MindComet

Microsoft’s Hotmail Update: Social Media & SPAM-Centric

Microsoft recently unveiled a new look & feel to Hotmail including additional features focused on eliminating inbox clutter and social media. Here are a few key takeaways:

Hotmail Highlights:
This is a dashboard breaking down emails from your contacts, social networking sites, flagged emails and any upcoming events you’ve marked. They’re more or less built-in filters from the get-go. Nicely done.

Filters:
There are also filter tabs that sort out all of your inbox messages based on the criteria of the filter. On-the-fly sorting.

Categories / Quick Views:
Photos, Shipping Info, Documents. The most common emails sent to you will be sorted out automatically based on their contents.

Sweep:
Most importantly, Microsoft has implemented a “Sweep” feature that allows users to remove clutter from their main inbox. For email marketers, this means that your campaigns may suffer with Hotmail users.

Trusted Senders:
You can boil this down to being Microsoft’s equivalent to Goodmail. They pre-approve specific senders and IP addresses for users to ensure delivery, complete with a safety logo next to the subject line.

Their SPAM handling techniques are quite interesting, too. They’ve developed a way of sorting out legit email that you may have signed up for unintentionally (which they dub “graymail”) and actual SPAM, which they’re calling “SmartScreen”.

Most of the updates on the surface seem to be “too little too late” to covert a Gmail user, for instance. But the advances of the new Hotmail user experience as a whole makes the argument that email is further planting itself as the hub for all social communication online. Unfortunately, I don’t think these fundamental changes to Hotmail will go over well with their users, since they skew older and spend less time online. But nonetheless, it’s progress. It’s one step forward and not two steps back (*ehem* Outlook 2007, *ehem*).

There are more features listed on their preview page including Office and cloud storage implementation. It’s a definitive step in the right direction for Microsoft & Hotmail and I’m curious to see what they release next.

So what do you think this means for email marketing? If these features are widely adopted by Hotmail users will email campaigns of the future just be “swept” away, overlooked to never be opened again? I think it’s a definite possibility and one that deserves discussion. Comment below if you have any thoughts.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 17, 2010

Why Even Good Senders Get Blocked

Now I have to be honest, most webinars I attend don’t really provide a whole lot of value. Most of them barely skim the surface of what they’re advertising the topic to be. All in all, they are a means for the company to simply promote themselves and sell their services. What I’m trying to get at is that the emphasis is on the company, not the topic when in reality it should be reversed, dontchathink?

So when I attended the “Why Even Good Senders Get Blocked” webinar hosted by Silverpop late last week, I was slightly skeptical. Luckily, Silverpop did not fall into the same pitfalls many webinar-hosts succumb to and delivered a highly informative and useful webinar detailing many points I want to share with you here.

RELEVANCE::
So first off, the entire webinar revolved around the theme of RELEVANCE and I can’t stress that word enough. If you’re not delivering RELEVANT content to your subscribers, they’re going to mark you as SPAM. If there’s a relationship gap between the marketer and the subscriber, all of the best practices in the world won’t help you if the subscriber thinks you’re simply abusing the relationship. You also need to give your users a means to stay active and involved. Give them some incentive every once in a while to keep them on board with your brand.

ENGAGEMENT METRICS::
There are many aspects ISPs look at when determining if a sender is blacklist-worthy. These include:

- tracking time the email stays in the inbox before deleted
( assuming the longer is stays in the inbox, the better for the sender reputation )

- marked as “not spam” data
( I brought this up about a year ago wondering if ISPs also take into account emails that land into the junk box which users flag “Not Spam”, which they definitely do )

- panel data
( I may be wrong about this, but from what I gathered, panel data is asking a sample of their users take a poll which determines what the ISP should and should not be considering SPAM )

- mail sent to inactive accounts
( self explanatory )

- users for feedback and data
( again, the users of every email provider such as AOL and Gmail are the ones who determine whether or not your emails will be delivered in the future. be as transparent, honest and relevant with your subscribers as possible. )

QDOBA::
Next they showed an example of an email sent out by the mediocre burrito chain Qdoba.

Their burritos may be bland—and so is this email—but it’s for a good reason. This is actually a pretty clever email. It’s subtle. It’s not your standard marketing message with loud, abrasive imagery. It’s just text and it’s tone acts like it’s coming from a snotty co-worker-guy. But the problem is that it simply doesn’t appear to be coming from Qdoba. It’s disengaging and actually does look like SPAM, but it wouldn’t really work any other way. So can you tell why the recipients may have been confused and marked the email as SPAM?

Basically, you can’t get around identifying yourself to your subscribers. If you don’t prove you are who you are clearly, you will be marked as SPAM, which may lead to blacklisting all over the place. It’s too bad, too. I liked where they were going with the intention of this email.

SEGMENTATION::
This also touches on the fact that sending relevant messages to your subscribers will work out in spades.

Marketers have reportedly experienced a 22% higher open rate for segmented campaigns and click rates twice as high opposed to non-segmeneted campaigns. Get as much personal data on your subscribers as possible and use it to your (and their) advantage!

FREQUENCY::
There has to be a sensible balance and cadence to your sends.
A) don’t over send - if you berate your subscribers with too many emails you’ll ultimately end up annoying them to the point of unsubscribing or marking you as SPAM. limit each subscriber to no more than 3 emails a month, spreading each delivery to 10 days.
B) don’t send too infrequently - you have to stay fresh enough in your subscriber’s mind when it comes to their inbox. If your email appears to be from Random Brand X in the mind of the user, you better believe they are going to mark you as SPAM. I’d imagine one email every 2-3 months just touching base will do you more good than once a year.

ESPs::
Any ESP worth your money should have a deliverability team on hand constantly working for you to ensure you are whitelisted and your reputation is maintained. If this is not included in your monthly invoices, find a new ESP which offers this service. Word.

FINAL THOUGHTS::
I think this screenshot of a slide from the presentation sums up everything about this webinar. If you apply these 7 aspects of engagement to your email marketing campaigns, you should have a much easier time with your deliverability, open and click through rates.
Thank you to Silverpop for delivering such a compelling, informative and topical webinar. I only hope all webinars were as good as this. Much appreesh.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Mar. 23, 2010

Mother London Turns Spam On It’s Head

What happens when an ad agency sends out a seemingly spammy email claiming to give away $10,000 to hundreds of people? Watch below and find out.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Dec. 23, 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

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

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.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 27, 2009

Major SPAM Distributor Taken Down by Feds

Have you noticed a drop in the amount spam being delivered to you recently? If so, this may be due to the fact that one of the largest SPAM firms was taken offline.  McColo Corp, based out of San Jose, California was hosting servers by a relatively small firm that served (no pun intended) as a means to deliver a significant amount of the world’s SPAM. McColo’s client list doesn’t hold up as far as integrity goes.  Their ‘clients’ include companies that sell knock off pharmaceuticals & handbags as well as child porn—all via email.

As soon as their site and servers were pulled, spam volumes dropped worldwide—as much as 66 percent in some cases.  Spamcop, the absolute authority on SPAM, saw 40 spam emails per second drop down to 10 per second. The graph can be found below:

McColo’s fate is not ultimately sealed, but it seems as though they’re S.O.L. Mark Rasch, a former cyber-crime prosecutor for the Justice Department claims that “It’s a little bit like a landlord who owns a building and sees people coming in and out of the apartment complex constantly at all hours and not suspecting their may be drug activity going on.“ Sure, they can play dumb all they want, but they more than likely knew of the fishy behavior occurring through their servers.

This is a major score for all of us legit email senders as well as anyone who is inundated with irrelevant, spammy email.

You can read the entire story at msnbc.com.  It’s worth the read.  Thanks to Greg Cangialosi for pointing this out.

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 13, 2008