Brand engagement in social media
Adobe has a good post up about consumer reaction and interaction with brands in social media like Twitter and Facebook.
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Now you know…
The key to email marketing, at least if you read blogs and talk to experts who blog about such things, is to segment your lists. But what does segmenting your lists really mean? Ken touches on it in a recent article about engagement and segmenting.
Segmenting your list means, quite simply, knowing your audience. It means tailoring your message to them, in order to extract as much money from them as possible. It means knowing which subscribers you can push with volume and which you will lose if you increase things too far.
In short, it means not treating all your subscribers the same, instead treating them slightly differently based on how they interact with your message.
To some people, this is too difficult. Ken even quoted someone in the industry as saying
Emailpocalypse
Apparently emailpocalypse is coming on Monday. That’s when Facebook is going to release their email platform (the one no one knows anything about) and it’s going to DESTROY EMAIL MARKETING AS WE KNOW IT.
Are you ready?
I think my favorite doom and gloom scenario is: Facebook will throw out the book on email deliverability because it will likely be the first mass-user email platform that is whitelist-based. In other words, you will NOT be able to send to a user unless they have given you explicit permission to do so.
THE HORRORS! Marketers are going to have to get PERMISSION TO SEND EMAIL. OH NOES! The SKY! It is falling! Recipients are going to have to actually invite marketers in! They can’t just take permission, they have to be granted it.
Oddly enough, a lot of the folks who are having conniptions are also people who have been preaching permission for years. Really, if they’re already getting explicit permission, then this is no different. It’s just an email platform.
And even if Titan is somehow a total game changer and is going to require explicit permission, it’s not going to destroy email marketing. Everyone who has a facebook account already has another email account. Marketers who can’t get explicit permission to mail to the facebook account can certainly keep sending “permission” email to their other email accounts.
Email marketing ulcers for the holiday
I’ve mentioned here before that I can usually tell when the big ISPs are making changes to their spam filtering as that ISP dominates my discussions with current and potential clients and many discussions on delivery mailing lists.
The last two weeks the culprit has been Yahoo. They seem to be making a lot of changes to their filtering schemes right at the busiest email marketing time of the year. Senders are increasing their volume trying to extract that last little bit of cash out of holiday shoppers, but they’re seeing unpredictable delivery results. What worked to get mail into the inbox a month ago isn’t working, or isn’t working as well, now.
Some of this could be holiday volume related. Many marketers have drastically increased their mail volume over the last few weeks. But I don’t think the whole issue is simply that there is more email marketing flowing into our mailboxes.
As I’ve been talking with folks, I have started to see a pattern and have some ideas of what may be happening. It seems a lot of the issue revolves around bulk foldering. Getting mail accepted by the MXs seems to be no different than it has been. The change seems to be based on the reputation of the URLs and domains in the email.
Have a domain with a poor reputation? Bulk. Have a URL seen in mail people aren’t interested in? Bulk. Have a URL pointing to a website with problematic content? Bulk.
In the past IPs that were whitelisted or had very good reputations could improve delivery of email with neutral or even borderline poor reputations. It seems that is no longer an effect senders can rely on. It may even be that Yahoo, and other ISPs, are going to start splitting IP reputation from content reputation. IP reputation is critical for getting mail in the door, and without a good IP reputation you’ll see slow delivery. But once the mail has been accepted, there’s a whole other level of filtering, most of it on the content and generally unaffected by the IP reputation.
I don’t think the changes are going to go away any time soon. I think they may be refined, but I do think that reputation on email content (particularly domains and URLs and target IP addresses) is going to play a bigger and bigger role in email delivery.
What, specifically, is going to happen at Yahoo? Only they can tell you and I’m not sure I have enough of a feel for the pattern to speculate about the future. I do think that it’s going to take a few weeks for things to settle down and be consistent enough that we can start to poke the black box and map how it works.