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Training recipients

Want to see a WWF style smackdown? Put a marketer and a delivery expert in a room and ask them to discuss frequency and whether or not more mail is better.
The marketer will point to the bottom line and how much more money they make when they increase frequency. The delivery expert will point to inbox rates and user engagement and point out that too much mail drives users to ignore the mail.
This isn’t actually unique to marketing mail. Send a lot of mail that doesn’t engage recipients and recipients are trained that they don’t have to actually pay attention to the mail. Some of them hit delete. Some may even report the mail as spam.
According to Cloudmark, this is exactly what happened when LinkedIn informed users of the recent data breach. They estimate that up to 4% of users who received the fully DKIM authenticated mail about the data breach deleted it immediately without reading it. This is higher than notification emails from other social networks.

Cloudmark suggests that part of the problem is that LinkedIn has an unclear opt-in process. Instead of asking users for preferences, LinkedIn assumes that all users want all the mail LinkedIn cares to send them. Then LinkedIn makes it difficult to find the page to change mail settings. This means recipients are very trained to ignore mail from LinkedIn. I know I ignore most of it. Anything that’s not a “want to connect” gets filed in the “I’ll read it when I’m bored” mailbox. So far I’ve not been bored enough to read any of it.
But I’m not sure it’s just about too much email. LinkedIn is a company that is heavily forged in phishing mail. Since May 1, just one of my email addresses has received over 50 messages purporting to be from LinkedIn.

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Unsolicited feedback

Those of us in the email space often have opinions about volume and frequency and opt-in and everything involved in email marketing. What we don’t always have is the luxury of receiving unsolicited feedback from recipients.
Every once in a while I find a post online that is that unsolicited feedback from someone. Today a poster on reddit describes his experience with signing petitions and the resulting mail from political causes. After signing a number of petitions, he started getting huge amounts of email. The volume was so high, he started unsubscribing.
I’m not going to copy his whole article here, but there are some interesting points relevant to the email marketing end of things.

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Happy Mailman Day!

For people who are on many discussion mailing lists, the first of every month is “Mailman Day”, and has been for nearly a decade.
Mailman is the most widely used mailing list manager for discussion lists and, by default, it sends email to all subscribers on the first of the month reminding them that they’re still subscribed to the list and how to unsubscribe. This is really useful, as I’m on some mailing lists that haven’t had any traffic other than the reminders in a couple of years, but it does mean that my mailbox looks like this this morning:

Discussion lists sending reminders is a close parallel to our usual recommendations for bulk mailing lists to send something at least monthly, so that recipients remember who you are and that they’re subscribed – and so that recipients who have vanished bounce that mail, so you can eventually remove them from your mailing list. (We’re not suggesting that you send a “this is a reminder” mail monthly – create some real content and send that).
Mailman Day also means that if you’re sending mail to a technical/internet-savvy demographic and you choose to send it first thing in the morning of the first of the month, you’re competing with a lot of noise in your recipient inbox. Unless you’re mailing daily it might be worth shifting a day forward or backward to avoid that conflict.

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