Tor cleans up their lists

Recently I got an email from Tor. Apparently they’re watching their opens and clicks and they noticed I hadn’t loaded any images recently.

We notice you haven’t opened the Tor.com newsletter in a while, and that’s okay: we know you’re busy. That’s why we create our newsletter from scratch each week, to highlight the articles we think you’ll love and round up some of our top stories.
It’s a great way to catch up on what’s happening on the site and get access to cool perks, like early looks at some of our original fiction. We want to let you know about some of the great content on the site, and give you the chance to keep receiving the latest science fiction and fantasy news.
To continue receiving Tor.com’s weekly newsletter, please: Confirm Now!

TorConfirmation
I like the Tor newsletter, and I do open and read it. But my mail client is not configured to load images, and Tor’s newsletter is readable without images on.  I’m always reassured, though, when I see companies acting on best practices in the wild.

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Confirming addresses for transactional mail

A colleague was asking about confirming transactional mail today. It seems a couple of big retailers got SBLed today for sending receipts to spamtraps. I talked a few weeks ago about why it’s important to let people unsubscribe from transactional email, and many of those same things apply to confirming receipts.

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Confirmation is too hard…

One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part.
I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm.
A couple years ago I was troubleshooting a problem. One of my client’s customer was seeing a huge percentage of 550 errors and I was tasked with finding out what they were doing. The first step was identifying the source of the email addresses. Turns out the customer was a Facebook app developer and all the addresses (so he told me) were from users who had installed his apps on Facebook. I did my own tests and couldn’t install any applications without confirming my email address.
Every Facebook user that has installed an application has clicked on an email to confirm they can receive email at the address they supplied Facebook. There are over 1 billion users on Facebook.
Clicking a link isn’t too hard for people who want your content. I hear naysayers who talk about “too hard” and “too much drop off” but what they’re really saying is “what I’m doing isn’t compelling enough for users to go find the confirmation email.”
This isn’t to say everyone who has a high drop off of confirmations is sending poor content. There are some senders that have a lot of fake, poor or otherwise fraudulent addresses entered into their forms. In many cases this is the driving factor for them using COI: to stop people from using their email to harass third parties. Using COI in these cases is a matter of self protection. If they didn’t use COI, they’d have a lot of complaints, traps and delivery problems.
The next time you hear confirmation is too hard, remember that over 1 billion people, including grandparents and the technologically challenged, managed to click that link to confirm their Facebook account. Sure, they wanted what Facebook was offering, but that just tells us that if they want it bad enough they’ll figure out how to confirm.
HT: Spamresource

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Subject lines

There has been a lot of discussion in various places recently about subject line length and how it affects email marketing. There have been multiple studies done on how the subject line affects opens and clicks. (Mailchimp, Alchemy Worx, Mailer Mailer, Adestra). The discussion has even spilled over into Ken Magill’s newsletter today.
I’ve had a couple people ask me my opinion on subject line over the years. My general response is that subject line length is not directly measured by spamfilters and so don’t fret about the length. It is true that consistently crafting poor subject lines can indirectly cause delivery problems. Send mail few people open and that will hurt your reputation over time.
I think Ken really said it best, though.

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