December 2016: The Month in Email

Happy New Year! We’re looking forward to some interesting new projects this year, both for our clients and for Word to the Wise. Stay tuned!
December was a slow month for blogging, with everything going on. But we’re back on the horse now and ready to blog for 2017.
WalesCaernarfonCastle
List and subscription management continue to be hot topics, especially in the wake of the listbombing attacks earlier this year. Earlier this month, I presented a webinar on listbombing for the EEC and DMA to review the attacks and discuss best practices for companies to manage subscriptions. For Ask Laura, I wrote about the unsubscribe process and how senders can best manage those requests to keep their lists current and compliant.
With all the holiday mail flying around, Steve wrote up a good post about the challenges of DNS hosting and issues customers may have reaching your site. He also wrote about canonicalization, a process for comparing things to see if they are the same, which is useful for understanding how messages change during the delivery process. It’s important to understand how this works with DKIM, as that process specifically looks at changes to messages in delivery to validate them.
I wrote a post about how delivery at Gmail is a bit different from other mail providers, which can lead to intermittent delivery problems, and got some useful information in the comments about some upcoming process changes. And as always, unwanted email is SPAM. It doesn’t matter if you call it outreach or prospecting, or “here’s something you might find interesting!” Still SPAM.

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July 2015: The Month in Email

Once again, we reviewed some of the ways brands are trying (or might try) to improve engagement with customers. LinkedIn, who frequently top lists of unwanted-but-legitimate email, announced that they’ll be sending less mail. Josh wrote about giving subscribers options for both the type and frequency of messages, and about setting expectations for new subscribers. In each case, it’s about respecting that customers really want to engage with brands in the email channel, but don’t want the permission they’ve granted to be abused. I also wrote a brief post following up on our June discussion on purchased lists, and as you’d predict, I continue to discourage companies from mailing to these recipients.

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August 2014: The Month in Email

Isn’t August the month where things are supposed to slow down? We’re still waiting for that to happen around here… it’s been great to be busy, but we’re hoping to continue to carve out more time for blogging as we move into the fall.
August
As usual, we reported on a mix of industry trends and news, the persistence of spam, and did a deep dive into an interesting technical topic. Let’s start there: Steve wrote a post explaining Asynchronous Bounces (yes, it’s a GNFAB), with some examples of how they’re used and how they can cause operational problems.
In industry news, we did a roundup post of some Gmail changes and a followup post on security issues with non-Latin characters in addresses. We also celebrated the long-awaited release of a wonderful resource from MAAWG that I am very proud to have helped author, the white paper Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link). We receive dozens of these calls every week, and though we are always happy to help people solve urgent delivery crises, we spend most of our consulting time and attention working with people to build sustainable email programs, so this document is a great “self-service” resource for people looking to troubleshoot blocklist issues on their own.
In other industry and MAAWG-related news, we noted that the nomination period for the J.D. Falk award has opened (you have just a few more days, procrastinators) and took a moment to reminisce about our friend J.D. and his incredible contributions to the field.
On the topic of creating, sending, and reading more attractive email, we posted some  resources from Mailchimp and crowdsourcing templates from Send With Us. We also incorrectly reported on a not-actually-new interface from AOL, Alto. Interesting to note that there’s been so little followup from AOL (and almost no post-launch coverage) in the two years since launch.
We also touched on a few myths: email saves trees and low complaint volume is good.
And finally, in November of 2013, I unsubscribed from every possible email I received on a specific account. I followed up on that briefly in a Part 2 post, and this month went back and wrote a Part 3 followup. Spoiler alert: spam is still a problem. Of course, we got some comments that we were probably doing it wrong, so Unsubscribe Barbie showed up to add her thoughts. We try not to be snarky around here, but sometimes we just don’t try very hard.

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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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