MindComet

Environmentally-Conscious SPAM Infographic

Spam isn’t just an annoyance and inconvenience for our inboxes; it actually produces a negative global impact on the environment. The team at webpagefx.com recently released the infographic below explaining just how this is possible. They claim that each spam email on average causes as much CO2 emissions as driving 3 feet. Compound that with the worldwide volume and you have quite the impact on the global environment.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 17, 2011

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.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 07, 2011

Poll: How Do You Deal With Unwanted Messages?

I’ve always wondered how people handle unwanted marketing messages. Now, keep in mind I’m not singling out SPAM either—these messages are usually taken care of automatically by your ISP— I’m talking about any email that you’ve subscribed to that you don’t have the time for at the moment. Do you delete them? Do you leave them just sitting in your inbox unread (this would drive me absolutely crazy)? Do you mark them as read?

If you’re anything like me, you treat your inbox with a fair amount of respect—not allowing it to get too cluttered or mismanaged at any one point. Personally, I mark all unwanted emails as read, but I’m curious to find out what my readers do when they want to blank out their entire inbox quickly.

I’d assume from the outset that the results will show that most people mark as read or delete unwanted emails. But a part of me wonders just how sophisticated the average person is becoming in terms of their inbox and other sources of information online. It’d be very interesting to see if many people have filters setup for their inbox.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 03, 2011

Crispers: Audio Double Opt-In Instructions

So this is a first for me… After I submitted my email for Crisper’s newsletter, I was driven to this landing page (make sure your speakers are on before you click).

Pretty nifty, right?

If for some reason you don’t have working audio on whatever machine or device you’re reading this on, find the transcript of the audio below:

“In a moment you’ll receive an email message asking you to confirm your email address and activate your subscription. Please check your email inbox now. Open that email and click on the confirm link. Once you do, your subscription will immediately be activated!“

It’s interesting to note that the recording doesn’t mention Crispers by name. Which means this is clearly a default or a templatized audio clip. The domain isn’t a vanity URL either. Instead of it being hosted directly on Crispers’ site, it takes you off-site as it’s hosted by their ESP, AWeber (Hi, Crystal!).

At any rate, I think this is implemented very nicely. It was a nice surprise to hear this coming through my earbuds when I opted in. It was a cool moment. Generally speaking, I think it’d be nice to see more multimedia implementation for instructions to users who are freshly opted-in. Do you think this is a trend that will catch on? Please feel free to leave your comments below!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 24, 2011

Borders’ Death Rattle In Email Form

If you aren’t already aware, Borders Books & Music are closing all of their stores for good. Call it a sign of the times or a changing of the guard with web stores replacing brick & mortar shops, it’s undeniable that Borders certainly won’t be the last corporation selling media to close up and go out of business. But this post isn’t all about them folding, its about how they’re reaching their subscribers with news of massive sales.

Look at this email:

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Now look at an example of what their emails USED to look like:

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I discussed this with Jeremy Carrus, one of MindComet’s designers, about the inconsistencies and stilted nature of the design. Here’s what we came up with…

Just cause you’re going out of business doesn’t mean you should change your brand or hide it.
Even if your doors are closing you can still go out with some dignity and use the look everyone remembered you for. I had to look closely to see who this email was from at first. It almost seemed like a knock-off, spammy email.

Why have social media links if you’re company is going under?
Why would anyone want to connect with a brand that is about to die? Is this due to the fact that social media buttons are a standard element like a forward button / link for any and all emails no matter what the subject or condition the brand is in?

Give users direction and a call to action.
If your goal is to get users into the store then put the locations link at the top of the page and not in the footer. Maybe even employ geo-location methods for users (not too hard to pull off nowadays) and dynamically insert the location closest to them.

Give users a deadline.
There is no time associated with this email so I could probably go in a few weeks and get the same deal. But if they said “Our Doors Will Be Closed On…“ it would result in some urgency, which might get me into one of their stores sooner rather than later. Even if they’re not closing they could prolong the sale and make me want to go later.

Show off the good.
Show users what you have to sell. Simply listing discounts associated with the categories of items isn’t too compelling. Sometimes folks need a visual to get excited. Images help support the sale.

Even though this is clearly a LAZY attempt at an email marketing campaign, I wouldn’t be surprised if an intern or some other lowly employee put this together. I’m sure Borders fired all of their marketing and creative assets a long time ago. It doesn’t surprise me that it looks this way… there’s really no accountability or a sense of trying with this email.

In short, the email is essentially a guy on a street corner waving a going-out-of-business sign to oncoming traffic:

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 18, 2011

A Golden Rule For Email Marketers: Never Assume Permission

The following post was written by our guest author, Crystal Gouldey. Crystal is an Education Marketing Associate at AWeber, an Email Service Provider and Software Platform.

When you assume permission, you end up sending information people don’t want. This usually happens in one of two ways. The first occurs when you add the email address of a contact who never actually requested to be on your list. The second happens when you send all your emails out to every one on your list, regardless of how you got their email address or what interests they’ve expressed.

If you do these things, you can run into a few problems:

1. You get a bad reputation. People complain about companies that have annoyed them (they may even blog about the experience).
2. Your deliverability decreases, making it harder for you to get your emails to subscribers who do want your emails.
3. You go from having potentially interested subscribers to angry ones pretty quickly.

Here are some groups that email marketers typically assume permission from:

Social Media Followers
You have fairly easy access to the email addresses of Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, etc. These contacts agreed they want to connect with you on these sites, but that doesn’t mean they want to be on your mailing list.

Customers Who Purchased
Online orders typically require purchasers to provide an email address. This is usually done to send the receipts and any other important information,  but it doesn’t mean the customers want to receive your promotional emails.

Support Inquiries
When someone emails you a question, obviously they’ll be expecting an email back. What they won’t be expecting is their email address added to your list.

I have a good example of this mistake. Earlier this year, I was looking for wedding photographers. After talking to one company, I got quite a surprise in my inbox the next day:

Adding me to their list was bad enough, but they knew I was interested in wedding photography and still sent their general promotional emails.

Subscribers Who Submitted Preferences
The subscribers that signed up using your preference center did so because they’re interested in specific information. Sending out emails outside of their stated preferences can show you assume you have their permission to send them whatever YOU want.

Here’s an example: I signed up on Princess Cruises site specifying in their preference center I was interested in cruises to Europe and Australia. A few days later I got this:

Alaska was NOT what I requested.

So what should you do? Provide links to pages where people can sign up to your mailing list. Ask your followers and regular contacts if they wish to be added. Listen to what people want from you. But whatever you do, never assume.

Find more of Crystal’s insight on the AWeber blog.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 17, 2011

Hotmail Kind-of Sort-of Announces HTML5 Video Support

So Hotmail now supports HTML5 video in email. This is a major development in the video-in-email saga, but it’s not a bullet-proof solution… yet.

Once the email is opened and images are displayed, the user must right-click on the video and select Play. This is due to Hotmail stripping out the <video> tag by default. Unsurprisingly, IE 7/8 doesn’t support HTML5 video yet, so you must have fallback content (such as an image) in place for users browsing the web with IE. Safari does not allow for right-click enabled playback, so fallback content is completely necessary here, as well.

Ros at CampaignMonitor brings up a good point in regards to autoplay in that having a video automatically play in users’ inboxes is likely to be a huge annoyance and will ultimately be a great way of encouraging users to unsubscribe. Food for thought.

All in all, this is not a solution that has been fully-realized, but it is only a relatively short matter of time before its fleshed out to the point where videos in email is viable and worth pursing in future efforts.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 20, 2011