Do you know where your signups are?

laura
Industry
July 19, 2016

Here at Word to the Wise we sign up for a lot of email from our customers. There are multiple reasons we do this.

Engagement starts before the first email

These days the key to getting to the inbox is sending mail your users want and expect. We always recommend senders start the engagement process during signup. Why? Because it establishes the relationship even before email happens. People want to like the vendors and brands they interact with. A key part of that is making the recipient feel special and like they have value to you.
There are other benefits to engaging before email. The biggest is the opportunity for the recipient to look in the bulk folder for mail. When a user says “this is not spam” by moving mail to the inbox, that whitelists the mail for that user. Even better, that acts as a big positive for the email’s overall reputation. Positive signals feed into the machine learning engines and change reputation for the better.

Broken signup forms

One thing that always amazes me is the number of broken signup forms there are online. Even when the senders have effective email programs, sometimes there’s a problem with the signup.
We’ve found some recurring problems during our signup experiences.
Signup forms are hard to find. For some systems this is OK, the signups happen during checkout, for instance. But every company sending non-transactional mail to their customers should make it possible to sign up for mail without making a purchase. Make the sign up form visible!
“Rogue” signup forms. At some point site design changes and new forms are added. Occasionally an older signup form isn’t deleted and subscriptions sorta happen, but the welcome messages are sent from a system no one is aware of still being active. In other cases, the forms looked like they worked, but addresses were never added to lists. Check all signup pathways regularly!
Going through the signup process tells me a lot about an email program. Deliverability problems often start at the point of address collection.
When was the last time you signed up at your site?

Peeple, Security and why hiding reviews doesn't matter

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Peeple app, which lets random individuals provide reviews of other people. The founders of the company seem to believe that no one is ever mean on the Internet and that all reviews are accurate. They’ve tried to assure us that no negative reviews will be published for unregistered users. They’re almost charming in their naivety, and it might be funny if this wasn’t so serious.
The app is an invitation to online abuse and harassment. And based on the public comments I’ve seen from the founders they have no idea what kind of pain their app is going to cause. They just don’t seem to have any idea of the amount of abuse that happens on the Internet. We work with and provide tools to abuse and security desks. The amount of stuff that happens as just background online is pretty bad. Even worse are the attacks that end up driving people, usually women, into hiding.
The Peeple solution to negative reviews is two fold.

Dueling data

One of the things I miss about being in science is the regular discussions (sometimes heated) about data and experimental results. To be fair, I get some of that when talking about email stuff with Steve. We each have some strong view points and aren’t afraid to share them with each other and with other people. In fact, one of the things we hear most when meeting folks for the first time is, “I love it when you two disagree with each other on that mailing list!” Both of us have engineering and science backgrounds, so we can argue in that vein.

One of the challenges of seemingly contradictory data is figuring out why it seems to disagree. Of course, in science the first step is always to look at your experimental design and data collection. Did I do the experiment right? (Do it again. Always do it again.) Did I record the data correctly? Is the design right? So what did I do differently from what you did? For instance, at one of my labs we discovered that mixing a reagent in plastic tubes created a different outcome from mixing the reagent in glass vials. So many variables that you don’t even think of being variables that affect the outcome of an experiment.

May 2016: The Month in Email

Summer, already? Happy June! Here’s a look at our busy month of May.

I had a wonderful time in Atlanta at the Salesforce Connections 2016 conference, where I spoke on a panel about deliverability. While in Atlanta, I also visited our friends at Mailchimp, and later spoke at the Email Innovations conference in Las Vegas, where I did my best to avoid “explaining all the things”. Since my speaking schedule for 2017 is filling up already, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunity to explain many more of the things over the next year or so. Let me know if there’s an event that might be a good fit for me, either as a keynote speaker or on a panel.
Steve contributed a few technical posts on the blog this month. He mentioned that Google has stopped supporting the obsolete SSLv3 and RC4, and he explored the ARC protocol, which is in development and review, and which will be useful in extending authentication through the email forwarding process.
Meri contributed to the blog this month as well, with a post on the Sanders campaign mailing list signup process. We’ve written about best practices for political campaigns before, and it’s always interesting to see what candidates are doing correctly and incorrectly with gathering addresses and reaching out to supporters.
In other best practices coverage, I pointed to some advice for marketers about authentication that I’d written up for the Only Influencers list, a really valuable community for email marketers. I wrote about purchased lists again (here’s a handy collection of all of my posts on the topic, just in case you need to convince a colleague that this isn’t a great idea). I also wrote about how getting the technical bits right isn’t always sufficient, which is also something I’ve written about previously. I also discussed the myth of using the word “free” in the subject line. As I said in the post, “Single words in the subject line don’t hurt your delivery, despite many, many, many blog posts out there saying they do. Filters just don’t work that way. They maybe, sorta, kinda used to, but we’ve gotten way past that now.”
On a personal note, I reminisced about the early days of mailing list culture and remembered a dear online friend as I explained some of why I care so much about email.
In my Ask Laura column, I covered CAN SPAM and transactional opt-outs. As always, if you have a general question about deliverability that I can answer in the column, please let me know.