Latest Spam trends

Google just posted an article about the latest Spam Trends (for Q2 2009)

They report that the takedown of 3FN had a lower (but still important) impact on the world's Spams.

All information can be read here:
Official Google Enterprise Blog: Q2 2009 Spam Trends

Email Marketing Gadgets

Once you have achieved a 99,5% delivrability, once you've split tested all you could on your email campaigns and that everything is optimized, when all your systems communicate together, when you track your users everywhere and that all systems and teams get the relevant information to be able to interact properly with your clients, there are still some things that you can add to your email strategy to enhance your clients' experience.

I call these gadgets, simply because they are absolutely not necessary but can be very nice to achieve this little something that will make you stand out of the pack

1) First gadget could be considered as a best practice (and might become one over the next years):
Although most people usually read their newsletter on a web browser or a mail reader, more and more people read theirs on their mobile device.
One thing I see more and more (even though most people STILL read emails the traditional way) is adding a second "view online" page.
The traditional view online link points to an HTML page. Well the second "view online" page could then be in text and the link should read: I you are reading this email on a blackberry, please click here to view the text version.

2) Second one is probably one of my favorites although it's probably not suitable for all kinds of email communications :
You (or your team) probably spend a lot of time editing the content of your newsletter, once this email has been broadcast, this content will be read by your openers; but after a couple of days it will die out.
One good way to continue use the benefit of this email content is to create an RSS feed of your email newsletter.
This way you will increase the value of all these brilliant articles you wrote.
This RSS feed could then also be an excellent alternate media to keep in touch with your company.

3) The third gadget is very trendy:
Add social networks publishing or forwarding possibilities to your emails.
As on blogs and websites, an email probably can be considered as an article, hence it's as relevant as anywhere else to add a "share this" button on your emails to post the emails (or link to HTML online page) to Facebook, twitter, linkedin,....)
I believe this has to be the next generation send to a friend process.

There's plenty of other gadgets (each ESP has theirs) but this has to be my top 3 yet.

Get new clients, keep them and increase their buying frequency.

This is the dream of any marketer and his worst nightmare as well (regardless the media they use).
Recently, a French survey* ran by Init and Thierry Spencer showed how little clients (at least in france) are loyal to Brands:

For supermarkets, 17% of respondents said they were less loyal to it than before. Brands are even in a worst shape when only 15% of respondents claim to be “totally” loyal to their Brands, when 21% of respondents conceded being less loyal than before.

In this nightmarish situation, Fnac.com and Brandalley came with a very good and aggressive campaign:

The first launched a loyalty program for people ordering at least once a week (regardless the amount of money spent), this card (called ONE) is different from the “regular” Fnac program since it grants access to a dedicated hotline and support desk, a dedicated queue and a dedicated welcome desk in shops.
Target here is obviously to push people in buying more often.

The latest made a “pay what you want” campaign, for several days in a row on a selection of products (10 000 products). Result was over 450 000 web visits the first day and 5 000 new clients on this campaign (each costing only 12€ to BrandAlley).

These two examples of marketing strategy shows how aggressive Brands are getting in getting new clients and trying to get the most ROI on them as possible.

*Survey can be seen here (in french)

Verizon is dead.

What a month!

After the tele2.fr emails about to die out soon (see post), Verizon is now out for good.

I received an alert from Retrunpath:
[...]Verizon's telephone business in the Atlantic North East, sold back in 2007, has completed their transition of email addresses. The migration of Verizon addresses to Fairpoint Communications started a few months ago and was completed during this last week. [...]

The error code received on the SMTP log is the following: 550 4.2.1
It should be considered as a Hardbounce (dead email).

Still on the Returnpath alert email:
[...] There is no 1 to 1 conversion of Verizon to Fairpoint Communications so simply changing the domain will not suffice in this case.[...]

You can trash right away all Verizon email addresses in your DB

What is a Spam?

I've been discussing Spam on this blog for months now.
I've given out, what are according to me the best ways not to be considered as a Spammer.

Now that time passed and that, working at an ESP, I've seen number of very different emails and clients being Spam blocked by ISPs and Spam reported by users.

Now the question that's on my mind currently is "what is the REAL definition of a Spam?"

First thing, as anyone living on the 21st century, I had a look at wikipedia for a definition, there it is

This is mostly a technical definition and a collection of facts.

Unfortunately I think all is not that simple, I think the definition of a Spam varies according to the point of view.

Let's try and see how we would describe a spam according to who we are:
Sender: Well, unless you are one of the Spammers sending Viagra advertising knowing you are spamming millions (billions) of people, you probably think you broadcast legitimate emails.

ESP: Same thing here, unless you are an illegal, underground ESP, you probably trust your clients (you probably have plenty of disclaimers in your contracts as well) and therefore consider you broadcast legitimate emails on behalf of your clients.

End users: We are all end users, so we probably all know what WE would consider as a Spam, basically any email sent to us that we didn't ask for or sent by someone we don't know.

ISPs and Spam filters: I kept those as last (although they should have been placed before the end user in the email chain) because I feel like this is the place where the problem is the less straitforward.
Several reasons for this:
First one is ISP loose money due to Spam, second reason is Spam filters make money out of it.
There's more and more Spam filtering company that make black or grey listed broadcasters pay for unlisting.
We can also mention the emailreg project launched by Barracuda which doesn't make everyone happy.
We also can mention all the certification programs that have flourished over the last years.
ISPs and Spam filter's definition of Spam is some kind of mix of:
Bad content, bad coding, bad keywords, poor sending domain reputation and poor IP reputation.
But even then, some of my clients match 100% of these criterias (I mean in good of course) but they will NEVER achieve 0% spam filtered emails

I guess the real definition of a Spam is an unsolicited email, but it's all a matter of perception after all.

Say goodbye to tele2.fr

As it was the case in February (see post here) with club-internet, tele2.fr email addresses will be the next victim of the SFR/Tele2/Cegetel merging in France.

I currently have no exact date from which these emails will stop to receive incoming messages, currently, no new tele2.fr email address can be created and the closing down should come shortly.

On the webmail's login page the following warning is displayed:

In June 2009
all @tele2.fr addresses will disappear

All users are invited to transfer their important messages on their @sfr.fr email address.

It's the third time domains dissapear this year in europe (after club-internet and Lycos europe domains)

Cabestan sent an alert to all its users to advise them to send quickly and email to all tele2.fr addresses they might have in their DB asking them to change their contact information.

YOU are responsible for who broadcast your ads

Gmail published recently an update to their Bulk Senders Guidelines concerning affiliate campaigns.

In a few words, this article states that brands are responsible for broadcasts made with their offers inside.

This is a general trend today across most ISPs, Freemail providers and anti-spam solutions.

Up to recently, only (or mostly) the sender reputation imported when sending bulk emails.
Now, link reputation, brand keywords and content itself gets more and more important in the filtering process.

This means that not only should you - as a brand - closely monitor who you use to communicate on your offers, but you should also be very cautious when sending third party advertising on who you advertise for.
Either way, lack of caution would lead to a big drop in your reputation as a direct marketing entity.

For those of you who want to read more, I already discussed this subject twice in October 2008 and November 2008