Is Gmail stealing your clicks?

First of all I would like to have the chance to express how much I am fond of Gmail (and google services at large) that I use a lot.
However, since the beginning I have wondered what is the proportion of lost clicks on Gmail addresses.
Why would I suspect a lower click rate on Gmail? Simply because Google displays contextual ads on the right of each and every email received on Gmail.
The ad being contextual, I sometimes see ads for (supposedly) better deals than the one advertised in the email I just received.
I have of course investigated but it is quite hard to have consistent measures on this matter since the click rate on the ads will highly depend on the email itself and its content (I assume that an email with mainly text will be better scanned and the ads will be more precise and therefore will gram more clicks).
This must also depend on the kind of product you sell and how likely it is that competitors might buy related adwords.
As a matter of fact, if I haven't found absolute proof that the number of clicks is lower on Gmail, I have noticed that for most of my clients, image only (mainly I should say) artworks tend to have a higher click rate than the ones including a bigger amount of text information.
Again: I will not claim this to be a proof that Gmail is taking clicks away from email advertisers, my questioning will probably never be answered since it would need a full comparison of clicks on the creative and on the ads which is very unlikely to happen some day.


My biggest concern is more "philosophical": is it really fair that when advertisers pay for an email design, email addresses, data management, broadcast (even though it has been proven that email marketing is among the least expensive forms of marketing), knowing also that the "precedence: bulk" parameter in the header indicates that it is an email blast, Google would display ads there?

here is an example of email I received that illustrates my point (you can click on the image to see a bigger version):

As I said in introduction, I am really happy with my Gmail inbox and I am aware that in order for Google to make cash out of this service, they need to get a chance to advertise on the product.
I sometimes even find the contextual ads quite useful when planning a travel or a night out with friends (the ads sometimes give good ideas or help find good deals), my only concern is that these ads are displayed on advertising emails.
It feels to me as if the Tv ads were displayed with a banner for a competitor at the bottom of the screen.
Google announced recently that they were about to increase the quality of these ads in Gmail, for that matter, is it really a good news?

GoodMail to cease operations

Although there is still no official announcement on the GoodMail website, several legitimate sources have spread the word that the company will cease operations in a few days.

Here is the text which is being sent around:

It is with great regret that I must inform you that Goodmail will cease operations on Tuesday 2/8/11.  We will continue to provide CertifiedEmail tokens until Monday 2/8/11 5pm PST at which time our Token Generators will be taken offline.  Tokens provided between 2/1/11 and 2/7/11 will be free of charge.  All tokens provided during the month of January will be charged at regular rates.

We are working with our ISP partners to accommodate a transition period for your IP addresses so as to decrease the effort required for warm up.  In the meantime, please begin to transition your traffic off of CertifiedEmail.

Please contact customercare if you have any questions.

Since I've never been a very big certification fan (except in some specific cases), I wouldn't say this will rock my (email marketing) world. However, it will be interesting to see in the upcomming months how the former GoodMail clients (if the announcement is true and no one takes the followup) will handle their email strategy in the upcomming weeks.

More information available on the email expert website

Unsubscribe me !

It's been a long time since I last posted on this blog.
The main reason for this is that I didn't have much time, another  reason is I didn't have much to say.
However, this week I decided to unsubscribe to all the different Newsletters I was subscribed to in france (now living in Canada, these newsletter were not very interesting to me.

I thought unitl now that most of the best practices for unsubscribe processes were respected by all (or most) advertisers. I was wrong.

Out of the - more or less - 50 newsletter processes I had to unsubscribe from, a couple, had a direct unsubscrbe, landing on the confirmation page, most of the unsubscribe links landed on a pre-filled form where I just had to submit.
However, I found out quite a few newsletters where I had to type in my email (which is not too bad) but also 5 newsletters where I had to log in to an account (to which I of course lacked the credentials).
The title going to a couple of newsletters that didn't even have an unsubscribe link.

So, once and for all: Please always have a clear unsubscribe process, the unsubscribe link should ALWAYS be available in the footer of your emails, one should NEVER have to log in on your website to be able to change his email preferences.

If you fail to follow these - simple - advices, you take the risk to get spam complaints, unsatisfied users and geopardize your online reputation (both vs the email providers and the users).

One 2 One email marketing

A couple of weeks ago, Cabestan-Canada organised a conference in Montreal, QC (in French) on One 2 One email marketing.

For those of you interested (and understanding French), here is the powerpoint of the presentation:

Le Marketing One2one par courriel

View more presentations from Anton Panaitesco.

I also made a translation of the presentation available here:

One 2 One email marketing

View more presentations from Anton Panaitesco.

Please feel free to comment.

New hotmail email filtering system

An Email Insider article mentions that hotmail should be releasing pretty soon a new inbox placement metrics system based on the user engagement.
It's true this story has been around for almost a year, but knowing what Gmail just did, rolling out their new (Beta) priority inbox, it makes sens that hotmail wouldn't want to be left behind and that it should probably speed up the  switch to a more user oriented inbox placement.
On a more general point of view, I reckon this user engagement measurement system will probably in the end be added to the spam filtering systems on a global scale.
After all it's probably the most sensitive and logical way to filter spam.

What will Gmail's Priority Inbox change in email marketing?

This has been a global tendency over the last years: to get rid of Spam and other unsolicited, unwanted or unneeded emails, ISPs have tried to classify email senders and sort them into 3 categories:

1 - Spam and unsolicited emails : Usually refused by the server
2 - Unwanted emails : Usually sent to the junk folder
3 - Regular mail : Delivered to the inbox.

The thing with this system was that it was based on a statistical analysis of several elements (complaints, hardbounces, email quality, average open rates,...) out of the total number of their users you were targetting.

Gmail is now rolling out their beta version of Priority Inbox. This system will continue to work along side the old one (meaning Gmail will keep filtering incoming email based on statistical data, but now, they will sort the emails automatically for their users:
Gmail will analyze how you react to a certain type of emails and will sort it accordingly in your inbox.
This sorting will have two levels : important and unimportant.
According to what we know, this analysis will be based on how often you read the emails you receive from a given sender and how often you reply.

The "funny" thing here is that this system will make it almost impossible for email marketing emails to reach the priority inbox, the reason for this is that it's quite unlikely that any of your clients will open each and every email you send to them and even less likely that they will ever reply to one.

At the end of the day a "regular" inbox will probably be cut in half : the personal emails up and the newsletters down.

I expect quite a drop on open rates for Gmail addresses in the first weeks / months after the roll out, time for the users to get used to this new display and to get the habit of checking the bottom list for your communications, but I also expect that this system will lead the way to new forms of one 2 one spam filters that will no longer be at the ISP level but at the user level.

This will have several implications:
First, it will emphasize the need to clean up your database on a regular basis since your inactive users will very likely no longer receive any of your emails.
Second, the deliverability management will no longer rely solely on ISPs but will have to fine tune and focus on how users react to the broadcasts.

On the user side, I'm pretty confident this is a huge leap towards clean inboxes and value added email communication.

On the ESP side... good luck, have fun!

The new hotmail

How could I describe the brand New hotmail?
I could list all the new features in a very long post and discuss them one by one but this would be too boring on a blog dedicated to email marketing since the changes in this version are (for the most) feature related, the spam filtering remains MS SmartScreen and the rendering system remains unchanged except for one noticeable thing that I will discuss hereafter.

So to put it in a minimal number of words, the new hotmail is now just like Gmail, except all the google features are here Miscrosoft ones.

As for the rendering, the only change I noticed is that this latest version seems to ignore the body align center and table (width 100%) align center.
A good way around this is to add your align center code in your CSS as well (please do not replace the alignment parameters that are inline, Gmail and Outlook 2007 still scrap the CSS).

Please feel free to comment if you notice anything else.