MindComet

Fred Flare Wins My Heart

Attitude. Personality. Unique. Distinct. Fun. Consistent. This email is all of those things.

From the cute illustrations to the day-by-day breakdown of Bee’s items and the prices of said items; it all works. Even though the huge call-to-action of “FREE SHIP!“ is way below the fold, it still does the trick. If anything, this email basically made the fold disappear. I was so intrigued by the creative, I scanned the entire thing up and down numerous times when it landed in my inbox. You couldn’t ask for a better reaction out of one of your subscribers… well, I could’ve bought something, but I’m not a girl. Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it. So there.

The emails from fredflare.com are something to behold. It proves that you don’t always have to conform to a standard template or wireframe in order to get a reaction out of your customers.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 30, 2009

Before You Go…

I was *this close* from unsubscribing from Shopittome.com‘s newsletter this morning, but once I clicked on the unsubscribe link from my daily sales alert, I was taken to the page below:

I immediately reconsidered my decision of opting out… all because of their variety of appealing preferences. The three preference options broke down as follows: “Take a Temporary Break”, “Make Salemail More Affordable” and “Receive Emails Less Often”. Perfect. Instead of opting out, I set a maximum price of $80 and chose to receive only one email a week. Rather than completely removing myself from their list (in turn remaining a potential revenue source), I stayed on board while receiving emails less frequently featuring less expensive items. This is a surefire way—and a great example of how—to retain your contacts and lower your opt out rates.

What other examples of creative and efficient unsubscribe / preference pages has anyone else seen recently? Comment below!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 18, 2009

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.

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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.

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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.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 10, 2009