I have previously posted about my views on the best time to send email. There is no one best time to send email. In fact, my experience leads me to believe if someone said the best time to send email is at 4pm on Tuesday afternoon then 4pm on Tuesday afternoon would rapidly become the absolute worst time to send email.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I really like Mark’s #4 recommendation.

4. Make the question obsolete

An alternative option to second guessing the best time of day to send out your emails is to do away with the question entirely.

Eh?

Control of timing becomes less critical to success where the recipient either determines the time of send for you (a concept also applied in the one-to-one model described above). Or where the recipient is determined to seek your emails out, irrespective of when you send them.

Send relevant email that recipients want and they will seek you out. They’ll create filters to put your mail in their “must read” mailboxes, they’ll add your sending addresses to their address books, they’ll actively look for your mail and exactly when you send the mail will become less of a variable in response rates.

At least 2 different people commented on when the “best” time to send email was, completely missing the entire point of my post. When you send email should be related to when your users are active in their email client. Senders know this, because they can track times when people open and click on links in the email. The data is all there, it just needs to be mined.

Plus, if every sender sent mail at the exact same time, that being the best time to send mail, then it will immediately become the absolute worst time to send email.

Pay attention to your recipients, and not to the internet experts. Listen to what your customers and recipients are telling you. Do what’s best for them, not what’s best for Joe’s Bait and Tackle Shop.

Researchers recently developed a model for email user behaviour that splits email users into two classes “e-mailaholics” that send, and presumably read, email all the time and “day labourers” that send, and presumably read, email during standard business hours. There is very little transition between groups, 75% of users stayed in the same usage group over the 2 years of the study.

What does this mean for senders? Senders need to know know how their recipients use email and which user group recipients are. By analyzing clicks and opens, senders can classify recipients and use that data to send mail that is more relevant and better targeted.

h/t arXiv blog at Technology Review

Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged address that I only gave to Adobe. Sure enough, it’s Adobe and ESPN co-branded spam about college basketball sent to an Adobe list.

Down at the bottom of the email there’s a blob of tiny illegible text, in very pale grey on white. Buried in there is an opt-out link: “If you’d prefer not to receive e-mail like this from Adobe in the future, please click here to unsusbscribe“.

I’d prefer not to receive college sports spam from anyone, including Adobe, so I click on it and find a big empty white webpage with this in the middle of it:

There’s no Adobe logo. There’s no branding. There’s nothing to suggest that this is an Adobe related mailing list. There’s no mention of Adobe at all, in fact. There’s nothing to tell me what mailing list this is, nor what clicking on the Confirm unsubscribe will do. It looks just like a typical spammer website.

Here’s another problem. I’m on a bunch of Adobe mailing lists, using this Adobe-specific email address. I’ve registered several versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Creative Suite. I’ve probably downloaded Adobe Reader. I’m a FLEX developer, of sorts. I’ve signed up for Adobe beta programmes. While I don’t want college sports spam, I do want the content from Adobe I’ve actually signed up for. So I log in to the Adobe website using that address, after doing the “you’ve forgotten your password” dance a couple of times.

And it doesn’t help much.

After logging in, there is nothing that tells me which mailing lists I’m on, nor gives me an opportunity to unsubscribe from some subset of them. Down a couple of menus, under “Change Communication Preferences” I have the option to tell Adobe not to send me any email at all, and that’s it. (They did have a link to “Manage Your Subscriptions” that looked promising, but it turned out to be a red herring).

At this point, my choices are either to unsubscribe from all Adobe mailing lists, then go and work out which work-related lists I need to resubscribe to (and hope it’s not one of those they’re sending ESPN spam to) or to suck it up.

What did Adobe do wrong here, and what could they do better?

1. Sending unexpected and inappropriate (and irrelevant to your subscribers) content to your mailing list is just a bad idea. It’s likely to make some subscribers hit the This-is-Spam button, and damage your future delivery rates. It’s also likely to turn some subscribers off and make them unsubscribe.
2. Sending inappropriate content without any figleaf of relevance makes it worse. This mailing had some slight tangential relevance to Adobe (the product it was pushing was a PDF document advertising ESPN). It could have been easily spun as “Here’s something neat we’ve done with Acrobat” rather than being just an ESPN sponsored “Win a TV for the big game” competition. Wrapping the content in a way that seems more relevant to subscribers will get more people to read it and fewer to mark it as spam.
3. Not having an explanation anywhere as to why the recipient received the email, neither in the email itself nor in the unsubscription page means recipients don’t know why they’re seeing the mail, nor gives them any feeling of control over it. Telling me that I’m receiving the mail “because I registered Acrobat”, for example, would at least give me some context as to which mailing list I was on.
4. Not allowing recipients to control the content they receive. I know that in the Adobe back office there’s a database that knows which mailing lists I’m on, so giving me only the ability to stop all email from Adobe, both the mail I’m interested in and the mail I’m not isn’t a good solution. It means that I’ll either stop all mail from Adobe or I’ll keep getting all of it, yet be grumpy about it. Neither is a good way to keep a recipient involved and likely to buy in the future.

   If, instead, there were a webpage that allowed me to see which lists I was subscribed to (and the emails themselves were clear about which list they were sent to) I’d be far more likely just to opt-out of the content I wasn’t interested in. And I might even notice other lists I might be interested in in the process.

5. Lack of branding. Not much looks more suspicious than a generic, unbranded landing or unsubscription page. Phishers can get this right, so it shouldn’t be too difficult for a real company (especially one that’s all about good web development).
6. Remember whose customers your recipients are. If a large company offers you a lot of money to send an inappropriate email blast to your mailing lists, balance that immediate income against the long-term damage done to your lists, and the damage done to your relationship with existing and potential customers.

Why Adobe thought that a mailing list of their customers – graphic designers and web developers, mostly – would be a sensible list to sell mailings for ESPN adverts I’ve no idea. But their other mistakes with branding, list segmentation and unsubscription handling really exacerbated that misstep.

I am here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth!

Senders are not passive victims of the evil ISPs. In 99% of cases, delivery problems are fully under the control of the sender.

Mail being deferred? Mail being blocked? Mail being delivered to the bulk folder? Senders do NOT NEED TO CALL THE ISP to fix most of these. Tickets do not need to be opened nor do personal contacts need to be employed. You can resolve the vast majority of problems with data you already have.

Mailing to non-customers generally happens when companies sort abuse and support mail through the same ticketing system. Good customer support (tell us how we did) turns out to be rotten complaint support. The failure here is multifactorial, but revolves around not understanding the difference between customer support mail and abuse complaints. Abuse is not, usually, mail from your customers. More often mail to abuse is from non-customers. While it may seem like a good thing to follow up with abuse complaints to find out if the person is satisfied, generally someone who complains about spam does not want more mail from a company. The fix it to change the selection process for surveys. Survey customers not complainers.

The second failure is more common with enterprise vendors. Generally the vendor will have multiple contacts at company but send a single survey out to all contacts at the customer. Take an average website that provides statistics about web or email performance. A company establishes an account there, and then provides a logins for customer support people, a manager or two and maybe an outside consultant. These people are all using the same site, but are possibly using different parts of it. The consultant can give some feedback on the API and data access, but is not the right person to ask about pricing, packages or overall usefulness and value for money. Management can provide feedback on pricing and value for money but probably has never logged into the website, despite having a working account. Customer support can provide feedback on the user interface and overall usefulness of the site. Knowing who is who at the customer and who is the right contact for different surveys can be tricky, but it is always better a company to appear to be acting purposely.

Finally, some companies send out surveys to anyone who has ever registered for a website, or game or product no matter how long ago that registration was. They send mail to the person who registered for a website but has not logged in for 6 months, or 12 months or even longer. The recipient may have even taken positive action to close an account, such as discontinuing payments. And, yet, the company still mails them a customer satisfaction survey. If the recipient is not paying for the product, if the recipient is not logging into the website then they are no longer a customer. Sure, there are times to reconnect with old customers, and it can be done well. However, what I am talking about is the survey that is clearly designed to be answered by current users and customers.

The sad thing is, I have received customer satisfaction surveys in all of the above categories in the last 6 months.

If you as a sender, are going to use customer satisfaction surveys, do it in a thoughtful and purposeful manner. Do it in a way that brings value to your company and to the people you are surveying. If you do not, you risk higher complaint rates. Remember, people who are not your customer or who are a former customer are probably more likely to hit “this is spam” then to answer your survey. Like any mail you send, make sure you know who your audience is and have a mental model for how they will treat your mail. Do not just grab all available addresses and mail them. Do some analysis of your customer base before you mail and mail them surveys that apply to them. You will get fewer spam complaints and probably more and more accurate survey responses.