MindComet

Hotmail Revamps Usability Features; Declares War on Newsletters

Hotmail claims that a good 75% of their spam complaints consist of legit email, most of which are newsletters and / or sales offers. Because of this, they are classifying this email as “graymail”. Hotmail recently explained their reasoning behind this on their blog. See their piechart breakdown of what their average user’s inboxes consist of.

So what Hotmail plans on doing is creating a “Newsletter” category, which emails will filter into automatically. How do they determine which emails are newsletters exactly? They plan on using their “Smartscreen” technology, which they claim to have a 95% success rate.

This may be a little troublesome for us email marketers. I have a feeling open rates for Hotmail users will drop briefly, but only until Hotmail users get used to the new automatic filtration process.

Along with their newsletter filtering process, they’re also unveiling a new unsubscribe process which is independent from the CAN-SPAM compliant links within emails. See the screenshot below for what users will see:

Another cool feature they’ve announced is Sweep, which is a part of Scheduled Cleanup. This feature basically removes all previous marketing messages from a specific sender, only leaving the most recent email in your inbox. The rest are filtered out into a different folder. Check out the video below:

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the new Hotmail. It’ll be interesting to see if any other major ISPs adopt similar tactics to keep users’ inboxes cleaned up by default. Personally, I think this is a little too intrusive on Hotmail’s part, but I suppose they have their reasons. What do you think?

Read more about their new features on their blog.

View Comments

Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 07, 2011

Adjust Send Schedules Around the Holidays

My three-day weekend was fantastic.  I went to a few bars, went to the movies, a cookout with my closest friends, and karaoke night (my renditions of “Wanted Dead or Alive” and “On the Road Again” garnered me two standing ovations, but I digress…) I couldn’t have asked for a better holiday.

But when I returned to work on Tuesday, I was immediately stressed. My inbox was flooded with newsletters and sales offerings desperate for my attention. Because of the abundance of emails, my attention was concentrated only on the ones related to my daily tasks at hand.  The others merely fell by the wayside, or in this case, the delete button.

As a rule of thumb, don’t send any emails for your campaign until at least 3 days after everyone returns to work… It gives the recipient some time to catch their breath.  Unless of course it’s time sensitive or you’re sending to a highly segmented list.  But even if its segmented, your recipients might be as overwhelmed as I was and completely overlook your message.

View Comments

Posted by MindComet on Sep. 05, 2007