It has been quite a while since I have had the opportunity to share information about Yahoo here on the blog, but there is new information to share.
Yesterday, Mark Risher from Yahoo spent some time talking with people about all things spam over at Yahoo. Matt from EmailKarma posted the transcripts as well as some excerpts from the talk. The really interesting bit, for me, was confirmation that Yahoo will be bringing back their FBL in the next few weeks. I have been hearing rumors about the return of the FBL for a while now, and it seems the general timeline (fall-ish) is accurate.
Speaking of the feedback loop, there have also been rumors that Yahoo is not accepting any changes to existing feedback loops. This does not seem to be the case. According to an internal person, companies who are currently in the beta FBL program can make changes to the program by contacting the postmaster team.
Mark Brownlow has a great article up about how senders can stop subscribers from regretting they signed up for mail. He starts off saying
So how to avoid subscriber’s remorse?
The obvious one - and stop me if you’re heard this before - is sending relevant, timely, useful emails. Unfortunately, remorse can set in long before you have the chance to establish your value through your future emails. So your “remorse reduction strategy” needs to begin before the subscriber has even opted-in.
He lists a number of strategies to minimize subscribers hitting the this is spam button because they did not get the mail they were expecting from a sender.
Sorry for the downtime, the machine running the blog had a motherboard fail and for various reasons (deadlines, family emergencies, etc) it has taken a bit of time to get the blog moved to another machine.
I do apologize for the time the blog was gone. Regular blogging will return tomorrow.
Through the grapevine, I have heard that PayPal is actually complying with the new CAN SPAM rulemaking and offering one-click unsubscribes.
Yesterday, David announced a new suite of tools to help senders troubleshoot blocking problems more efficiently.
DJ over at Bronto blog has a post up about list churn / list attrition. She quotes a statistic published by Loren from MediaPost (the original post is behind a subscription wall) that a list will lose 30% of their subscribers year over year. This is similar to a statistic that I use, but the context I have seen the published statistic in is slightly different. DJ offers suggestions on how to reduce this churn. All the suggestions are great, but I think that they slightly miss the point. There are multiple processes that can be described as list churn. One is churn DJ addresses, that is people unsubscribe from a mailing list. The other is people abandon their email addresses. Individual mailers have some control over the first type of churn, but almost no control over the second.
I think the study Loren was quoting describes the second phenomenon not the first. In 2002, ReturnPath published a study that showed 31% of people changed email addresses in a single year. Understand, this does not mean that 31% of recipients on any particular list will actively decide to unsubscribe from a list or report it as spam or otherwise unsubscribe from that list. This is 31% of all email address owners will get a new address and abandon their current one. There are a few reasons for the churn.
- Email addresses provided through an employer do not carry to new employers.
- Recipients change ISPs.
- Recipients change email addresses at ISPs, often to avoid high levels of spam.
Engaging users may help convince them that mail is worth enough to subscribe with their new address. However, senders will still see addresses drop off their lists. The person behind the email address is no longer using that address.
Not all subscription and delivery problems are under the control of the sender. Address abandonment is one of those problems.
The new CAN SPAM rules take effect today. EmailKarma has a list of articles detailing the new rules. These rules govern handling of opt-outs and establish a “sender” category for purposes of physical address and opt-outs.
Kevin Hillstrom over at MineThatData blog talks about using email metrics and other customer information to not market to people who cost a company money.
I thought I would give everyone a brief update on my continuing saga with trying to unsubscribe from PayPal’s marketing list. Because of what I do, I have some options not available to the average recipient. One of the things I did is ask people I know if they had any contacts at PayPal who may be able to address this issue.
I was given an internal contact at PayPal by a colleague who works at one of the certification companies. I sent the PayPal contact a brief summary of my experience. She explained she was not in a department that handled email any more, but that she forwarded my mail on to the responsible people. A little later I received another message saying that I had been unsubscribed and they were examining the tapes of my call. She also mentioned that their unsubscribe process would be changed “sometime in mid-July.” I was not given any details.
A colleague who attended the recent AOTA meeting in Seattle offered this comment.
I sat at a table during lunch with Michael Barrett, the CISO of Paypal recently at AOTA and I can assure you he is fully aware of CAN-SPAM laws and changes. Whether that translates to all layers of the company or not is another issue (one they are clearly not handling well). Ironically, his trust presenation talked about these types of battles for large companies.
In addition to looking for some personal contacts at PayPal, I contacted the vendor where I made the purchase from in February using a credit card through PayPal. He shared with me the information PayPal sent to him, including the notice that my PayPal account was unregistered. Unequivocal evidence that the last time I used their service, that I did not have an account with them. They had no business sending me that email.
His information confirms that their marketing message did violate CAN SPAM. The claims of the customer support reps that I had an existing account are contradicted by PayPal’s own statements to the vendor in February. There was no opt-out on the message as I received it.
Over at the VerticalResponse blog, Janine walks us through analyzing clicks in an email and sets herself new things to test in future mailings. Well worth a read.
