Monthly Archives: October 2010

Poll added – what’s your favourite part of email marketing?

  By Remy | October 28, 2010 - 14:00 | Sitenews
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After thinking what was still missing on Emailblog.eu I thought of the polls: always nice to have some insight in what visitors think about certain parts of the world of email and email marketing. First one that came up in my mind was this: what’s your favourite part of email marketing? Feel free to vote at the poll item in the sidebar, or if you are missing an option let me know in the comments.

For those voting for bounce management: rrrrright.

Great part of testing: why is my email considered spam?

Email Standards: Outlook 2011 to use Webkit as render engine

  By Remy | October 27, 2010 - 08:55 | Email clients
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The Email Standards Project blog posted some big news (if true) yesterday: Outlook 2011 will be using Webkit as render engine instead of Word, like Outlook 2007 and 2010 are using.

A quote of the Microsoft employee, noted when demonstrating the new Outlook for Mac:

“that instead of using the Word HTML rendering that previous versions of Mac Office used (and the PC version as well), Microsoft has moved over to Apple’s Webkit rendering engine to render HTML mails.  Outlook 2011 also uses WebKit to create HTML mail.”

So far, Mac is the only platform where Outlook will be using Webkit as it’s render engine, but hopes are high that this will be done in the PC version too: it would be a big relief for email designers and email marketers worldwide in terms of usability and flexibility.

Win an iPad! aka subject line creativity drying up?

  By Remy | October 26, 2010 - 14:45 | Email marketing, Trends in Email Marketing
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I must have seen that subject line hundreds of times recently, and not just professionally speaking: also in my personal email world (which is thankfully a lot smaller) this has been popping up more and more*. Not just from expected senders like retailers and online stores, but also from the unlikeliest of businesses like free personal budget services, car dealers and more.

Steve Jobs with his iPad, marketers want everyone to win one

It got me thinking there are three things going on (and have been going on for quite a while in online marketing):

1) marketers watch what’s hot and copy or use that to promote their services/products (in recent years, it was ‘win an iPhone / iPod’, remember?)

2) people want what (supposedly) gives them status, joy in life and more – e.g. something that is valuable. Not just in money but also in ‘respect’ (as far as owning goods gets respect)

Item no. 3 is the one in the title of this post: is subject line creativity drying up? Point 1 notes that ‘Win a $wantedthing’ has been done for ages now, but it just seems to be overly present these days, so much so that it will not trigger people anymore to open the email. That’s the real danger of these types of subject lines: once they are omnipresent their effect diminishes into uselessness and there is nothing to be gained anymore. These types of subject lines generally gather a large number of opens and clickthroughs compared to more normal and neutral subject lines, so they still will be loved by some marketers.

But how long will the audience be tricked? When will the last resort of marketers for using these subject lines be unnecessary or better yet, more original? I hope things will calm down when the iPad becomes the next iPod and everyone has one: hopefully Apple will not bring out anything new by then. Anyone want to win an iPud?

*note: I do not hate or dismiss the iPad: it is a very nice product (used it myself a couple of hours), just to make that clear.

Dell: we come in peace (subject line)

  By Remy | October 21, 2010 - 09:12 | Email marketing, Email Marketing Design
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Subject lines are all important: they persuade the receiver to open your email or not. If you manage to come up with something creative or something that stands out from the “Mr Jones, 50% off selected items”  group then you already have an advantage over other senders.

Dell has got new Alienware aptops, and they sent their email with the subject line ‘we come in peace’ (Dutch: wij komen in vrede). Definitely not a standard subject line, and short / creative enough to catch my attention.

Here’s the subject line and email, and the in-style click through action ‘come with us’ (Dutch: sluit je bij ons aan)

It’s a nice play on the Alienware brand name and family of computers, and the subject line is only 18 characters including spaces: great for mobile too (see why that’s important here). Of course, it has to be an option to use such short and special subject lines: don’t use special subject lines just for the heck of it: they should still say what’s inside the email or people will be disappointed.

Help, I’ve received spam from $company! What to do now?

  By Remy | October 20, 2010 - 14:00 | Deliverability, Security, Spam
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Seems this week is spam week after yesterday’s GMail/Yahoo’s spam filter post, but it doesn’t matter: spam is (sadly) part of everyday life, so you as an end user should do everything you can to calm the flood, even if it’s only 1%. First a statistic from Cisco: 200 billion emails are sent every single day. Trouble is: 90% of that is spam. So what can you, humble email user, do to make life just a bit less miserable? Here’s how.

Find out who’s spamming you

Besides the general Viagra, mortgage, 100% 500 billion dollar Nigerian diploma from someone’s deceased uncle and such you will receive (some) spam that is closer to home. This will be from companies that have somehow gotten hold of your address (or if you have a quite generic address like a@b.com and the spammers are using dictionary email generators) who have put your email address on a list and are now spamming you. Find out who they really are and get a hold of their basic information: company name, location and contact data. This is important, below you will read why.

Know where and how to report spam

After you found out who the punks erhm not so nice people are who sent you the unwanted email(s), it’s time to report. But to whom, how and where? There are several options, depending on where your email address is located. Some examples:

Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo or other web mail service

These services most of the time include a ‘mark as spam’ or ‘mark as phishing scam’ option: they will gather all information on spam reports and take affirmative action.

ISP mail service

Next to web mail service there’s ISP mail services: your internet provider will probably have provided you with an email address when you became a customer. They also most of the time have pretty good spam systems set up, including an abuse address to report to, or a spam button in their web email interface similar to that of Hotmail.

Company mail service

If you receive spam at your corporate email address the best thing you can do is to report it to the person responsible for handling the email server(s): either in person or via email depending on the size of your organization. It could be that an abuse@companyname.com is set up just like the ISP mail service one, so you could use that just fine.

Own (hosted) web/mail domain service

If you own your own domain(s), it should be apparent that you have a spam filter system (like Spamassassin) set up on your domain to take care of the most obvious spam: for all ‘special’ spam that trickle through you could either get in touch with your hosting company or ISP to help you out.

National or local anti spam services

Separately from all the types of mail services you could be using, reporting to a national or local spam service can give them some cannon fodder to hunt down companies: without complaints, hard evidence and such they cannot fine or sue companies in a court case. If the spam fighters receive 1 complaint or 5000 about a certain organization, that will make all the difference in them getting into action or not.

In The Netherlands, we have the OPTA who (among many other things) enforces the Telecom law: this if some company misbehaves through certain communication channels, they will get slapped for that. For email the site called spamklacht.nl has been made available: on this site end receivers of spam can file a complaint including the original email with headers and extra information about the way it was received and how it was perceived. If the OPTA receives enough complaints about a certain organization or company they will take action against them with fines and such.

Hopefully your country or local authority has similar websites or services set up to register spam in a central and orderly manner: this way they have the aforementioned evidence available to fight back.

Drop in a bucket

Of course, this will only help to stem the tide a little bit: most of the spam will still be sent from zombie computers part of an everchanging botnet worldwide and this flood is very hard to stop, but like I said in the beginning: every single percent less spam counts, so don’t let this discourage you. Simply because 1% of 195 billion emails per day is a lot.

To illustrate how botnets and spam work, see the image below (from Wikipedia):

GMail, Yahoo web mail spam filters gone crazy?

  By Remy | October 19, 2010 - 14:30 | Deliverability, Security
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From various people (which I will quote later on) I’ve seen mentions that their or other’s email campaigns have recently ended up in GMail and / or Yahoo’s spam filters. From one person I received their emailing which arrived in GMail’s spam filters with many subscribers, making their campaign results plummet. In the email itself I couldn’t find any reason for a spam filter to regard it as being spam: next to that previous messages from the same sender and reply address have never been sent to the spam folder. I tend to think I can think like a spam filter, or at least know a bit of how they work, but these instances have left me dumbfounded.

Here’s one other mention from Janet Roberts about Yahoo:

@remybergsma Looks to me like they’re fiddling w/the dials cuz the emails in my folder today are ones I *always* open and often act on.

Furthermore, some people have noticed that their GMail calendar reminder emails have been marked as spam by GMail’s own spam filter. Chad White from Retailemailblog noted this:

Lots of murmuring about Gmail’s spam filters becoming hyper-aggressive suddenly. Some blaming Priority Inbox.

So far I’ve seen some messages in my own GMail inboxes being sent to the spam folder, for really no apparent reason: they were just fine layout and content wise, and I’ve been subscribed to them for quite a while. Not too long ago someone else mentioned that GMail’s own Calendar reminder emails have been ending up in the spam folder too: the only thing he did to the reminder emails is delete them, and that should not be a reason to mark something as spam.

Have you noticed any web mail provider’s spam filter behaving in an odd manner recently? Please let us know in the comments: hopefully we can find out more about what’s going on.