March 2016: The Month In Email

Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned!
March2016_blog
Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March:
On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and Steve offered some advice for ESPs and software developers on methods for handling this gracefully. I also answered an Ask Laura question about making the decision to publish DMARC. Look for more on that in this month’s Ask Laura questions…
Our other Ask Laura question this month was about changing ESPs, which senders do for many reasons. It’s useful to know that there will generally be some shifts in deliverability with any move. Different ESPs measure engagement in different ways, and other issues may arise in the transition, so it’s good to be aware of these if you’re contemplating a change.
In industry news, I wrote a sort of meta-post about how the Internet is hard (related: where do you stand on the great Internet vs. internet debate? Comment below!) and we saw several examples of that this month, including a privacy debacle at Florida State University. Marketing is hard, too. I revisited an old post about a fraud case where a woman sued Toyota over an email marketing “prank”. As always, my best practices recommendation for these sorts of things (and everything else!) really boils down to one thing: send wanted email.
Steve wrote extensively about SPF this month in two must-read posts, where he explained the SPF rule of ten and how to optimize your SPF records. He also wrote about Mutt, the much-loved command line email client, and marked the passing of industry pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who, in addition to his many accomplishments, was by all accounts a very thoughtful and generous man.
Finally, I occasionally like to take a moment and follow the twisty paths that lead to my spam folder. Here’s a look at how Ugg spams my email doppelganger, MRS LAURA CORBISHLEY. In other spam news, there’s a lot of very interesting data in the recent 10 Worst list from Spamhaus. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

Don't mess with my email
Thoughts from #EEC16

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September 2015: The month in email

September’s big adventure was our trip to Stockholm, where I gave the keynote address at the APSIS Conference (Look for a wrapup post with beautiful photos of palaces soon!) and had lots of interesting conversations about all things email-related.
Now that we’re back, we’re working with clients as they prepare for the holiday mailing season. We wrote a post on why it’s so important to make sure you’ve optimized your deliverability strategy and resolved any open issues well in advance of your sends. Steve covered some similar territory in his post “Outrunning the Bear”. If you haven’t started planning, start now. If you need some help, give us a call.
In that post, we talked a bit about the increased volumes of both marketing and transactional email during the holiday season, and I did a followup post this week about how transactional email is defined — or not — both by practice and by law. I also wrote a bit about reputation and once again emphasized that sending mail people actually want is really the only strategy that can work in the long term.
While we were gone, I got a lot of spam, including a depressing amount of what I call “legitimate spam” — not just porn and pharmaceuticals, but legitimate companies with appalling address acquisition and sending strategies. I also wrote about spamtraps again (bookmark this post if you need more information on spamtraps, as I linked to several previous discussions we’ve had on the subject) and how we need to start viewing them as symptoms of larger list problems, not something that, once eradicated, means a list is healthy. I also posted about Jan Schaumann’s survey on internet operations, and how this relates to the larger discussions we’ve had on the power of systems administrators to manage mail (see Meri’s excellent post here<).
I wrote about privacy and tracking online and how it’s shifted over the past two decades. With marketers collecting and tracking more and more data, including personally-identifiable information (PII), the risks of organizational doxxing are significant. Moreso than ever before, marketers need to be aware of security issues. On the topic of security and cybercrime, Steve posted about two factor authentication, and how companies might consider providing incentives for customers to adopt this model.

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Prepping for EEC


Tomorrow I head off to New Orleans to the EEC conference. It’s my first one and I’m really looking forward to meeting some of the people I only know online.
I’ll be speaking on two panels on Friday:
All You Ever Wanted to Know about Deliverability (But Were Afraid to Ask) at 10:50. This is your chance to ask those questions of myself and other experts in the field. I always enjoy Q&A panels and actually hearing from folks what their big deliverability questions are. (and remember, if you have a question, you can always send one to me for Ask Laura)
and the closing Keynote panel
ISP Postmasters & Blacklist Operators: Defending Consumer Inboxes at 1:10. I’m on a panel with various ISP postmasters, blacklist operators and we’ll be talking about what it’s like dealing with the deluge of mail. For instance, there is a huge outbreak of bot-spam at the moment, and a lot of the filters are struggling to keep up. In fact, I’m a last minute replacement for one filter company as they are in all-hands-on-deck firefighting mode to keep their customers safe.
Hope to see you there!
 

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Content is the new volume!

I’m having a great time here at #EEC16. Today is my visit and go to sessions day, since tomorrow I’m speaking at 2 different sessions.
I was lucky enough to get into the Customer Experience session presented by Carey Kegel of SmartPak and Loren McDonald of IBM Marketing Cloud. It was an interesting session.
If you don’t know, SmartPak is a brand focused on selling horse tack and supplements. They initially started off by creating packs of supplements for your horse. This is great for horse owners, as it means the barn staff just needs to add one pack to your horse’s feed. No measuring, no confusion, it’s simple and means your horse gets what they need.
First they started talking about the volume of email sent by SmartPak. Their mails aren’t that consistent, but they mail between 25 and 30 emails a month. Some months last year they mailed every day.
What they started seeing, though, is that the volume of marketing mail drove list churn. The biggest reason users gave for unsubscribing was “too much volume.” The more mail they sent, the more unsubscribes they saw. Even worse, more volume did not translate into revenue. As email volume went up, email performance decreased.
They tested adding content to emails. Just a block on the side of the email with links to content on their website. Adding the content links increased click through rates by 9% and revenue per email by 15%.
These results don’t require the content be in the emails. Using emails to drive recipients to already existing content on the website, including videos and surveys.
The session didn’t specifically discuss deliverability directly, but I think there were some clear deliverability benefits to content marketing.  In fact, an email with no call to action, simply a post-purchase “what to expect” email had an open rate of 33%. These types of open rates help improve overall reputation and lead to more inbox deliveries.

The session really drove home how valuable content marketing is. One thing that was continually repeated during the session is that most marketers have the content already. Use email to drive users to the content you already have. Include that content in marketing mails. Meet the recipient’s needs and wants.
There are a couple takeaways I got from the session.

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