Tag Archive for 'Reputation'

Monitoring customers at ESPs

Published
by
laura
29Oct
in Industry
.

In the past I’ve talked about vetting clients, and what best effort encompasses when ESPS try to keep bad actors out of their systems. But what does an ESP do to monitor clients ongoing? Al Iverson from ExactTarget says that they:

Look at what clients are doing constantly. If too much of a client’s list is filtered out at import, If too much of their mail bounces, If they receive too many spam complaints from a large ISP, If they get blacklisted by a reputable blacklist like Spamhaus or Spamcop, Or if they do something that shows [ET] that they’re not complying with the opt-in consent requirements contained in [the] contract.

If any of those things happen, what happens next?

The client is funneled through a policy enforcement/best practices process to help address the issue, reform the process, remove the bad list, educate the client, and, if those steps all fail, terminate that client.

Read the rest of what Al has to say here:
http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/al-iverson/0/0/exacttarget-and-stopping-spam

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AOL talks about reputation

Published
by
laura
28Oct
in Asides
.

Over at the AOL postmaster blog, Christine posts about reputation and AOL.

1 Comment

Reputation: part 2

Published
by
laura
24Oct
in Delivery Improvement
.

Yesterday, I posted about reputation as a combination of measurable statistics, like bounce rates and complaint rates and spamtrap hits. But some mailers who meet those reputation numbers are still seeing some delivery problems. When they ask places, like AOL, why their mail is being put into the bulk folder or blocked they are told that the issue is their reputation. This leads to confusion on the part of those senders because, to them, their reputation is fine. Their numbers are exactly where they were a few weeks ago when their delivery was fine.

What appears to have changed is how reputation is being calculated. AOL has actually been hinting for a while that they are looking at reputation, and even published a best practices document back in April. Based on what people are saying some of that change has started to become sender visible.

We know that AOL and other ISPs look at engagement, and that they can actually measure engagement a lot more accurately than sender can. Senders rely on clicks and image loading to determine if a user opened an email. ISPs, particularly those who manage the email interface, can measure the user actively opening the email.

We also know that ISPs measure clicks. Not just “this is spam” or “this is not spam” clicks in the interface, but they know when a link in an email has been clicked as well.

I expect that both these measures are now a more formal and important part of the AOL reputation magic.

In addition to the clicks, I would speculate that AOL is now also looking at the number of dead addresses on a list. It is even possible they are doing something tricky like looking at the number of people who have a particular from address in their address book.

All ISPs know what percentage of a list is delivered to inactive accounts. After a long enough period of time of inactivity, mail to those accounts will be rejected. However for some period of time the accounts will be accepting mail. Sending a lot of mail to a lot of dead accounts is a sign of a mailer who is not paying attention to recipient engagement.

All ISPs with bulk folders have to know how many people have the from address in their address book. Otherwise, the mail would get delivered incorrectly. In this way, ISPs can monitor the “generic” recipient’s view of the email. Think of it as a similar to hitting the “this is not spam” button preemptively.

This change in reputation at the ISPs is going to force senders to change how they think of reputation, too. No longer is reputation all about complaints, it is about sending engaging and relevant email. The ISPs are now measuring engagement. They are measuring relevancy. They are measuring better than many senders are.

Senders cannot continue to accrete addresses on lists and continue sending email into the empty hole of an abandoned account while not taking a hit on their reputation. That empty hole is starting to hurt reputation much more than it helps reputation.

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Reputation

Published
by
laura
23Oct
in Delivery Improvement
.

Reputation is the buzzword in delivery these days. Everyone talks about building a good reputation and how to do it. Makes sense, the ISPs are always hammering on reputation and how critical reputation is. The more I talk with delivery folks on the ESP side of thing, the move I realize that there is a fundamental disconnect between what the ESPs mean when they say reputation and what the ISPs mean when they say reputation.

Many people handling delivery think that the bulk of reputation is wrapped up in complaint rates and bounce rates. I think they know the ISPs measure more than just complaints and bounces (spamtraps!) but really believe that most of developing a good reputation is all about keeping those complaints low.

This perspective may have been true in the past, but is becoming less true as time goes on. There are a lot of very smart people managing incoming mail at the ISPs and they are constantly looking for ways to better meet the desires of their customers. Lest we forget, their customers are not the senders, their customers are the end users. Their customers are not senders.

Part of meeting the needs of end users means actually giving them a way to provide feedback. AOL started the trend with the this-is-spam button, and other ISPs (ones that controlled the user interface at least) followed suit. For a very long time, reputation was dominated by complaint percentages, with modifiers for number of spamtrap addresses and number of non-existent users.

The problem is, these numbers were easy to game. Spammers could modify their metrics such that their email would end up in the inbox. In response, the ISPs started measuring things other than complaints, bounces and spamtraps. These other measurements are strong modifiers to complaints, such that mailers with what used to be acceptable complaint rates are seeing their mail end up bulked or even rejected.

Recently, AOL seems to have made some subtle modifications to their reputation scores. The result is mailers who have previously acceptable complaint rates are seeing delivery problems. When asked, AOL is only saying that it is a reputation issue. Lots of senders are trying to figure out what it is that is more important than complaints.

Tomorrow, I will talk about what I think AOL could be measuring.

4 Comments

The Question

Published
by
laura
25Sep
in Delivery Improvement and Industry
.

Mark Brownlow has a list of 12 questions every email marketer should ask about their marketing program. Buried in the middle is the most important question for delivery.

Do you worry more about what ISPs think about your email than what subscribers think about your email? If you take care of the latter, won’t the former take care of itself?

My answer is if a sender is worried more about what the ISPs think than what subscribers think that sender is going to have ongoing and continual delivery problem. However, if a sender focuses on sending relevant, expected and wanted email then they will have almost zero delivery problems.

3 Comments

Appropriating reputation

Published
by
laura
22Sep
in Best Practices
.

One of the thing savvy spammers are doing these days is appropriating the reputation of someone else. Reputation appropriate takes many forms. Some spammers hijack windows machines, turn them into bots and send spam through major ISP smarthosts. “Legitimate email marketers” buy service from mainstream ESPs to send their permission-challenged email that they cannot get delivered through their own IP space.

There are different strategies for companies to prevent bad groups from appropriating their  reputation. For the ESP, the prime defense against reputation appropriation is screening new customers and new lists.

When screening potential customers, there are three broad categories that customers fall into. One is the legit prospect that is exactly whom they represent to you, these are the easy guys. Another is the naive mailer, who really does not have any clue about email but wants to move into the digital age. This mailer is often extremely small, but knows nothing about email. The final category is the subversive prospect. This is the company who knows exactly what they are doing, and who is actively working to hide their practices from the ESP. They are attempting to subvert the process.

Over the coming weeks I will be talking more about screening new customers and how to distinguish the naive customer from the subversive one.

2 Comments

How not to handle unsubscribes

Published
by
laura
24Jun
in Best Practices
.

On the heels of my unsubscribe experience last week where an ESP overreacted and unsubscribed addresses that did not belong to me, I encountered another deeply broken unsubscribe process. This one is the opposite, there is no way to unsubscribe from marketing mail at all. Representatives of PayPal have only been able to suggest that if I do not want their mail, that I block PayPal in my email client.

I had a PayPal account years and years ago. They made some extensive privacy policy changes back in 2003 and when I did not actively agree to the new policies, they closed the account. That account closure seemed to take, I heard nothing from PayPal. In early 2008, I made a purchase at a vendor that only accepted credit cards through PayPal. Normally, I do not do business with vendors who only accept payment through PayPal, but there appeared to be a way to make the payment without establishing a PayPal account, so I went ahead and made the purchase.

The receipt from that purchase came from PayPal, and mentioned that I had an existing PayPal account. I figured that because the address was the same as the 2003 account that the boilerplate did not understand ‘closed accounts’. I brushed off the notice and did not worry about it.

On June 23, I received marketing email from PayPal. The mail offered 10% off my first eBay purchase, if I set up an eBay account using the same address on my PayPal account. Yay. Spam. Oh, well, no big deal, there was an unsub link at the bottom of the email. It is PayPal, they are a legitimate company, they will honor an unsubscribe. It will all be fine.

Or. Not.

Clicking on the unsubscribe link in the email takes me to a webpage that tells me I had to login to my account to unsubscribe. But I do not have an account!

They clearly think I have an account linked to the email address they mailed. I decide to see if I can recover the account and then unsubscribe. I put in the email address they sent the marketing email to, the password I probably would have used had I actually set up this account and hit “submit.” PayPal now asks me to set up 3 questions to use to recover my account in case I forget the login in the future. Uh. What? No. I do not want to set up an account, I want them to stop sending me email. I abandon that webpage.

I then attempt to recover the password to the account. Put in the email address that PayPal is sending email to and hit “forgot password”. PayPal, as expected, sends me an email. Click this magic link to recover your account. PayPal then asks me to input the full number of the credit card associated with the account - the credit card number I do not have. What account? What credit card number? Is this from my 2003 subscription that was closed? Is this from the purchase I made in February? I abandon that webpage.

The recover password email helpfully lists a phone number I can call for assistance so I call. In order to be able to talk to someone I have to enter my phone number. And the credit card number associated with my account. I resorted to randomly pounding on “0” and telling the voice recognition software I wanted help. Eventually, it got so confused it transfered me to a real human.

Tragically, the voicemail system was actually more helpful than the real human on the other end. Distilling down hours of sitting on the phone with them, I am told the following:

  1. There is no way to unsubscribe from mail at PayPal.
  2. Everyone gets spam and I should not care about spam from PayPal
  3. I can block mail from PayPal in my mail client.

During the conversation, I was repeatedly informed I did have a PayPal account. I asked when the account was opened. The first rep said “June 23, 2008.” You mean today? The day I attempted to login to the account to unsubscribe from the mail you sent me? Yes. That is the day I opened the account. She was incredibly unhappy when I pointed out that was after I had received the email, was my attempt to unsubscribe from the email and did not explain why I was receiving unwanted email from them. After going in circles, repeatedly being placed on hold and asked for credit card information I used to set up the account, I requested a supervisor. The supervisor told me the account was opened in September 2007. September? What? I have no recollection (or email!) about dealing with PayPal in September. I decide to stop trying to figure out the account and asked if there was any way I could make PayPal stop emailing me. She helpfully explained everyone gets spam, that I should block PayPal in my email client and then hung up on me.

Steve, noticing that I was in a slight temper, worked his way through their voicemail system and talked to another rep. Overall his experience was the same. There is no way to unsubscribe from PayPal’s emails without logging in to the preference center and there is no way to login to the preference center without the credit card number associated with the account.

After about 2 1/2 hours of trying to deal with the PayPal reps, we gave up. Clearly there is no way to actually unsubscribe from PayPal mailings.

How many recipients who don’t want to receive mail from Paypal are going to spend several hours fighting through an unhelpful phone tree and being hung up on by customer support reps? Almost none of them. Instead they’re going to hit the “This is spam” button to block the mail, damaging the reputation of the ESP sending the mail.

Worse than that for PayPal, though, is that eBay/PayPal are strongly in favour of DKIM, and they are signing all their mail - solicited and unsolicited, marketing and transactional - with DKIM. That means that recipients hitting the “This is spam” button in response to not being able to unsusbscribe from unwanted mail will also damage the reputation of all mail sent by PayPal, including their transactional mail, not just the reputation of the ESP sending the bulk mail.

Last week it was a little sender at a small ESP failing to correctly manage unsubscribes. This week it is one of the largest senders of email who cannot get unsubscribes right. One of the underlying problems is PayPal’s choice to irrevocably link account management and marketing email. PayPal policy states they cannot let me have access to another person’s financial information and owning an email address they are sending email advertising to is not proof of ownership. In other words, the account established with my email address is not actually my account and I have no right to stop receiving mail.

I actually understand this and appreciate PayPal’s attempts to protect the financial information of their users. However, a major flaw in the current process is that PayPal does no email address confirmation with the account. Therefore, people receiving email from PayPal cannot make the email stop. They do not want to reveal financial information to me if I do not have the right to see it? Good for them. That’s fine, that’s great, but they have to make it possible for recipients to make the mail stop.

One of the early reps I talked to even claimed it was Federal Law that they had to get me to verify the account before they could unsubscribe me. She is very, very wrong. CAN SPAM is reasonably specific about unsubscribes. Currently there must be a way to unsubscribe over the Internet. I do not believe PayPal is currently compliant with CAN SPAM because of the hurdles they have erected that make it more difficult, or even impossible to unsubscribe from their marketing mail.

Since the original CAN-SPAM legislation was passed the FTC has acknowledged recipient concerns that marketers are skirting the existing requirement that they allow recipients to unsubscribe by making unsubscription possible, but requiring recipients to go through a complex process, or require unreasonable additional information (such as, say, credit card numbers) from recipients in order to discourage users from unsubscribing.

To show that this sort of behaviour is not an acceptable way to offer unsubscription according to CAN-SPAM, the FTC have included detailed clarification on this point in their rulemaking that takes effect on July 7th.

§ 316.5 Prohibition on charging a fee or imposing other requirements on recipients who wish to opt out.

Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that any recipient pay any fee, provide any information other than the recipient’s electronic mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps except sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page, in order to:
(a) Use a return electronic mail address or other Internet-based mechanism, required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3), to submit a request not to receive future commercial electronic mail messages from a sender; or
(b) Have such a request honored as required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3)(B) and (a)(4).

10 Comments

Those addresses are costing you

Published
by
laura
29May
in Best Practices
.

Mark Brownlow has a post up about the hidden costs of bad email marketing. These center around brand damage, but there are other costs to poor email marketing strategies.

Previously, having old and non-responsive email addresses on a mailing list did not hurt and may have helped a reputation at an ISP. In some cases, these addresses may have even helped a reputation by increasing the number of emails delivered thus lowering the overall percentage of complaints.

More recently, some ISPs have started looking at the characteristics of recipients as part of the reputation score of a sender. If a sender is mailing a lot of abandoned email addresses, these ISPs can detect that fact. This counts against a senders reputation and may result in email ending up in the bulk folder or being blocked at the transaction.

Many senders are extremely resistant to removing old addresses from their lists. Some of the more numbers driven ones have even followed the statistics and can tell me exactly how many people ignore their email for 12 months or 18 months, and then come back and make a large purchase. This is true, sometimes people will ignore email for a long time and then come back. Keeping these people on a list may be beneficial.

However, in those recipients who ignore email (no opens, no clicks) for a long time are some addresses that have been abandoned. While these addresses are not spamtraps, repeatedly sending email to large numbers of abandoned addresses will lower the sender’s reputation over time.

All senders should have a process for dealing with non-active addresses. Allowing cruft to accumulate on a list does negatively affect reputation.

0 Comments

Disposable or Temporary Addresses

Published
by
laura
20May
in Best Practices
.

Mark Brownlow has a really good post up today about disposable and temporary addresses and how they affect marketers trying to build an opt-in list.

I use tagged addresses for all my signups, and have for more than 10 years now. It lets me track who I gave an address to and if this mail is contrary to what I signed up for or the address has leaked, I can shut down mail to that address entirely.

Tagged addresses also have another function. One of our local brew pubs has a rewards program, spend money there, get points. As part of the signup process, they requested an email address. All the email I have received from them has been clearly branded, well designed, they are an example of how to use email right. That is until last week. Last week I received an email to the tagged address from some survey company. The survey company provided no branding, nothing.

Dear Passport Member

As a valued member of our passport program, your opinion is extremely important to us.  We are constantly looking to improve our menu offerings, passport privileges and manner in which we serve our most treasured guests.

Simply fill out the following survey and we will award you a bonus of 200 points within 2 weeks of completion.  Deadline to complete the survey is May 19th.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts about our program and how we can serve you even better in the future.

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/XXXXXX

My first thought was that our local brew pub somehow leaked my information out and I was getting some weird phishing or tracking spam. After a bit of examination and looking at the survey (again, not branded and with HTML looking like it was done in 1997) I did realize that this was probably a real survey commissioned by the brewpub and outsourced to someone else who executed it badly.

Recipients signing up to lists with tagged or disposable email address can be some of the most savvy customers. If marketing and emails are done well, this kind of customer can be a bonus. If marketing and emails are done poorly, the subscriber will leave.

1 Comment

Botnets

Published
by
laura
15May
in Industry
.

Terry Zink has been posting articles about botnets as traced by Hotmail. I do not often talk about botnets as they are outside my area of expertise. They are not something I deal with, as no one who uses botnets is welcome as a client here.

My clients and I, however, do have to deal with the fallout from botnets.  Because of botnets, receiver ISPs are extremely suspicious of mail from any IP address that they have not seen mail from previously. Mail from new IPs is, more often than not, a newly infected Windows machine. This results in mail from new IPs not starting with a reputation of zero but starting with a negative reputation.

Botnets are another example of spammers making it more difficult for mailers with permission to use email.

1 Comment