That means more flexibility and independence for your customers … and less time spent fixing things!
TinyMCE comes with some other great features, like image management and cropping, that make it easier than ever to build great campaigns. You can check out the new module here.
(Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/pathayes/3208430981/)
Marketing Sherpa’s team compare the American anti-spam law and the Canadian anti-spam project of law to highlight the five major differences. We could say that Canadian anti-spam law goes a little further.
Difference #1. Advanced permission is required
Difference #2. Permission is required for SMS messages
Difference #3. Unsubscribe links must stay active for 60 days
Difference #4. Unsubscribe requests must be honored within 10 days
Difference #5. Individuals have the right to sue spammers
Read the complete article: Canada’s Anti-Spam Bill: 5 Key Differences from CAN SPAM
