Recipients and the Spam Button

Earlier this week Litmus and Fluent hosted a webinar title “Adapting to Consumers’ New Definition of Spam.” This had a number of fascinating facts about email marketing, many of which should reassure folks.
gearheadLitmus has a blog post up highlighting some of the findings specific to millennials and email. Good news is millennials like getting mail from brands and interact with them regularly. Even better, they will rescue mail out of the spam folder.
The full whitepaper is available from Fluent: 2016 Consumer Perceptions of Email. I’ll be writing more about this over the interesting tidbits here over the next few weeks. But I really suggest people go download it and read it.

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iOS mail supporting list-unsub header

Al over at SpamResource reports that the next generation of Apple’s iOS has support for the list unsubscribe header.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time an independent email client has built in support for the List-Unsubscribe header. Microsoft and Google support it, but only in their webmail system. Hopefully other mail clients will follow suit.

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iOS List Unsubscribe Functionality

Al did a great post over on Spamresource about the how the new list unsubscribe function in the default mail client from iOS10. What’s been interesting to me is how much I’m hearing from ESP folks about how their customers want it gone.
If you don’t know what we’re talking about, in the default mail client on iOS10, Apple is now offering a way to unsubscribe from list mail by placing an unsubscribe link at the top of the message.
ListUnsub
As you can see, this isn’t just for commercial mail, it’s in place for every mailing list that has a List-Unsubscribe header. (This is a screenshot from something I posted to OI this morning). For me, it’s somewhat intrusive. I’m on a lot of discussion lists – technical, marketing, business and even a couple social ones. Reading them on my phone has become a challenge, as every email in a thread contains the “unsubscribe” button now.
Luckily, you can dismiss the message for all posts to that mailing list by hitting the ⮾⮾⮾⮾x. Interestingly, once you’ve turned it off there seems to be no way to turn it back on for that list.
Senders have different complaints, however, they do not have to do with intrusiveness or usability issues.
I’ve heard complaints about placement and about how easy it makes it to unsubscribe. One person even stated that everyone knows the place for an unsubscribe is at the bottom of a message and it should never be at the top of a message. I find these arguments unpersuasive. Unsubscribing should be easy. Unsubscribing should be trivial. People should be able to stop getting mail on a whim. Particularly here in the US, where unsolicited mail is legal, being able to quickly opt-out is the only thing keeping some of our mailboxes useful.
I’ve also heard some concerns that are a little more understandable. One company was concerned that unsubscribes go directly to their ESP rather than directly to them. This is a somewhat more understandable concern. Good senders use unsubscribes as part of their KPIs and as part of their campaign metrics. They know how much an unsubscribe costs them and will use that as part of their metrics for defining a successful campaign. Still, though, it’s not that big a concern. ESPs are already handling these kinds of unsubscribes from providers like gmail and hotmail.
Almost 7 years ago I blogged about a sender who wanted an unsubscribe link in the email client. It was a bit of snark on my part. The interesting part, though, is that some senders want unsubscribe mediated in the client and others things it’s horrible. I think this tells me that there’s no universal right answer. It Depends might be the most hated statement in deliverability, but it is the absolutely the reality of the situation.
 
 

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Changing deliverability thinking

Almost every email marketing program, at least those sending millions of emails per campaign, have delivery problems at one time or another. The problems seem random and unpredictable. Thus most marketers think that they can only address delivery problems, they can’t prepare or prevent them.
On the delivery side, though, we know deliverability problems are predictable. There are situations and events in a company’s marketing program that increase deliverability risks.
I talked a little bit about this with Derek Harding at a recent conference. I started talking about my ideas that deliverability is not random and that companies need to stop treating it as unpredictable.  He pulled together a great article from our discussions. Head over to ClickZ to read about it: Take control of your email deliverability.
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The predictability of deliverability is something I’m going to be writing more about in the coming months. This is, I think, the next challenge for email marketers. Figuring out how to incorporate deliverability into their overall marketing strategy. Successful programs need to take ownership of getting to the inbox. Deliverability isn’t an emergency, because it’s been planned for and managed throughout a program.

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