MindComet

Lashback & Yahoo! Team Up

ExactTarget is reporting that Lashback and Yahoo! are now working together to determine senders’ “unsubscribe reputation”. What is Lashback, you ask? Lashback is a service that basically oversees and identifies which senders are honoring unsubscribes and which are not. They report on the Spam counts from reputable senders as well. For instance, when a user marks an email as Spam from a sender that has a good unsubscribe compliance, Lashback steps in and makes sure it’s actually marked as an unsubscribe request and not a Spam complaint.  They have dubbed themselves as being “The Email Compliance Authority”.

For any sender who’s using a major ESP, they have nothing to worry about as all ESPs remove unsubscribed addresses pretty much immediately. If you’re a small business or a sender who doesn’t have a lot of resources, it is more likely you’re keeping track of your unsubscribes manually. If you miss one, it may come back to bite your reputation… especially with Yahoo! addresses, in this case.

Along with overseeing sender reputations and righting wrongs, they’re also trying to educate users with a plugin available for download. Once installed, the plugin helps compile unsubscribe information which can report when senders are not honoring opt-out requests. The gist of the service is to identify which senders / entities are not following CAN-SPAM rules. Seems to be quite useful.

The only question I have is do they allow a grace period of 10 days before they start reporting on an unsubscribe or is it immediate? This could be problematic if it’s the former, as CAN-SPAM rules state that a recipient needs to be removed from the list within 10 days.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 17, 2009

Please Release Me

What if every time you wanted to unsubscribe from a list, you had to reply with this video?

I think the email marketing community totally needs to embrace this idea and shoot for a new rule provision for the CAN-SPAM act. So along with the existing rules of including a one-click opt-out link, the physical address of the mailer and a non-deceptive subject line, we can add the option of also opting-out by replying to the mailer with this video or any recording of it.

Let’s make it happen, people. Humperdinck ‘10.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 12, 2009

Major Spambot Killed

According to theregister.co.uk, a botnet (also know as Mega-D or Ozdok) which was responsible for 1/3 of all of the world’s spam has been wiped off the proverbial map. The responsible party, FireEye, analyzed the ins and outs of this botnet and attacked it’s commands and control channels, ultimately paralyzing it and rendering it useless.

The botnet operated through various control channels that sent out instructions to “zombie” machines in their network that would in turn send out spam.

Although this is great news in the long run, it won’t garner as much change as one might think, though. All of the IP addresses (more than 264,000) the botnet used were already blacklisted. For now, the ISPs will have to identify each individual IP address that was under the botnet’s voodoo hex and clean up the mess from there.

In 2008, a staggering 200 BILLION spam emails were sent per day. But now, without Mega-D looming around, that daily total will drop to around 134 billion daily spam emails. I know it’s still an overwhelming number to digest, but at least it’s a bit more manageable.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 10, 2009

Target Misses the Mark

I’ve never bought anything from target.com. So why would they think this email would apply to me?

This seems to be a botched, misdirected send, doesn’t it? The entire message simply does not apply to me. From the copy “click on the item below” to the absence of any items to the missing related products, this email was an undeniable misfire. I should not have received this email. Period.

I can’t tell if this was a system generated hiccup or a manual mishandling. Either way, a corporation like Target with their breadth of resources should not be experiencing issues like this. Although, they did recently run into some hot water about an offensive costume for sale in their online store. Seems like they need to re-evaluate some things and get their ducks in a row.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 28, 2009

Emails Like This Make People Like Me Opt Out From Your List

Let me start with a rhetorical question. If you saw this email, would you consider it spam?

Well, if you’re anything like me, you thought it was spam and opted out immediately. There’s nothing here that screams “legitimacy”, even if it actually is a legit message (which this is).

And as you can see, even with the images “on” it still doesn’t do much to defend itself.

Another telling reason why I thought this was spam is because I never opted in to ever receive emails from Nation’s Restaurant News. It was most likely because I accidentally opted into a partner network of email lists. Shame on me for not paying better attention.

I think it would be wise if all 3rd-party emails had a disclaimer above the fold, warning the user that the email they’re receiving may not be of interest to them. This verbiage would also have a prevalent opt out link next to it.

Another thing I’d like to note is that the email wasn’t from Nation’s Restaurant News, it was from Ellen Koteff. Ellen, I don’t know you and I surely don’t want emails from you. If the email is from a company, it should be FROM the company. No excuses.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 27, 2009

WordPress Unveils Email Service

Bloggers who’ve struggled with implementing an email newsletter into their blog can rest easy. Wordpress—with assistance from Feedburner—have developed a plug-in for their users that allows them to set-up and send emails from the convenience of their dashboard. It works exactly how you’d imagine… The newsletters take posts & snippets of content from their blogs and update their users via the inbox. The service also provides access to statistics like click through rates, open rates and the like.

Granted, there are competing email services specifically for blog, but aren’t free. The other service providers have many more capabilities than what Wordpress is offering at the moment. For right now this is a bare-bones method of delivering updates straight to the subscribed users. Although, I’m sure the developers at Wordpress will continue to improve this feature over time, especially if the majority of their users adopt it.

An announcement like this won’t overwhelmingly effect top-tier ESPs, but I have to imagine that this will definitely impact their acquisition of small businesses. And something like this should be seen as a threat to those ESPs who specialize in small businesses or individuals for the majority of their revenue stream. With such pro-active solutions as this, it’s no doubt that Wordpress is one of the biggest blog platform providers out there. A free service like this will only help maintain their dominance in the blogware market.

If you have a Wordpress blog, you can find out more on implementing your newsletter here.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 09, 2009

Body Background Images Can Add Depth To Your Email

If you’ve followed this blog for the past couple of years, you know that I’m a big proponent for the removal of background images in email design. This is all due to the popularity of unsupported clients such as Outlook ‘07 and even Gmail to a certain extent. Although, sometimes a series of events will take place that will lead you to change your whole perspective on things.

In this case, that perspective-altering event was visiting Dylan Boyd’s killer Email Wars blog. The post that really piqued my interest included a screenshot of a BEEEAUTIFUL email from Columbia. The forest-landscape background totally threw me for a loop. As far as background images go, they usually consist of a gradient or repeating image, but rarely do I ever see photo-realisitc backgrounds in the bodies of emails. It caught my attention to say the least.

I then remembered that the geniuses at CampaignMonitor discovered a method of getting background images to display in the body of an email. So even this email could be displayed as intended in Outlook ‘07. Win.

I think this should be an example for creative online marketing and advertising departments to stretch their email designs out a bit. Try incorporating big, sweeping background images. I think most B2C email campaigns could benefit from at least testing this.

Have you seen any other brands using photo-realistic background images in the body of their emails? Provide examples in the comments.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 07, 2009