Yahoo, deliverability, the little guy and ESPs
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on January 07, 2008
Yahoo recently announced changes to their anti-spam efforts. Changes that impact legitimate marketers, too. Word to the Wise has the technical inside story, particularly regarding Yahoo's use of Spamhaus blocklists.The official Yahoo! Mail blog explains developments to the email user at large. It's worth reading the comments below that article, since you'll get alarming insight into consumer behavior and attitudes toward email and spam.
2007 saw email deliverability come into its own as an industry-within-an-industry. We now have delivery specialists and service companies ready to help you navigate your way safely through the complexities of the email delivery environment.
As this complexity increases, so life becomes harder for your average marketer sending out email. Many folk still aren't aware of fundamental best practices, so it's unlikely they're keeping up with the latest deliverability issues.
Indeed, the vast majority of poor email marketing comes not from maliciousness, carelessness or stupidity...but from ignorance.
Can the email service providers do more to adress this problem?
Some of the "value priced" companies already make a lot of effort to educate their small business customers on the right way to do email marketing (see, for example, the AWeber blog.)
But nearly all such efforts rely on people actively seeking information.
I'd love 2008 to see ESPs being more innovative about alerting customers to potential deficiencies in their email efforts.
Some already enforce best practices through built-in tools and features. Examples are requiring double opt-in sign-ups or automatically appending physical address data to email footers to help ensure compliance with anti-spam legislation.
But why not, for example, have poor campaign results trigger little alert boxes?
If someone is getting a 5% open rate, then a little red flag should pop up..."Your open rates are well below industry averages...click here to learn how to improve your results."
If an outgoing email is packed with links but generates few clicks...red flag and pointers to helpful resources.
Surely there's a role for expert systems to automatically diagnose problems and direct folk to plausible remedies?
There are cost and implementation issues involved, but the benefits for ESPs are clear.
If customers improve their practices and results, they invest more in email marketing services, generate better word of mouth and help ensure the ESP stays on good terms with the ISPs and webmail services.
Let me know if you've seen any good examples of such innovation (or if you're an ESP and are doing it already!)
More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email marketing services, yahoo email, yahoo mail, email deliverability
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4 Comments:
Too true about the origin of much poor email marketing.
Good food for thought re: the "red flags," Mark. Thanks much.
By 
Justin Premick, on
07 January, 2008
Good suggestions there Mark, that's something we try and be very proactive about.
An example of where we take this approach is through spam complaints captured through ISP feedback loops and our abuse team. If a customer passes a specific low threshold for complaints, we'll automatically let them know (via email and in their accounts), plus provide a number of recommendations on how these can be avoided moving forward (subscription practices, permission reminders, subject lines, etc).
We've found that customers respond to the helpful advice really well and generally see a reduction in complaints over time.
The open and click rate ideas have a lot of merit too, I'll be passing that one around the team.
By Dave Greiner, on
08 January, 2008
Thanks guys. I think the more proactive ESPs (like yourselves) do a good job when it comes to bounce management, spam complaint processing, education etc.
The next challenge and step (from my POV) is applying that approach to softer aspects of the email marketing process, like relevancy. Finding ways to automatically identify "irrelevant" email and suggest improvements. A hard task, but would be lovely if someone could master it.
Some clever programmer might be able to distill all we know about evaluating an email program into some kind of automated system.
Is there some magic formula involving a combination of open rates, clicks, subscriber numbers (gains and losses), conversions (where available) and changes in these numbers etc. through time?
The system could then rate the email program and alert the user accordingly with suggested remedies. Or flag the very bad accounts for personal attention by customer service.
It would be pretty cool if the system noticed that the 500 addresses you added on Saturday drew far fewer responses than your usual new subscribers, and suggested you take a closer look at the source of those addresses.
Or if it automatically identified inactive accounts and asked if you want to conduct a subscriber reactivation campaign for these addresses, with a wizard to take people through the process.
All the stuff informed marketers would do themselves, but the system automates it.
I could go on, but this is probably of zero interest to most readers :-)
By 
Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
08 January, 2008
Some more great suggestions in there Mark. Feel free to go on and on ;)
As email marketing software developers, it's our job to build tools that not-so-informed marketers can use that get the best results with the smallest effort required. I find this stuff very interesting.
By Dave Greiner, on
10 January, 2008
