Get In The Inbox

For a little while last year I kept getting Spamcop reports triggered by emails to steve@apple.com and stevejobs@apple.com.
Of course there is always the chance that Steve Jobs himself had signed up for updates on used cars in Hampshire, however unlikely that is, a few later occurrences were impossible due to being after October 5th 2011.

As I would usually, I spent the time tracing that email address’s route to the list sent; on one occasion, the used car one, everything had been collected by the same form on their own web-site. It appeared that the way the form was structured made it look like people had to enter in an email address in order to get their used car quote, when in fact it was completely optional. So people who wanted their quote would not see any relevance in supplying their email address and due to being forced to enter it, felt they would get on some sort of spam list, subsequently they just made an email address up.

The same thing occurred for a few Airports who have rolled out free WiFi but force you sign-up for emails in order to use it; according to many lists, the late Steve Jobs got around a lot after his untimely death.

My favourite example is Credit sites, where they need to do a credit check on your to approve you for a loan or something. They all ask you for your mobile number and your email address; They don’t need an email address or mobile number to get your credit rating and see if they can approve you, they ask because they want to force you onto their list so that can make loads of cash flogging your contact details, which would then have 3rd party opt-in for ever.

Essentially, not all list building practices that sound like they will build your list may build the list in a good way. Some strategies have people are forced or sneaked on to lists through mandatory email fields without relevance or hidden Ts and Cs on pages giving something for nothing. This would be because some people think that the number of records is more important than the quality and engagement levels of the list.

Not all people are tricked by this and make up email addresses to get to the next page and not be ‘spammed’… if your lists has addresses like:
asdf@yahoo.com, spam@gmail.com, junk@live.com, nothanks@yahoo.com, no@hotmail.com,
me@privacy.net, thefield@home.com, sdfsdf@sdfsdf.com, 123@123.net, qwerty@com.com:
It means someone has made up an address to quickly get what they want without consequence. You might notice a repeat of “sdf” this is because most people are right handed and use their right hand for the mouse, so the left hits the 3 easiest characters which are ‘s’, ‘d’ & ‘f’. There are many more frequently used patterns of address and these are some of the most common.

ISPs and spam protection software companies know this too and many of the common ones are spam traps. They know that these addresses are not owned by people but get hit a lot and why, they then monitor some of them like spam traps so emailing them can either hurt your reputation or just get you blocked.

Some of the common domains used are owned by spam protection software companies to further help them blacklist IP and domains.

So the moral of the story is: consider how people get on your list, consider the relevance of the emails you send them based on how they got on your list. If you have obvious signs of forced sign-ups re-think that sign-up experience. Also have a look at your existing list and consider cleaning off the forced addresses that will have never opened an email from you.

A forced opt-in is where a site asks for an email address, forces you to opt-in to emails, in order to get something.

Common B2C implementations are on financial aid sites, where you have to fill out a form in order to get your quote. However the quote is not emailed to you, it simply appears on the next page but you still have to supply an email address and accept the Ts & Cs.

Consumers have since figured this out and when they don’t see a relevance to entering their email address, they expect spam, so they either enter in their junk address or just make one up. Also consumers will often use these forms for a flash check of their credit rating, ie: accept or reject, so they can be opted back in as well.

This means that lists built this way are full of addresses that do not exist or belong to people who have not actually asked for them and many of the rest were not expecting the email and probably do not want it.

Many of these addresses are just people who’ve just hit a load of keys in a row, like: qwerty, asdf etc. others make the point like: nospam@thanks.ta etc. etc.

Of course many of these will bounce when first sent to and as long as your email software suppresses hard bounces you won’t have to worry about hitting them again. If you have a lot of them all in the same ISP, eg: Hotmail; a high number of bounces will not do your reputation and favours.

The ones that are actually delivered tend to find the inboxes armed with rather powerful spam buttons which get used without a second thought.

On the other hand over time instead of wasting their efforts dealing with all of the emails sent to junk addresses, the ISPs hosting them simply black hole it so you’ll never know.

However, the odd one gets turned into a spam trap, whether it’s run by the ISP or a Spam Fighting organisation. As you know, hitting traps harms your reputation or just gets you blocked.

Ideally lists would be built without forcing people to opt-in to emails, instead the list would be full of people who have deliberately signified that they want your emails. However, if you are forced to collect email this way, there are some ways help remove some of the risk:

• Clean out the obvious junk addresses before you send the email to the list.
• Send a welcome email that makes the opt-out easy, so people will happily clean themselves off you list for you.
• Put an unsubscribe link in the top right as well the bottom in at least the first 5 emails you send each address.
  This way if someone opens the email and their mouse drifts towards the spam button, they are likely to pass this unsubscribe link in the top right and there is a chance they’d use that rather than the spam button.

The perceptions of this low level of data collection tends to come from the olden-days of direct mail when it was a numbers game and there were no blacklists. Well that model does not apply to email and ISPs & Spam fighting agencies don’t like it and where they are inclined to, they will target senders who obviously collet data this way and junk it or block it.

If you have the option to make a change to your collection methods:

Alter the collection method to only take an email address when your process actually needs to send them an email.

Change the process or decide to only email people who have deliberately requested emails.

Don’t opt someone in from the initial form but offer them help and benefits to sign-up on the next page.

This will save you a lot of pain, generally poor deliverability and subsequently a low open rate.

The important point here, is that hammering dead and uninterested addresses will harm your ability to get in front of the people who will generate revenue with you.

In this blog post, I’ll be taking a look at Amazon’s mass Email Marketing system to see how it works and will demonstrate some smart Email Marking solutions for how it could have been done better.

My Experience of Amazon’s Bulk Email Marketing Strategy

I use Amazon more than any high street shop or other online retailer. As a result, I get between two and ten emails a week from various parts of their online empire: some seem to be from a clear Amazon department, and some are focused on a specific product type.

My product purchasing habits revolve mostly around electronic goods and the odd book, but occasionally I get emails containing content in which I have no interest. I wanted to ‘manage my preferences’ and unsubscribe from these mailouts, as all good Email Marketing software should allow the recipient to do.

Unsubscribes/Opt-outs

The closest thing I could find to get me on the road to unsubscribing was a tiny single-word hyperlink opt-out at the end of the second of 26 lines:

Managing The opt-outs

I was given the choice to opt-out of all special offers or not – that’s all special offer emails, even though every email is clearly from a different department. I clicked a few different email opt-out links and they all seemed offer the same option:

Delving a little deeper, it appears that ‘improve your recommendations’ is the option that controls the different departments and their ability to email you. I ticked the ‘don’t use for recommendations’ box on the categories in which I had no interest and finally managed to unsubscribe myself.

Getting to this point was a confusing and needlessly complex process.

Do You Still Want To Copy Amazon’s Email Marketing Strategy?

After that poor user experience, would you still want to email just like Amazon? The answer is most likely still yes, because they make a huge amount of money.

However, if your brand is not as strong as Amazon and the ownership of your market is not as dominant, could you get away with giving your customers that kind of mass Email Marketing experience? Or would people just get bored, de-prioritise you or even unsubscribe completely?

Your Email Marketing System Can Be Better Than Amazon

Take the model that Amazon uses, but give your customers control and keep them informed – good Email Marketing software should always give options for different levels of recipient control. The important bit is not to opt people into frequent emails that they haven’t asked for – it’s just rude!

You should always ask people what they want to be emailed about, only email them with relevant content and give them control over what they receive from you. Good Email Marketing solutions aren’t some arcane art, they’re just common sense.

Want to read more, download a copy of ‘Do you want to email like Amazon or better? or check out our resources section for more guides on email marketing.

Just because you operate within the law, it doesn’t mean your email campaign will be delivered. Just because legislations don’t prohibit certain activity, it doesn’t mean that you are entitled to do it without consequence – the soft opt-in, corporate subscribers and third party opt-in are the big three problems.

Soft opt-in is no good

Recipients are not fans of the soft opt-in, or at least the way is has been (ab)used over the years. Nor are they fans of being forced into or even sneaked into third party optin when they fill out a form – often the third party optin is at the bottom of a linked Ts and Cs page from a sign-up form. Recipients’ consequent use of the spam buttons on emails that they had not asked for has caused ISPs, in their strive to increase user experience, or at least lessen bad experience, to request only emails that people ask for to be sent to their users.

Things like buying lists which would be full of third party opt-ins and corporate subscribers will get you a lot of complaints, hard bounces and subsequent junking, maybe even blocks and black lists as well as the spam traps that get into lists when addresses are scraped from the internet.

Whatever you do, don’t scrape addresses from the web. If someone puts their address on their website and doesn’t ask be added to everyone’s list, don’t add them to your list. For instance, sales@yourdomain.com will be on a contact page asking to be emailed if someone wants more information, not asking for marketing emails from anyone who finds the address. All B2B spam trap addresses sit on websites on the web, if they are scraped and sold on, entire hosting centres can be blocked. If you don’t have someone asking for your emails, you will always be in danger of getting a spam trap.

Ensure you respect and suppress every opt-out request and hard bounce. Make sure you or your ESP has you on the feedback loops for at least AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo and SpamCop.

Data best practice tip: only email people who actually want the email, don’t scrape from the web and don’t buy lists.

List building

The very basic thing here is to have a sign-up form on your website. The best practice is to a have a sign-up form on every page of your web-site, even if it only asks for the email address – nice and easy.

Best of best practice is to make the opt-in a double one, where someone submits the form and your form sends them another email straight away with a link in for them to click to confirm the subscription. This way you can be certain that the person who gave you that email address actually owns it. However lots of marketers are too scared of losing people during the process and refuse to do it. This is understandable and for many sites, you rarely get people signing up with other peoples’ addresses.

The only times it tends to happen is if the site has forced that person to enter an email address to get to the next page: content like videos, vouchers, quotes etc. If people are suspicious or cannot see why they should give an email address, they will just make one up. These are the forms that should be confirmed before they are marketed to otherwise you will be sending emails to people who haven’t asked for the emails and they will hit the spam button.

To meet in the middle somewhere, the best practice is to employ a welcome message. This is a message sent straight away after someone fills out the single opt-in sign-up form.  The welcome email capitalises on the momentum of engagement; someone has gone through all of the effort to trust you with their email address, the only way they could be more engaged than that is to give you money! So sending an email straight away and will get some of the highest engagement of any email.

The email welcomes the individual to your brand and list, tells them what will happen next, even gives them a sample of what to expect and maybe a cheeky call to action to get them started with the site or even a prize for signing up.

List building best practice tip: get sign-up form and do a welcome email.

This is one of many Best Practice Guides I have written for Pure360, they are all archived on this site in one form or another. If you’d like to see the full polished version search for best practice on Pure360.co.uk.