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.
Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 17, 2009
Comments
James,
I hope with the success of Lashback and Yahoo! working in conjunction, more ISPs will follow suit to more actively correct and adjust the true spam complaints from the ‘accidental’ ones. Take care and keep up the solid work.
Posted by Bryan Quilty on 11/18/2009 10:35 AM
Bryan,
Thanks for picking up the mention from Al. I do want to clarify most receivers and ISPs handle the unsubscribe process differently and have their own formulas for reputation which impacts deliverability. A consumer complaint is still a complaint as it stands right now in most systems, and impacts negatively your reputation probably more than any other factor. But the news here is that reputation has become far more granular. Yahoo! has been great in talking to more email marketers about their expectations. And I think like Al’s comments this morning also find LashBack data to be unique and valuable. Unsubscribe performance is increasing in both adoption and impact across the industry on a global basis. List-unsubscribe is hot right now as well. But in this process remember authentication, relevance, unsubscribe, volume, complaints, domains, sending IPs, creative, sending behavior- all of these points and more are taken into account in different ways. The rule: anything you do to build trust with consumers and receivers, builds reputation and your deliverability.
Posted by James O'Brien on 11/17/2009 04:59 PM