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So that’s it.  Problem solved, right?

I wish.  Whether from the unscrupulous selling of emails, to the hijacking of address books, etc., there are still many slices of spam slipping under the door to the inbox.  Enough in fact that we’ve become quick on the draw when it comes to flagging messages.  And it’s evident that users fatigued from dealing with an ever increasing volume of email have taken to flagging many legitimate messages merely because they seem spammy, are annoying or because they’re seeking vengeance against senders that abuse our patience.  And therein lies the trouble.  It’s helpful and necessary to identify true spam, but when a sender’s legitimate messages get flagged it hurts the brand, the delivery rate of the IP address (and anyone sharing that address) and may even cause loss of whitelisting.

Here at Sailthru we’re constantly advising our clients that spam is in the eye of the beholder.  Just because you obtained a user email though sound practices doesn’t mean you can take that interest for granted.  Behavioral studies are showing that people react to what’s happening on their computer screen the same way they do in life.  Which is to say, if you wouldn’t do it out there, don’t do it in here.  Would you leave five voice mails with a friend during the day just to say “hi”?  (note: if you said yes…you might need a hobby.)  And which would be more annoying, the frequency of the calls, or the fact that they were devoid of content?  Answer: it doesn’t matter.

If you want an engaged, responsive user base that looks forward to your messages and keeps you in the inbox, then be sure to follow these five C’s:

-be CONSIDERATE.  There are real people, real busy people just like you receiving those emails who deserve to be treated like friends.
-be CONTENT driven.  We all want real content–a reason to open and spend time with messages.
-be CONCISE.  There’s no prize for longest or most busy email.
-be CREATIVE in design, branding and delivery.  Think about, test and get feedback on the user experience to your messages.
-be CONSISTENT.  More isn’t necessarily better, but if you’re weekly BE weekly, if you’re daily BE daily.

Because ultimately spam is whatever you say it is.

I’m sometimes called upon to come up with subject lines and copy for campaigns, a task I enjoy and at which fancy myself pretty darn good.  But for one campaign we ran an A/B split test with the competing subject headings of, “Half-off for the Holidays” versus my “Everything half-off (even the partridge in the pear tree)”.  I was pretty confident I had the winner, but in comparing the results we noted that while the open rate was higher for mine, the more bland heading held a slight, but definitive advantage in clicks. Worse yet, the more bland heading had clearly resulted in more conversions to sales.

So what had happened?  There are many ways to interpret the data, but here are just a couple:

1.) People preferred the bland subject heading (I don’t believe it, but it is the simplest interpretation and we like to shave with Occam’s razor here at Sailthru.)

2.) People on that particular list are the type that like more simple subject lines (i.e. I didn’t know my audience.  It’s quite possible, but given the hip nature of the company sending the email I still don’t believe it.)

3.) Perhaps the clever subject heading had gotten some responders who wouldn’t have otherwise to open the email.  Ah!  Now we’re on to something.  (I’m not just saying this because it makes me sound better, I swear.)

Another way of phrasing this third interpretation is that those who clicked through and purchased were among the most engaged users of the site and were not heavily influenced by the cleverness of the subject line (or lack thereof).  If that’s so, then why had the simpler version resulted in more sales?  That’s not clear, though it is possible that given the list size results were skewed by one or two heavy buyers.

However, since our goal for that particular email was conversion to sales my rationalizations couldn’t hold sway and we went with the more simple heading.  But if our focus had been to build the size of our active list perhaps we would have run the other campaign; it had shown a small but decisive advantage in getting people to open the email.  Of course none of this takes into account the monumental importance that relevant and interesting content have on behavior once the email has been opened.  But that’s a topic for another posting.  Just remember, when running an A/B test take a close look at your analytics, they may reveal some interesting and unexpected behavior.  Even if it’s your own.

For detailed instructions on how to perform an A/B split visit:  http://docs.sailthru.com/ab_split

First a definition of terms: in it’s basic form an A/B split test is the competing of two versions of an email within a given campaign, each on a small percentage of a list.  Having monitored responses to each, the more effective of the two test emails is then sent to the remainder of the list.  It is important to remember that the two competing versions are run on exclusive segments of the list, that is, test recipients receive either version [A] or version [B], but not both.  The purpose and great power of an A/B split test lies in the ability to determine how your users are likely to respond to an email before having sent it to the vast majority of them.  Of course, coming up with two versions of a single campaign also puts to the test your basic assumptions about who your users are and how they will respond to a given message, thus making it a teaching tool as well.

Our system has a default setting of 10% for each of the A/B segments, which means that 80% of the list is withheld.  So, under the default settings, the winning email can be sent to 90% (10% test + 80% final) of the list (unless the final version of the email is a hybridized third version… So many options!).  You can specify any number of recipients for your tests, just remember that you want it to be a large enough proportion for the test to be meaningful, and a small enough proportion that the vast majority of the list receive the most effective version of your email.

A 50:50 A/B test is not really an A/B test
We sometimes get requests to run A/B tests on a different proportion of a given list.  The system lets you choose any fraction of your list that you specify.  But quite often we are requested to run a split of 50% and 50%.  As I said before, the system will let you do this, but just know that to do so defeats a central purpose of the A/B test.  After-all, once you’ve run your test on 100% of the list it’s too late to use any of the knowledge gained!  And even if you were to send the same email a second time you’d be in new conditions and sending to users who, at least half of which, had received the ad already.

For detailed instructions on how to perform an A/B split  visit:  http://docs.sailthru.com/ab_split

So far twitter has avoided the advertising route, but why not do something like the below? At the bare minimum we’d like them to brand their emails and provide some thing more than just an alert. In this example we’ve included some links to other people my new follower follows.

Twitter follow example email

@twitter  We’d love to help send your email! Call us.

You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.

So why send a poorly formatted welcome email. If you don’t engage the user now at this touchpoint where they are expecting your email, how do you expect to engage them when you send your marketing message.

The two biggest problems with welcome emails:

1. Not engaging
2. Doesn’t make it to the inbox

Both result with your new signup not coming back!

Imagine the following scenario, Joe Bloggs signs up at your website, he lands on the page after sign up and gets a call from his boss, he picks up the phone and starts talking, after he’s done he goes back to the site and realizes he has no time to look at it but takes another peek. Fast forward 4 hours to the end of the day…

Joe Bloggs looks at his email and he sees the welcome email from yoursite.com, he opens it and it’s a simple blah blah non branded email – he deletes it and goes home. If we take this further, next week he gets a marketing message from you that is all nice and pretty, but he’s already thinking not sure why I bothered so ignores it.

What if the welcome email had grabbed his attention again, got him back to the site at the end of the day? Or just given him some branding so that when he next got a marketing email he’d recognize your brand and actually give it a read?

Finally, consider ecommerce, your welcome to checkout conversion rate can be increased dramatically with great welcome emails. If you are still reading this – STOP – and go edit your welcome emails!

Since CAN-SPAM essentially says peer initiated are OK (albeit this was before web mail address books were being scraped as a daily basis), we’ve asked our clients to follow our best practices and we ask that if you are doing them yourselves that you do as well. It will improve your chances of delivery into the inbox, and you won’t be alienating people and degrading your domain!

Peer initiated emails should adhere to the following requirements:

1. Emails must clearly declare in the pre-header and footer that they are a peer initiated and show the address they were initiated by along with easy access to the global unsubscribe link
2. Subject lines must be clear about the purpose of the email
3. Emails should contain mailing address, and links to the privacy policy and terms of use
4. The privacy policy must clearly state that you will not use email addresses from your user’s address book other to send the requested peer initiated email
5. Within the site UI where the user provides details to log into their web addressbook, their must be a notice that you will not be storing usernames, passwords or email addresses other than for the imminent use along with a link to the pricacy policy
6. The From address must be that of the customer service address for the website (the reply-to can be that of the requester)
7. The interaction with the user on the site must clearly indicate that emails are being sent on their behalf.
8. Sensible limits should be imposed so that people are not sending to their entire gmail address book which could be 2000+

We provide GetConnect as a service to grow communities and websites, but we are very strict at maintaining good standards.

Do you send an authentication email AND a welcome email or are they one and the same?

Do you send an email to a new user that hasn’t signed in again for a month?

Does your reset password email just contain a single link? Your touchpoints with your users are the best chance to tell them about your twitter account, or a new promotion. Just because it’s a reset password email doesn’t mean it can’t have extra information. Just make sure the purpose of the email is the main call to action. (And I hope you have a reset password email, not a “here’s your password” email – ALL passwords should be encrypted on ALL sites – lots of people still use the same passwords for all accounts and if you are not encrypting then you are a security flaw for the unfortunate).

I suggest you do a periodic review of your emails, make sure they contain good content, timely content, are easy to read, and engage your users. Think about it from your users point of view, would you like to receive these emails? Finally look at your bounce rates from your emails, you want to aim to keep your bounce rate as low as possible, a high bounce rate from traffic generated by email means something is not right.

In the mean time we will keep trying to make the email business a better place so that spammers and phishers can do no harm!

“There’s no email”, she said. In preparation I had her send report open. “It should be there…now!” as the status changed to delivered on the report. “Ping” went her email client, the email arrived within seconds.

“Ooh, how’d you know when I was going to get it, that was quick” she said.

I showed the client the back end admin for our real time delivery reports and how she could tell what emails were delivered and when. Tomorrow when Google updates her Analytics data she’ll be able to tell what links were clicked on too!

We have real time delivery reports with built in Google Analytics. I’m sorry but when clients see it in action for the first time… well, that stuff just never gets old.