Hotmail unsubscribes affect your sender reputation?
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on May 10, 2007
"In the future Senders who realize an excessive number of unsubscribe requests may have their reputation impacted." (Page 6)
This refers to the Hotmail feature where if you meet certain criteria and your emails are set up appropriately, then recipients see a generic unsubscribe link they can use to leave your list.
This is welcomed by marketers, since it's better for people to use that unsubscribe link than report you as spam. The idea being that spam requests contribute to a bad sender reputation. So the less of those the better.
The footnote suggests however that Microsoft may at some point also monitor unsubscribe requests...and use that data in assigning you a sender reputation, too.
There are a lot of unknowns here. When is "in the future"? What counts as an "excessive" unsubscribe rate? And what exactly might be the impact on your reputation (if any)?
But one interpretation could certainly be that Microsoft might begin determining the value of your email (should we deliver it?)...by the value of your email (do recipients want to read it?).
In other words, deliverability would not just be about whether you obey all the formal and technical rules for getting your email delivered, but whether you also send relevant, valuable emails.
If that's the case, it would be another nail in the coffin of lazy email marketing. A lot of feathers would get ruffled, but smart marketers would benefit.
Anybody heard more about this line of thinking? Or anyone from Hotmail / MS care to comment on the likelihood of such an approach?
More on Hotmail | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, windows live hotmail
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2 Comments:
This seems to be a no brainer. Smart marketers (and ESPs) know that relevant emails that start from a base of strong, appropriate permission have lower unsubscribe rates than others. In other words, it's already clear to most of us that bad mailers have higher unsubscribe rates. It seems to be a logical next step for Microsoft to pick up on and utilize this data.
By 
Al Iverson, on
11 May, 2007
Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL already incorporate feedback from recipients in determining whether your mail gets through or not. In fact, I think its one of the dominant indicators. If lots of people click "This is Spam" then your reputation goes down and with it your deliverabliity.
The more objective data they can use to build your reputation, the better for marketers and all senders. However, I do think its worth noting that Unsubscribes should be measured separately from Spam complaints. Excessive Unsubscribes are probably a sign of a problem, but a normal amount of unsubscribes shouldn't count against you at all.
By Josh, on
11 May, 2007
