Category Archives: Trends

Coming Back After Quarantine

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In March of 2020, when the lockdown started, many businesses scaled back their operations, assuming that it would be over in a few months. We all know what happened next. Now, as businesses are coming out of a year of hibernation and restarting their marketing programs, some are finding that their email deliverability has dropped precipitously. More email is going to the spam folder and more subscribers are choosing to unsubscribe. They ask: “How can this be? We haven’t changed anything.” If you’ve encountered this problem, there are a few things you can do to alleviate the situation.

Remind Them Why

The sad truth is that people have a short memory and email is easily forgotten. If you immediately start sending them mailings the way you used to, they might not even remember who you are. This means there’s a greater chance of them clicking the spam button. See it from their viewpoint. It’s likely they are receiving dozens of emails every day. A year ago, they saw your mailings regularly and were used to it. In the meantime, they’ve been subscribing and unsubscribing from many other mailings. Suddenly, here comes your emails out of nowhere. If they haven’t kept your business in the front of their thoughts, they may assume that your mailings are from an affiliate marketer, or worse, unsolicited. “Who is this company, and why are they suddenly sending me emails?” they ask. If you’re lucky, they will click unsubscribe, but there’s also a chance they will see you as a spammer.

It’s easy enough to avoid this. If you’ve not sent emails during the past year, you’ll need to reintroduce yourself. An email letting them know that you’re coming out of lockdown and reminding them why they chose to subscribe to your mailings is a good idea. You’ll want to get across the point that you’re not sending unsolicited email and that your future mailings will have value to them. Avoid sales pitches for the first few emails. They need to remember why they subscribed to your email list in the first place, so give them something other than a sales pitch.

Common Ground

Few events in history brought the world together like the pandemic. We all went through it so we all have that in common. You’ll want to let them know why you weren’t mailing anything during the lockdown and that you are still in business. If it’s applicable, you can point out that you understood the hardships that the lockdown presented. You might even want to relate how your own staff dealt with the situation. A subject line such as “We’re back in our offices,” or “It’s been a while since we wrote” can help. Anything that will let them know that you’ve sent them email in the past and that you’re not a complete stranger.

One technique that works well for unengaged subscribers of any kind is to offer something at a discount or for free, however, this will only work once you’ve reintroduced yourself. Free offers and coupons from out of the blue are invariably viewed with suspicion and can be counterproductive. First, you’ll need to make sure you’ve established that you’re not sending them these offers unsolicited. Once you’ve done that, special offers are a great way to keep your subscribers engaged and bring them back to your site.

Start With the Best Bets

If you’ve set your subscriber database up for it, segmenting your mailings to distinguish the more engaged subscribers from the rest will help you get things back up and running. It will also clue you in to any changes you’ll need to make to your data. If portions of the group that were engaged before the pandemic and were interacting with your business on a regular basis, but are now ignoring you, you’ll want to find out why before opening up to the rest of the community.

Things Change

No matter what you do, one inescapable fact is that not everyone came through the pandemic with the same results. Some of your subscribers may no longer be in business. Hundreds of bars and restaurants have had to close their doors permanently. Thousands of people moved on to other fields after losing their jobs. Sadly, for some of your subscribers, your products or services may no longer be relevant to their needs. This isn’t always a bad thing. While others may have moved away from what you have to offer, new people are entering the market all the time. Right now is a good time to put some effort into strengthening your subscriber list, while new people are still learning about the fields they’ve entered. You’ll want to be there to greet them at the door, so to speak.

Go to Goolara website

1.

© Goolara, LLC, 2021. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Goolara, LLC and the Goolara Blog with appropriate and specific directions (i.e., links) to the original content.

Happy New Year?

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We assume most of you are glad to see 2020 come to an end, not that it looks like things have improved with the new year just yet. For email marketing software providers (ESPs), 2020 was a mixed bag. On one hand, many businesses relied more than ever on email to get the word out about their products. On the other hand, many businesses couldn’t weather the lockdowns, with restaurants being especially hard hit.1 Now that the longest year in history is finally over, and it’s time to look back on the emails from the past year and see what people have been doing.

One thing we noticed was that there were a lot fewer really terrible mistakes in email. Some of this is, no doubt, because most ESPs now offer templates and drop-and-drag options that can help avoid serious HTML mistakes. Another possible reason is that many companies have streamlined their email design to use a branded template each time. That doesn’t mean the year was without its missteps. Here are a few.

Don’t Bother to Phone

Dreamstime got the year off to a bang-up start with this unreadable mess. It looks fine on the desktop and on iPads. The content is black, and the backgrounds are white. That all flies out the window on the iPhone. This is one case where simply reducing your window size in the browser is not going to help you see what’s going to happen on a phone. This might have been spotted if someone had bothered to look at the email on a phone, or, at least, ran it through an email preview service, such as Litmus, Email on Acid, or proofjump, although Apple plays by its own rules sometimes, so even the services that offer testing across multiple devices and browsers don’t always catch these iPhone issues.

A Common “Type” of Problem

While we’re on the subject, even if you’re not using media queries to make your mailings more responsive and readable on phones, you should still make sure they are readable on any mobile phone from an iPhone 3 on up. It’s a problem that is all too common across the board. Getting the font size right can be tricky. A larger font may look good on a phone but looks goofy on a monitor. A smaller font may look great on a monitor but is rendered unreadable on a phone. In the examples shown above, the one on the right looks fine, but the one on the left is virtually unreadable on any but the largest mobile phones. You can turn the phone sideways, which helps, or you can pinch and spread the image to make the type larger, but this means scrolling back and forth as well as up and down just to read the thing.

Ironically, the example on the left has twice as much formatting information in the style tags as the one on the right, including 24 media queries. Unfortunately, none of them address the issue of font size, so you end up with an email that is unreadable on most iPhones. This is an easy one to solve, and you don’t need any media queries to do it. A font size of 14 pts works for both the desktop and smartphones.

See: Data

Here’s a disaster that never should have happened. There were so many things wrong with this mailing. It started with the CDATA expressions and media queries in the head that are hidden in CSS comment tags. Problems are compounded when the width of the email and the width of tables within the email don’t match. The end result was to cause the tables to stack and push the content to the side forcing the comment widths into their smallest setting. The whole thing looks even worse on a phone.

Fun with Templates

I don’t have to even say anything about this one. This apology email from Really Good Email actually says it all. It’s also worth noting that this is as true of a template you’ve been using for a while as it is for a new one. For instance, look at the footer on this mailing from Dangerous Minds:

This is, most likely, a Mailchimp template. I’m sure when it was created, an icon for Google+ was worth having, but that platform has been gone for over a year. If you are using the same template for more than a year, you’ll want to look at that footer and make sure you’re not doing the same thing. It’s also worth mentioning that CAN-SPAM requires an actual physical address. “Los Angeles, CA” doesn’t really qualify.

First, Tell Me Who You Are

While we’re on the subject of CAN-SPAM violations, this one from Babble, a language learning service, certainly qualifies. First, here’s their footer.

It looks legitimate enough. They’ve included their physical address, and there does appear to be an unsubscribe link. But when you click on the unsubscribe link, you are presented with this screen:

Hello? You want me to log in to unsubscribe? This is a clear violation of CAN-SPAM.

GUESS who?

An even more aggravating violation of CAN-SPAM comes from GUESS, a fashion company best known for their jeans. I received this email the other day:

As my name is not Jacob, it’s apparent that someone signed up with the wrong email address. That’s fine. Things happen, especially with this particular AOL account (which I stopped using a long time ago, but still check it regularly). But when I clicked the unsubscribe link I was taken to the main page of the site with no instructions on unsubscribing. Sometimes when this happens, it is because the emails are being sent out transactionally and you have to change the settings on your account to stop the mailings. This is the reason you see so many people complaining about the email from sites such as LinkedIn and Quora. When I went to the sign in, it asked for my password, so I clicked “Forgot password.” At this point, I was told that no such account existed. This means the “Jacob” must have corrected his email address at some point, but the email department at GUESS Jeans didn’t get the memo. There’s only one recourse at this point, and that is to report them and start marking any future emails as spam. Nice work GUESS.

We All Make Misteaks

I wonder how many people were confused by the reference to covid. What the author meant was, of course, “corvid”—the family of birds known as crows. This one came from Dan Lewis, whose Now I Know newsletters are always filled with fun facts. One thing any of us who often work alone have learned is that you can’t proofread your own work. You need another set of eyes somewhere along the way. Dan quickly followed it up with a correction, but at the bottom of the page we see this:

Purgagory? Don’t you hate making a mistake in an email apologizing for making a mistake? We can relate to this one.

Here’s Lorem!

Using Lorem Ipsum text and other placeholders while designing a mailing can help get through the initial stages of email design, but when you forget it’s there, the results can be embarrassing. A case in point is what happened to Drzly back in May. Few businesses have fared better under the Covid restrictions than the liquor delivery services, and Drzly’s no exception. Perhaps that’s why they sent this email without testing it first, trying to capitalize on the moment. The mistakes are bad enough, but the banner line “Things just got personal” doesn’t help. This is as bad a mistake as we’ve ever seen, but Drzly’s response shows exactly what to do when this happens:

They acknowledged the mistake, then added an offer to induce people to engage with them. A perfect follow-up.

Give Me Some Room!

There’s no reason for this one. A few pixels of right and left padding or margins would have solved the problem. None of Walgreens’ other mailings suffer from this problem, so we suspect that the content was copied and posted from another source. Be that as it may, the problem was an easy one to resolve and would have been noticed had they checked their mailing on a smartphone.

A Shot in the Dark

A trend that received a lot of attention in email marketing last year was the growing popularity of the “dark mode” on smartphones. While we tend to believe that much of the discussion on this subject is hype, it’s a good idea to make sure that your content is easily read no matter how or where the recipient chooses to read it. The biggest offenders in dark made are black logo png images with transparent backgrounds. Here are a few examples:

This can be easily fixed by adding a transparent glow to your logo, or by placing the logo in a contrasting background. You can test the results either by sending it to your smartphone or by using the online dark mode simulator that proofjump provides for free.

The Bottom Line

In the end, the best advice is always the same: Test your mailings across different platforms and devices before you send them. Most of the mistakes listed here could have been avoided with less than fifteen minutes of additional attention at the beginning of each campaign.

Go to Goolara website

1. In December, SFGATE reported that 85% of the restaurants in San Francisco’s Financial District had closed permanently.

© Goolara, LLC, 2021. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Goolara, LLC and the Goolara Blog with appropriate and specific directions (i.e., links) to the original content.

The Hidden Costs of Cloud Services

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Azure and Email Marketing
Have you considered moving computer workloads to the cloud? You probably have. In the studies we’ve seen, over 90% of companies are now using cloud computing services.1 If you are considering moving your infrastructure to Amazon Web Service (AWS), or Azure, or some other cloud computing service, there are a few things you should know before taking the plunge. We’ll look at these potential pitfalls and give you the information you’ll need to make an informed decision.

Moving to Azure: A Case Study

Recently, a customer decided to move their databases from a managed IT provider to Microsoft’s Azure. They had a large, home-grown CRM-style database to move, plus several more databases that we helped manage for their email marketing purposes. They carefully studied the Azure website to determine which package would meet their needs, and how the cost compared to that of their current provider. They concluded it would be cheaper and more reliable to switch to Azure. However, things didn’t go as planned.

The first question everyone asks is how much will it cost, but that’s difficult to estimate. Even careful scrutiny of the configuration pricing using Azure or AWS won’t necessarily answer this question. When you buy a server from Dell or others, many factors determine the performance, but the cost is relatively upfront. The speed and number of cores determines the base speed and how much RAM can have a significant impact. In the case of a database server, the speed and size of the storage system is critical. There are other factors but these are the main considerations. It’s a relatively straightforward process.

Compare that with the purchase of a cloud database. For Azure, you start by determining if you want a managed instance, an Elastic Pool, or a single database. Go down the route of a managed instance, and you choose from Windows Virtual Machines, SQL Database Managed Instance, or a SQL Server virtual machine. The Elastic Pool is closest to owning your own server that hosts multiple databases and that pricing path has you choose between the vCore (virtual core) and the Database Transaction Unit (DTU) model. Choosing the DTU model has you then select your elastic Database Transaction Units (eDTUs) per pool, which determines the per-hour pricing. But what is an elastic Database Transaction Unit, and how many units do you need for a viable database? Microsoft defines a DTU as “…a blended measure of CPU, memory, and data I/O and transaction log I/O in a ratio determined by an OLTP benchmark workload designed to be typical of real-world OLTP workloads,” but they provide little information on how these factors are “blended” or the specifications of the OLTP numbers used. Microsoft does offer a DTU calculator, but it involves running either a Command Line Utility or a PowerShell script to capture CPU and IOPS at the server level and create a CSV file, which is then uploaded to the Azure website.

It’s also tricky to verify that the configuration you’ve chosen will actually work. The customer initially picked a mix of a single vCore and the other databases in an Elastic Pool. However, they learned later that this setup does not allow SQL jobs to run or cross-database joins, things that their current database allowed and were fundamental to their design. There were also resource limits that Azure imposed that caught them by surprise. An estimated nine-hour overnight transfer of the data ended up taking thirty hours because of Azure-imposed resource limits.

Azure vs. AWS

Although Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering is growing in popularity, Amazon’s AWS is still the market leader. How would you estimate the costs for their system? To us, AWS pricing seems more straightforward than Microsoft’s. You still get these cryptic descriptions like db.m5.xlarge and db.r5.8xlarge that you must individually look up, but when you do, the abbreviation stands for a computer with a certain number of cores running at a specific speed, and an amount of RAM. Much more like what you get when buying your own computer. You must also estimate costs for data transfers and database and backup storage, which can be hard to determine.

The customer ran into several issues in attempting to migrate their databases to Azure that further increased their costs, but once they worked through those technical issues the migration was performed overnight. However, when they brought their systems back online the next day, they found the performance was unacceptably slow. They rolled back to their existing managed provider and looked over the website pricing options again. With their increased knowledge of the requirements, they recalculated the monthly pricing. Now they estimated a figure that was twelve times their initial cost!

Needless to say, this was unacceptable, so they’ve stayed with their current managed provider. But how could the price be so far off? We looked over the options they had initially selected. In our opinion, the eDTUs for the Azure DTU model was a bit low, but not unreasonably so. It’s easy to see how someone performing a diligent and thoughtful analysis of the pricing could come up with this price.

If you’re considering moving your infrastructure to the cloud, you need to be aware that the benefits don’t always outweigh the costs. Goolara’s Symphonie email marketing solution can use a database hosted by a cloud provider, or with AWS, the entire system can be installed on their computers. If you are considering a cloud provider for your database or entire email marketing system, contact us, and we’ll be happy to help you estimate the costs.

Go to Goolara website

1. According to Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud Report.

© Goolara, LLC, 2020. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Goolara, LLC and the Goolara Blog with appropriate and specific directions (i.e., links) to the original content.

Drag-and-Drop Solutions

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Drag and Drop interface
Perhaps it’s because I had already spent so much time learning HTML, or perhaps it was just prejudice, but, until recently, I gave drag-and-drop email design solutions little consideration. After all, how hard is it to create a few divs and tables then add images and text? It’s not rocket science; it isn’t even Python. But after spending a few weeks using the new drag-and-drop interface in Goolara Symphonie, I’m here to say, I’m a believer.

Since its inception, Symphonie has had a visual editor to help with the creation of emails, but not a drag-and-drop template builder. As most of our customers already have HTML designers working for them, adding a drag-and-drop builder to Symphonie was never a priority.

Then, when we started testing the new interface, something surprising happened. We found it was both robust and easy to use. Sure, it’s easy to write the code for a basic HTML email, but the template builder was even faster. Best of all, the finished designs automatically include responsive media queries and those pesky conditionals so necessary for displaying your emails properly in Outlook and IE (example: <!–[if (mso)|(IE)]><table width=”100%” cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ border=”0″><![endif]–>).

Suddenly the thought of creating an email from scratch again seemed challenging. Using the drag-and-drop interface it’s possible to create a multi-section email template (example: Logo, hero image, salutatory text, three sections with images, text, and buttons, and a footer) in a little over a minute (yes, I really did time this).

Now I’m firmly in the drag-and-drop editor camp. Even for simple emails, it is faster and easier to use. Additionally, we’ve added lots of ready-to-use templates (all included for free) to make the process even easier. We think you will enjoy the new feature as much as we have. If you want to see it in action, contact us for a demonstration.

Go to Goolara website

GDPR and Email: Part 1, an Overview

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GDPR vs. Email
They started working on it in 2012, and for the next four years, the countries of the European Union argued over, cajoled each other, and hammered out the details of a ruling known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It was a long hard slog, but when the dust had cleared, the feeling was that the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament had a regulation that would satisfy the privacy issues inherent with any new or future technology, without hampering individual needs.

Or did they?

Ratified on May 24, 2016, the GDPR took effect on May 25th, 2018, and offers the strictest set of regulations to date as to what you can and cannot do with someone’s data. Everything from Facebook to your digital camera has to comply with the regulation, and that includes email subscriptions.

It Affects the Whole World

Although intended to protect the citizens on the European Union, it also applies to overseas companies with EU subscribers—and here’s where the GDPR starts getting fuzzy. In a recent webinar, listeners were told that they don’t have to worry about the GDPR as long as they can prove that did not actively seek European subscribers. On another site, readers were told that if you have any European subscribers, you’re obliged to follow the GDPR restrictions. So who’s right? The webinar is correct, in fact. If you can prove that you intended for your site to be used exclusively outside of the EU and had no mechanism in place to entice European subscribers, you are not liable, but that also means you might have to prove it at some point, and if, for reasons beyond your control, a large number of your subscribers are from the European Union, you’ll probably lose that fight.

That Depends on What The Meaning of “Is” is

At first glance, the GDPR looks pretty thorough. It even has a section that defines the terms it uses, such as “personal data” and “natural person.”1 But look more closely and you’ll see that every definition, in turn, raises new questions. “Personal data,” for instance, is defined as “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’),” and goes on to explain that “an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly” (italics mine). Although the ruling is broad enough to include it, you won’t find a discussion of email anywhere in the regulation. In fact, the word “email” is used only once—as an example of one of the things that can be used to identify a person.

After reading and re-reading the current crop of articles about the regulation, what strikes us is how few of these address the questionable areas of GDPR, especially as it relates to email marketing. Whether you run email marketing using your own equipment or take advantage of a hosted solution, here are some questions and discussion about GDPR challenges for email senders.

Tell Me You Like Me

If you’re a European citizen and you’ve signed up to receive email from a company, that company must “demonstrate” that you actually did sign up. So how do you demonstrate that someone provided their information on a web form? The GDPR goes on to talk about written declarations, but that is unlikely to apply for email marketing.

You can be audited to ensure that you are complying with the GDPR, so you should be able to prove this.2 If you say that the recipient confirmed with a double-opt-in, what physical evidence can you present to backup this statement? Is the word of your software that says the recipient clicked the link enough? Do we need to record additional information to show this action really happened, like recording the IP address and browser information used when the confirmation link was clicked? But wait! Isn’t that Personal Identifying Information (PII) that you shouldn’t be keeping on recipients? Which takes precedence? Proving the recipient “demonstrated” their consent, or minimizing the PII for that recipient?

A double-opt-in confirmation step would seem to “demonstrate” the person’s interest in receiving your email. But as many email marketers know, getting people to confirm is challenging. A double-opt-in can reduce the list size; forcing them to do it again is guaranteed to reduce list sizes even further.

Unsubscribing is not Forgetting

You won’t find the word “unsubscribe” anywhere in the regulation or its recitals.3 When you unsubscribe, your information is still in the database, being applied to past metrics and ensuring that you aren’t accidentally left on any mailing list segments. Unsubscribing should be easy. Just click the unsubscribe link on any email and as long as it is an honest and legitimate company you should stop receiving mailings from that company in short order. But the GDPR even complicates this.

“Personal data shall be: adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed…” the regulation states, but then goes on to say: “In a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed.” To further muddy the waters it continues by adding that “personal data may be stored for longer periods insofar as the personal data will be processed solely for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes…in order to safeguard the rights and freedoms of the data subject.”4

The first statement seems to indicate that data about a recipient can be retained only while it is needed for processing. For a regular newsletter subscriber, it seems likely that retaining their information would be acceptable to be able to provide the newsletter service. But what if the person unsubscribes? Or the email address is no longer valid (goes on-hold). Should any personal data for the recipient be removed at this point?

The structure of the GDPR seems to suggest that the answer to this is no unless the person has requested to be “forgotten,” which opens up a whole new can of worms.

I Forgot to Remember to Forget

One of the most controversial and discussed topics about the GDPR is its “Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)” clause, which states that the “data subject” has the right to request the erasure of personal data.5 Of course, nothing is ever that simple. The regulation goes on to list the cases where a person may request erasure. Since these include for direct “data marketing purposes,”6 we can assume that it applies to most email situations, but is it possible to request that a company erase all your personal information, even though you wish to remain a customer? And what about past metrics? If 25 subscribers clicked on links last year, then asked to be forgotten this year, what happens to that data? Data from previous could be construed as “historical research,” which the GDPR says is okay to keep.7

If “forgotten” means you’re no longer anywhere in the system, and not simply, “we’re not going to send you any more email,” how would you know this? Surely you need to keep a record verifying that a person requested to be forgotten, but if you do, then they’re not completely forgotten. It reminds us of comedian Mitch Hedberg’s joke: “A man in an infomercial told me to forget everything I knew about comforters, so I did. Then he tried to sell me a comforter, but I didn’t know what it was.” If you don’t keep track of who asked to be forgotten, then how can you prevent them being re-entered into your system? It’s ludicrous. The GDPR seems to suggest that a marketer has the right to retain the email address since it’s required for compliance with the legal obligations of the states and is required by the email marketer for the defense of claims that the recipient might make.

Data Extraction

In Article 20, the GDPR is very clear that a person has the right to “receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format.”8 This is the “data extraction” clause, and the way it is worded suggests that every email marketer intending to be compliant with the GDPR should have a mechanism that allows recipients to see the data that’s been collected on them. It just doesn’t say what this data might be. Data in demographic fields or associated one-to-many tables would seem like reasonable choices, but how about open and clickthrough data?

For both the data extraction request and the request to be forgotten, there are privacy and security issues left unaddressed by GDPR. You could, for instance, create a web form that lets an email address be “forgotten” when it’s entered, but then a malicious person could erase data just for kicks. Similarly, providing all the collected personal data on request should require some validation to ensure the recipient is actually requesting this data.

Many ESPs have added a request to be forgotten feature to their privacy policies requiring you to send an email to request this. While this wouldn’t appear to be automated, at least it’s a step towards ensuring the recipient is the one making the request. As for the request for data requirement, so far, only Goolara offers to extract the recipient’s personal data in electronic form. Since it is a requirement of the GDPR, we expect others will eventually comply.

Final Thoughts

While the goals of the GDPR are fairly clear and even laudable, it can be difficult to implement when the rubber hits the road. How do we both remove personal data and keep some for the purpose of honoring the unsubscribe? Do we really need to remove all demographics when someone unsubscribes? How do we implement features like data extraction and make it available for portability? We’d like to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.

In Part Two, we’ll get a little deeper into the nitty-gritty of the GDPR, and look at the right to be forgotten in more detail.

Go to Goolara website

1. Chapter 1, Article 4: Definitions

2. Chapter 2, Article 7: Conditions for consent

3. Recitals are brief descriptions added to the GDPR to help clarify certain terms and aspects of the regulation. At this time, there are 173 recitals!

4. Chapter 2, Article 5: Principles relating to the processing of personal data

5. Chapter 3, Article 17: Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)

6. Chapter 3, Article 21: Right to object

7. Chapter 9, Article 89: Safeguards and derogations relating to processing for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes

8. Chapter 3, Article 20: Right to data portability

A Look at Email Ten Years From Now

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You'd need a crystal ball.
Have you ever wondered what email marketing will be like ten years from now? Will it still exist? What devices will people be using to read their email? We do wonder sometimes, and it can be fun to try and make some predictions about where the field is headed.

Predicting the future is always a tricky matter, and things you feel so sure about can turn out to be so wrong. A popular prediction in the fifties was that by 1970, we’d all be flying to work in our own personal airplanes, and in 1989’s Back to the Future II, predicted that in 2015, kids would be skateboarding on wheel-less hoverboards. Ten years ago, Runt of the Web made this prediction about the newly released iPhone:

“This stupid ‘iPhone’ that Apple is pedaling is never going to catch on…expect cellphones to just keep getting smaller and smaller until they reach the size of a postage stamp sometime around 2017.”

We’re not sure you could make this prediction anymore inaccurate if you tried.

In 1997, email was still a relatively new tool for most people. Back then, direct mail marketing and telemarketing were the most popular (and annoying) methods of pitching products. Email marketing was catching on, but so was its evil twin: spam. Any predictions in 1997 about where email marketing would be in 2007 undoubtedly would’ve been wrong. Between 1997 and 2007, the world of email marketing changed dramatically. HTML in email became more common, and spam got so bad that governments started passing legislation to prohibit the sending of excessive and unwanted email.

The next decade was far less eventful. By the early 2000s, the catchphrase that you should format your email “like it’s 1999” was catching on. Mailbox providers were loath to add the latest features to their email readers, fearing potential hacks and viruses. By 2007, nearly every email client restricted their email formatting capabilities to basic HTML, with no CSS options. Styles needed to be embedded within the content, and divs were out of the question; tables were preferred. During the past two years, we’ve started to see this policy loosen up, and some email apps, such as Apple’s Mail app, allow nearly every feature of HTML5, even when the individual iPhone client apps do not.

With all of this in mind, we’re going to make our own predictions about where email marketing is going, and what it might look like in 2027. Some of these predictions are already well on the way to coming true, while others are educated guesses.

Technological Convergence

Text messaging is a relatively new technology that has been quickly adopted and widely used by a broad spectrum of the population. Many of the messages that are sent via text messages could also be sent as emails, and if text messaging had not come around, email probably would have been the mechanism used. Will one of these technologies “win” and the other fade away? It doesn’t seem likely. Each of these seems to have developed its own niche. Text messages lack formatting options such fonts, tables, and colors; and a message is required to be short. Would text messages be more usable if you could send longer messages with formatted text and layout elements like HTML provides? Text messages are casual, often with spelling errors and the heavy use of abbreviations and acronyms, but that is the environment we’ve come to expect. Text messages are different enough from email messages to make them a useful tool for daily communication.

While technology could advance to allow text messages to share many of the features of email, it seems that would destroy its value, so we do not predict that will happen. In ten years people will still send short messages for nearly instantaneous communication, and will still expect little or no advertising via this method. Meanwhile, look for richer, more informative communications to come via email.

The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things

More of our modern devices can communicate with us in non-verbal ways. Refrigerators, thermostats, vacuums, cars, etc., all have information to push to us in ways that aren’t accomplished via simple screen displays. How will these devices push their messages in the future? Will it by via email, text messages, or some new technology that hasn’t been invented yet? Part of the challenge is the same one we face today. I would be okay with my car texting me that someone is attempting to break in, but I don’t want text messages that there is a carwash nearby offering a discount. So perhaps the Internet of Things will need to use both text messaging and email. Finding the dividing line between useful messages I want to receive from my refrigerator and annoying messages that irritate me will certainly still be an issue in ten years.

New Email Authentication Protocols

This is a safe guess. New methods of validating emails are suggested all the time. Most of these, most notably DMARC, are built on SPF and DKIM, the two current standards for email validation. We don’t see any changes in this, but we don’t think DMARC is the last word in authentication either. We can foresee new methods that would make issues such as phishing and spoofing in their current forms extinct. That’s not to say there won’t always be scammers, but anything that makes it harder on them is okay by us.

CSS Animations

Until recently, any animation in an email was limited to gifs. Now we’re starting to see some clever use of CSS animation, such as Eddie Lin’s spectacular CSS-only fireworks display that Litmus used in an email this year. Right now, their use is still a novelty, but as more email clients ease up on CSS restrictions, and folks like Justin Khoo at FreshInbox, and Anna Yeaman at StyleCampaign continue to push the envelope of what’s possible in email design, we’re bound to see more of these types of kinetic displays crop up in emails.

More Videos in Email

No big surprise here. Some email clients already allow it. Since it’s HTML5 only, it’s just a matter of time before videos become common in emails. As to how people will react to this remains to be seen, but as long as most marketers don’t start using autoplay on these them, everything should be okay. Autoplay is the wild card, nobody likes videos to start playing when they reach a web page, and they’ll hate it even more if it happens upon opening an email. How email clients react to this will depends on how their users react. It’s a double-edged sword. People like videos and respond well to them, but when poorly executed, there are few things more annoying (for more on this subject, see Using HTML5 in Email: Video).

Simpler Responsive Design Techniques

Let’s face it. Short of sending unformatted text, it is difficult to come up with a design that works as well on an iPhone as it does on a desktop monitor. That was the whole reason for responsive email design. But as we reported in our four-part series on the subject, responsive email design can be a pain the neck to implement. We can foresee a day when this won’t be such a hassle. When responsive set-ups will be so standardized that implementing will only take a couple additional properties or classes. We’re already starting to see this with CSS frameworks such as W3.CSS, Milligram, and Spectre, which don’t use any JavaScript. Expect more to come that will be specific to email. And while we’re on the topic of JavaScript…

HTML Scripting

JavaScript is a big no-no in email, and it’s easy to see why. As a programming language, it is not far removed from running an app. You’d never run an executable file that came attached to an email from someone you didn’t know (at least, we hope you wouldn’t), but opening an email that can run JavaScript is almost the same thing. Early on, some email clients tried offering JavaScript, but scam artists were quick to pounce on this.1

But we can see a day when JavaScript is abandoned in favor of newer features in HTML. HTML5 already has some of these features, but they can’t be used in email because none of the email clients recognize them yet. Eventually, most, if not all of HTML5’s features will be acceptable in email. We see this development arriving around the time that HTML8 is released. Of course, by then, email marketers will be telling us to format “like it’s 2017.”

Forms in email

Forms in Email

Right now, forms are taboo in emails. This is primarily a security issue. Forms require interactions that can include personal data, so email clients are understandably loathe to grant any email that much control. But as HTML5 achieves wider adoption in email, and designers start to really crank up what you can do with it, we can imagine a day when the email clients will find a way to make HTML-based forms acceptable without sacrificing security. If that happens, forms will start appearing in emails on a regular basis. It is the one feature we regular hear email marketers lament the absence of. If email safe scripting is ever developed, we predict this will be the first thing people will start including in their mailings.

“The Death of Email” Articles

We pretty safe on this next prediction. One thing that won’t have changed in ten years is that there will be articles predicting the death of email. In 2007, Slate magazine published an article titled “The Death of Email” in which they predicted that email would soon be eclipsed by other online services, such as “Facebook or MySpace.” Every year since then, online magazines and websites continued to predict the same thing—at least until the end of 2012, when Monetate’s quarterly report showed that email was crushing social media when it came to conversion rates. In spite of the evidence to the contrary, at least once a year, somebody writes an article declaring that email is on its way out, about to be replaced by the latest thing. Our prediction is that email will still be around in ten years, and still going strong, and so will the articles predicting its demise.

Incorrect Predictions

For our final prediction, we predict that some of the things we listed above will be wrong. We don’t think so, but looking at the predictions of others from ten years ago, we know better than to get too cocky. The future has a way of throwing curve balls. We realize some of these things are probably pipe dreams, but so was Dick Tracy’s wrist radio2, which led inventor Martin Cooper to create the first mobile telephone. It will be interesting to come back to this post in ten years and see how we did. What do you think? Are we on target or way off?

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1. Microsoft tried to take this idea one step further by allowing Visual Basic to be used in email, a move that proved to be disastrous.

2. According to the inventor, although the communicator in Star Trek is usually cited as his inspiration.

To IP or Not IP, That is the Question

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IP graphic
Internet Protocol (IP) addresses are how the Internet keeps track of who is where. They aren’t necessarily attached to specific email addresses, but they do contain potentially valuable information about a person’s geographic location (although, as we’ll see, this is an imperfect science). It stands to reason that the more information you know about your subscribers, the easier it is to tailor your content to fit their interests, so there is some value in attaching IP information to each email address, but be careful: Where you and your customers reside can affect the legality of this practice.

Using the IP Address

Your computer’s IP address is like a landline telephone. If everyone in a household is using that telephone, then everyone will show up under the same number. Like a telephone number, an IP address can give you a good idea as to where someone is located without showing you the exact address. A search on our own IP, for instance, turns in different results, but they are all in the Bay Area, which is where our headquarters are located. Even with this limitation, an IP address will narrow down the possible location of the subscriber, which can, in turn, help greatly with certain types of marketing.

Dynamic vs. Static

There are two kinds of IP addresses—dynamic and static. Their names suggest exactly what they are. A static IP address is one that never changes. Companies, for instance, will often be use a static IP address to help them send and receive data and allow others to easily log onto their servers. A static IP address is mandatory for certain activities such as VoIP and VPN to ensure stable connections. Individuals might also opt for static addresses if they plan to host a website on a server, or are highly active in the online gaming community.

Dynamic IP addresses are often used for home connections. They are considerably cheaper and the end user doesn’t have to worry about network configuration since this is handled automatically. As one might expect, geolocation is a little more reliable with a static address than a dynamic one, although both have some value here.

Linking IP addresses to the email addresses gives you ability to provide information as to when and where a person opted to receive email from you, eliminating potential claims that your mailings were unsolicited. Some ISPs ask for this information when investigating spam complaints. But there is a big caveat to using this approach: It might be against the law.

IP Addresses and the Law

The legality of linking IP addresses to email addresses changes from country to to country. In some countries, it is perfectly legal, while others see it as a violation of privacy, allowing it only after the subscriber has agreed to let the ESP use that information. In the US, for instance, there is no single, comprehensive federal law regulating the collection and use of personal data. Even if there were, the odds of it being enforced are slim considering that the FTC only brings a handful of cases against emailers to court every year, and most of those are because the products these companies are selling don’t work, rather than privacy breaches or CAN-SPAM violation.

In Canada, which has some of the strictest spam laws on the books, a record of an opt-in is required. Canada has strict rules about what information the government can gather about a person, but the laws concerning the private sector appear less well defined. If businesses aren’t allowed to attach IP information to email addresses, then the verification of subscription becomes a lot harder. This summer, a second aspect of CASL takes effect that lets individuals challenge a company’s email programs, meaning anyone can bring any company to court. This sounds like a recipe for disaster, but only time will tell.

In Great Britain, you can collect IP addresses, but you start treading into the danger zone once you connect those IP addresses to individual email accounts. An IP address by itself isn’t considered personal data, but when it’s combined with other information to build a profile of an individual, it suddenly becomes personal data—even if that individual’s name is unknown. You’ll need to get permission from the recipients to do so. This isn’t a big deal., although most British companies use these additional requests for more specific information, such as the location of the recipient’s preferred store.

In most of the rest of Europe, things get even even trickier. In Europe, static IP addresses have been considered personal data for some time now, but on October 19, 2016, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that dynamic IP addresses can also qualify as personal data under EU privacy law. Additionally, the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court has ruled that collecting and storing IP addresses is in violation of the Personal Data Act.

These laws have been further enforced with the approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The regulation was passed by the EU Parliament in April of 2016. Although not specific to email, the regulation does require businesses to keep tight controls on their private data and gives your subscribers the “right to be forgotten.” Any data you have on them needs their approval and they can nix it at any point. This includes their name, photos, email addresses, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information, and computer IP addresses. The regulation has a two year grace period before they start cracking down on violators, and applies to any business doing business in the European Union.

The irony here is that by not allowing the ESPs to use this information, it makes it harder to verify when someone not associated with that email address is pranking the actual addressee, making it far more likely for that person to receive spam than they otherwise would.

Over in China they have a completely different take on the matter. As far as they’re concerned, an IP address in isolation isn’t personal data because it’s focused on a computer and not an individual. This reasoning was applied by the Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner in a complaint about Yahoo!’s disclosure of information about a journalist to Chinese authorities.

Approach With Caution

So what is the best technique? If your company does no business outside of the United States, and never plans to expand past that country’s borders, IP collection isn’t an issue. If, on the other hand, your clientele is international and you need to stay compliant in several countries, you’re better off either forgetting about collecting IP information, or adding a check box to the sign-in process to verify that the recipient has approved your use of their IP address information. Given the constantly shifting landscapes or laws on this subject. Some type of verification from the users that it’s okay to note their IP addresses is the safest route.

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A Guide to Using Emojis in Subject Lines

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emojis
We all get them, especially around the holidays: those emails with little pictographs in the subject line. At Halloween, they are jack-o-lanterns and ghosts (🎃, 👻), further into winter they might be snowmen or Christmas trees (☃, 🎄). Sometimes they relate to the sender’s industry. Guitar Center, for instance, regularly uses the guitar pictograph (🎸), while Webdesigner News starts every subject line with the image of a pencil (✏). These are emojis, and have become popular tools for spicing up subject lines to make them more appealing. In this article we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of using emojis, and things to look out for when using them.

Emoji or Emoticon?

First let’s get the out of the way the inevitable question, “What is the difference between an emoji and an emoticon?” An emoticon is a facial expression created using the limited assortment of punctuation that is available in basic English text. The most well-known example is the colon and right parenthesis indicating a smiling face: :) . The alternative to basic text is Unicode, a character coding system designed to include every character in every language. In Unicode, there is an emoji for a smiling face (☺), along with a large assortment of other tiny pictographs. Unlike a smiling face created with a colon and a right parenthesis, the emoji is one character, not two. There are several emojis you can choose from to indicate various levels of mirth (😄😃😀😊😁), along with characters for nearly every other human emotion (😯😨😭😡😳).

Emojis got their start on Japanese mobile phones, where they were used to replace emoticons. Although the names sound similar, the word emoji has nothing to do with emotions. It is a combination of the Japanese words for “picture” (e – 絵) and “character” (mo-ji – 文字).Their worldwide acceptance began when Apple decided to include emojis as a feature on its iPhones in 2009. Then in 2010, hundreds of emojis were encoded and introduced in the Unicode Standard, and more are added every day. As of this writing, there are 722 emojis available with Unicode character coding. Emojis have popped up everywhere from Android phones to Gmail.

As befitting their Japanese roots, some emojis are specifically aimed at Japanese culture and leave westerners scratching their heads. Emojis for foods such and Dango (🍡) and Oden (🍢), and festivals such as Tanabata (🎋) and Tsukimi (🎑) presumably don’t see much use in America and Europe, while other symbols, such as the white flower (💮) might be used, but in an entirely different context from how it’s used in Japan (in Japan it is used to mean “well done”).

Where Are They?

Unless you are using an iPhone to write your mailings, which is highly doubtful, finding the emojis on a keyboard can be tricky. You can type in the Unicode directly, but that is a pain in the neck, and you first have to know these codes to type them. For instance, to add an airplane (✈) to your subject line, you’d need to type in U+2708 (hold down the Ctrl+Alt+Shift keys, type U, type 2708, then hit enter). It’s a lot of work for one character, and it doesn’t always work anyway. Some desktop systems have shortcuts for inserting emojis, or special pull-down menus, but these are still slow. The easiest way to add emojis that we’ve found is iEmoji.com, which lets you compose the subject line on their web page, then copy and paste it to your email marketing software. But some care should be taken when doing this, which leads us to the next point: Why do some emojis work in subject lines and others don’t?

Question Marks and Empty Squares

Have you tried using emojis in your subject lines, only to have them replaced by small squares or questions marks? There are two primary causes for this. The first is that you are using a newer, unusual emoji that is not included across all systems. The country flags, for instance, do not show up in most email reader subject lines, and often not in the content either. In most email readers, the newer ability to choose the skin tones of certain emojis isn’t available, and will add blank squares or question marks to a subject line (more on this below). When using emojis in the subject line, it is safest to stick to the default emojis, which usually appear in yellow.

With a few email readers, such as Live Mail, how it displays can even depend on where it is in the software. Take this example:

Live Mail comparisonAll three emojis appear in the list window on the left, but not in the title window on the right. The first emoji (the umbrella) appears correctly in both areas, while the others (the cat and dog) appear as empty boxes on the right. The reason for this is because the umbrella is one of the original emojis that were introduced in 1995. As a rule, these will appear in your subject lines more often than the newer emojis will. Some of these characters, such as the smiley face (☺), musical notes (♪ ♫), and card suits (♠ ♣ ♥ ♦) were added early on, and are available as symbol characters in basic English character sets.1 Here is a list of the original 1995 emojis:

☺ ☹ ☠ ☝ ✌ ✍ ❤ ❣ ♨ ✈ ⌛ ⌚ ☀ ☁
☂ ❄ ☃ ☄ ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ ☎ ⌨ ✉ ✏ ✒ ✂
☢ ☣ ↗ ➡ ↘ ↙ ↖ ↕ ↔ ↩ ↪ ✡ ☸ ☯
✝ ☦ ☪ ☮ ▶ ◀ ☑ ✔ ✖ ✳ ✴ ❇ ‼ 〰
♈ ♉ ♊ ♋ ♌ ♍ ♎ ♏ ♐ ♑ ♒ ♓
© ® ™ Ⓜ ㊗ ㊙ ▪ ▫

A second, and more likely cause of question marks in the subject line, is that your email is set to something other than Unicode. If the character you want to use is not available in the character set you are using, it will not appear in the subject line. Go to the settings while in your email marketing software and check the character encoding choice. If it doesn’t say “UTF-8” it’s probably not going to work in the subject line, even if it works in the content.

As a rule, it is never a good idea to use emojis to replace words in a subject line. If the emoji is replaced with a question mark, you might end up with a subject line that still makes sense, but says something you don’t want it to. For instance, if you replaced the word “love” with a heart in the subject line “You’ll ❤ our deals,” you could end up with this: “You’ll ? our ideas,” which isn’t exactly a confidence builder, and could be read as “You’ll question our deals.” In fact, a scan of various emails—and even web pages—shows that using the heart symbol to replace the word love might just be the number one gaffe. I even found the following line in an online article about emojis: “There’s a lot of ? for emoji these days….”

It is safer to put the emojis at the beginning and the ends of the subject lines, or as breaks between words. Even so, you should ask yourself: If a question mark appears instead, will it affect the subject line’s meaning?

I’m Not Mad, I’m Happy

In some cases, the emojis from one operating system are different enough from the emojis in another to cause confusion. Here, for instance is the emoji labeled “drooling face”:

drooling emojiTwo appear happy, two appear unhappy, and the last one looks downright scared. One doesn’t even appear at all. While it is unusual for emojis to vary this much across platforms, it doesn’t hurt to check the emoji you plan to use to make sure it doesn’t change too drastically when viewed on different devices and operating systems. The easiest place to do this is at the Unicode Consortium’s Full Emoji Data page. There, you’ll find all the emojis—including a few that appear animated, such as the Gmail emojis, which sometimes cry, bounce up and down, or wink. The Unicode Consortium’s Data page also lists the date when each emoji was introduced, which can help you determine how safe it is to use that emoji. An emoji introduced in 2016 is probably not going to show up in a subject line, and might not even show up in the content.

Politically Correct Emojis

While animation is more site specific, and doesn’t affect the individual emojis, there is another recent addition to the emojis that will affect how and emoji behaves in a subject line. After people complained that the emojis of hands and faces were not ethnically inclusive enough, a feature was added whereby you can specify the gender of an emoji and its skin color. Care must be taken when using skin tones and genders as these add additional code to each emoji. For instance, the code for the left pointing finger emoji is U+1F448, while the code for the same emoji with pale skin is U+1F448+U+1F3FB. In subject lines, even if the original default emoji appears, the gender and color information will in most cases appear as empty square blocks or question marks. For this reason, it is best to stick to the basic emojis and avoid skin tones and gender additions until more mail readers are compatible with these features.

Emojis and Deliverability

As always, the most important question is: Can emojis affect the deliverability of an email? Our tests suggest that, under some circumstances, emojis do appear to have a negative effect on an email’s deliverability, but a minor one. Mailings with large quantities of emojis in the subject line and contents were more likely to end up in the spam folder, while those that used them more judiciously appeared to have no problems getting through. Obviously a subject line that is nothing but emojis is probably not a good idea. Some spam filters can identify is a subject line is nonsense, and a string of emojis looks just like gibberish. We recommend restricting the use of emojis in subject lines to no more than three, and to make sure there is actual text in the subject line as well. Keep in mind also that there may be aspects of your content that are pushing your mailings close to a negative rating, and the emojis won’t do anything to improve the situation. For for information on what to look out for, check out our white paper, Deliverability Enhanced.

As to which emojis provide the best open rates, a quick scan of the articles that discuss this shows that there is no consensus here. In all likelihood, this data changes from month to month anyway. The only meaningful answer is to see how they do in your own tests, and proceed accordingly. Like those articles that tell you which day of the week is best for sending, any article that claims to know which emoji performs best is working from a limited data set and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Test and Test Again

If you do plan to use emojis in your subject lines, our advice is, as always with any first time format experimentation, test and test again. We would also recommend paying closer attention than usual to the deliverability results in your tests. Some A/B split testing against subject lines without emojis or with different emojis isn’t a bad idea either. Emojis can be a fun way to enliven your subject lines and increase open rates, but it will still require testing with your own recipients to see if they’ll work for you.

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1. It should be noted that the term “emoji” was not applied to these character, however, until Unicode version 6.0, released in 2010.

Watch Out For Typos!

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Email typos
Here at Goolara we’ve been seeing a recent rise in a peculiar method of gathering and hijacking information. The basic mechanism isn’t new, but the fact that it’s being used with clickthroughs appears to be a new twist. It is based on exploiting mistyped email addresses by purchasing domain names that are either misspelled or have letters added or removed. You might, for instance, intend to send an email to someone at a Gmail address, but because you typed too quickly, it’s going to “gmial.com” instead; or maybe your finger hit two keys at once, and the mailing is sent to “gmailk.com.” In both cases, the domains are registered and your mail is actually being processed by these sites. To put it another way: That mail you accidentally sent to the wrong address is being received by someone who has intentionally chosen their domain name to take advantage of this mistake. Is that someone you really want to have any of your email data?

This technique, called typosquatting, has long been used to trick people into visiting sites (called domain doppelgangers) that look a lot like the sites they are imitating.1 Most of it disappeared after laws were passed and some successful lawsuits were filed against these pretenders, but the legislation didn’t address the other part of the equation. The law can prevent them from mimicking an existing website, but anyone who has registered one of these domains still has the ability to receive any email sent to it. While a website could be construed as attempted fraud, simply receiving misaddressed email falls into a very gray area. Even this isn’t that new. These fakes sites have always accepted email. The new twist is that they are now apparently clicking on the links in the email they receive.

The Man-in-the-MailBox

It’s hard to know the reasons for these clickthroughs. It’s possible that they are intended to keep the address active and defray suspicion. Or it might be part of more complex scheme, such as the “Man-in-the-MailBox” scam detailed in a report on domain doppelgangers put out in 2011 by Peter Kim and Garret Gee of the Godai Group. In that report, Kim and Gee explained how they set up set up 30 doppelganger accounts for various firms and received 120,000 e-mails in the six-month testing period. Acting as middlemen, they would pass on data to the correct address and then send the information back to the intended recipient. In this way, they accrued 20 GBs of data that included everything from trade secrets to individual passwords.

It is also a method of verifying the links, which can be useful for ascertaining the value of each email address. This may seem like an inefficient way to collect addresses, but the evidence suggests that the processes here are handled primarily by bots, so minimal manpower is required. Like an army of ants, they achieve their goals methodically over time. If you intended, for instance, to send something to a specific address at Gmail, the typosquatter can now figure out the correct address without much difficulty and add it to their list. With the amount of email data passing through the Internet every hour, it is possible to build up a substantial list of names in no time.

Why It’s Important

You might be tempted to ask why this is important? After all, it’s only a few addresses here and there, but there are costs involved. Keep in mind that you’re paying for those addresses, and you’re paying for sending to those addresses. If you’re using an automated system to relay leads to your sales department, then clickthroughs from these sources can cause your sales staff to waste valuable time chasing down these imaginary leads and doing follow-ups that go nowhere.

It is also possible that some of these people are up to things far worse than merely collecting addresses. While many companies don’t accept email responses, some set up their mailings so that they send email replies to specific staff members. You don’t want to put your sales team in a situation where clicking on links from these sources—either accidentally or absentmindedly—lead to bigger problems. It is also worth remembering that these address mistakes simultaneous keep those subscribers from receiving your intended email while opening them up to receive email from these questionable sources.

Protecting Yourself

As you might imagine, protecting yourself against this problem can be tricky. Checking for typos only goes so far, and when your mailing list includes thousands of names, it’s almost impossible to catch them all. In Symphonie, we’ve added logic to the process that identifies and blocks these domains when we encounter them, so you don’t have to worry about the most commonly mistyped addresses. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stay on your guard, though. Like rust, these scammers never sleep and they are coming up with new naming variations all the time. Catching these people in that act is a responsibility we all share.

Requiring a double opt-in will help somewhat. Since, in most cases, the email address is initially entered by the subscriber, getting them to verify it will eliminate a lot of the potential for typos. It won’t keep you from accidentally sending the verification email to an incorrect address, but it will help keep that address off your recipient list. The mistyped address still has the potential to end up on scammer’s list, but at least you won’t be sending wasting your time and money sending mailings to them.

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1. Technically, there is difference between typosquatting and domain doppelgangers. Typosquatting means a domain that is similar to the intended domain, but is misspelled, while a domain doppelganger will appear almost the same, but with periods either added, removed or misplaced (for instance yourcompanyc.om instead of yourcompany.com).

Deliverability and Volume Shifting

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Deliverability chart 1
Sometimes you might come up against a situation where the perfectly innocuous email you are sending has trouble getting delivered to certain addresses. You may have had no problems sending to that ISP in the past, and the mailing might even be based on a previous design that got through without problems, but suddenly you’re finding your mailings held up and greylisted. When this happens, you’ll want to check your mailing patterns for sharp increases in volume. If you see a spike like the one shown in the picture above, there’s a good chance you’ve uncovered the problem. It is easy enough to avoid, but it might require you to retool your approach to campaign marketing.

The Volume Factor

Besides using keywords, text-to-image ratios, bit.ly link redirects and a myriad of other ways to assess if an email is possible spam, ISPs and other mailbox providers also use your mailing patterns to identify when something’s wrong. If you suddenly decide to send out 100,000 emails, where you have previously been restricting your mailing output to a few thousand, you might find your mailing suddenly throttled way back on its delivery. Sudden spikes like this can cause even well-established companies to experience delivery problems. Email marketing programs that otherwise do not have deliverability issues will see their mailings blocked or greylisted when the volume of delivery jumps suddenly at irregular intervals.

On one level this makes perfect sense. If one day you suddenly saw a fifty-fold increase in traffic to your site, you’d immediately suspect something was wrong. The mailbox service providers react the same way, erring on the side of caution. Of course, if you regularly send 100,000 emails a day, the email provider won’t see anything unusual and will (unless there are other issues) allow your mailing to land in the Inbox.

This isn’t to say you have to send the same number of emails every day, but it does suggest that a little planning goes a long ways. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Don’t be Sporadic

It’s okay to have spikes in your mailings as long as the occur at fairly regular intervals. You may have some problems the first time it happens, but if you do it regularly, most email service providers will adjust and allow more of your email through in the future. The chart shown at the top of this article shows what happens when a once time high-volume mailing arrives at a mailbox provider—alarm bells go off, even if you’ve had no deliverability problems in the past. If the same sender has a pattern of sending large quantities once a week, the odds are better that the mailing will get through.

Deliverability chart 2

Watch Out For Greylists

Provided there are no obvious spam triggering elements in your mailings, then, in all likelihood, emails stopped because the mailing’s been greylisted. In one sense, this is a good thing because it means the email will eventually reach the recipients, but it can also be a very bad thing if that particular mailing is time sensitive. A one-day only, Fourth of July sales announcement won’t do anyone much good if it doesn’t reach the Inbox until July fifth. Be especially careful if you’re planning on time-zone specific emails to arrive exactly when desired. You may want all the email delivered at 10:00, but it’s unlikely to happen.

Caution is always the best approach. Either send it out a little early, or make sure you have a policy in place if the mailing gets delayed. Even this might not help, though. While most ISPs throttle back the delivery of sudden, unexpected sending spikes, some ISPs will block a mailing completely if they feel the sudden spike is suspicious.

No Sudden Moves

Spreading the mailings out over a few days can also help avoid problems associated with a sudden spike in mailings. Then over time, if you keep your mailings on a regular schedule, you can consolidate these mailings into once mass mailing without difficulty. The window for most ISPs is about a month, but even monthly volume spikes will cause problems. A weekly spike has a better chance of getting through. Likewise, a regular pattern, such as every Tuesday, will work better than mailing spikes at random intervals.

You Don’t Have the Last Word

You can get as angry at the mailbox providers as you like, but if they decide to throttle back your time-sensitive emails, there’s not a lot you can do about it. Yelling at your email marketing software provider (ESP) and insisting that they must deliver your mailing when you want them delivered is placing the blame in the wrong place. The mailbox providers hold all the cards, so if they decide to greylist your mailing, there’s not much your ESP can do about it beyond verifying the reasons for the delivery problems. Any changes in tactics will have to come from your side of the equation.

The realities of deliverability cannot be overlooked, they require you to plan your promotional marketing scheduling carefully. If you are not the one in charge of the mailing schedule, you’ll want to make sure that the person who is in charge fully understands the factors involved in deliverability and how to best use the email marketing channel. Would there be a loss if a monthly newsletter was delivered over several days, or split into 25% a week? If not, then you might want to consider parsing the mailings out over a longer period of time, or, if you’ve decided to send more email on a regular basis, ramp up the sending over time.

Large volume mailing without encountering deliverability problems is easily achieved, but it might require you and the management to change your mindset on how you send email. Email clients aren’t going to change the way they do things just for you. You have to change to keep in sync with the way they do things. Make sure you’re consistent above all. If that’s not possible, try spreading out a large send over several hours. This gives the ISPs a chance to verify that your mailing is legit and will help ensure the mailing won’t run into major stoppages.

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