A Marketer’s Field Guide to Yahoo! Inboxes

Yahoo! Mail was one of the first free webmail providers to hit the market and is one of the three largest providers in the world with 280+ million users. If you include some of the smaller providers that utilize the Yahoo! infrastructure such as AT&T and BellSouth there are 320+ million users. Even though they are one of the oldest and biggest ISPs in the market they have continued to attract and cater to a relatively young social audience compared to other free webmail providers. Yahoo!’s anti-spam team is also one of the most active and responsive groups in the industry when it comes to clear communications and responsiveness to senders.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to ISPs and Deliverability

Email marketers are intensely focused on ROI for their marketing dollars. Maximizing the number of clicks, opens and conversions is the primary method that ROI is measured for most marketers. However, maximizing all of these response metrics requires that your email is delivered to your subscribers’ inbox by the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This metric is commonly referred to as deliverability or inbox placement rate.

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Marketing Sherpa Features an Email Marketing Sweepstakes Winner

We’re happy to see one of our marquee clients, Publishers Clearing House (PCH) featured in Marketing Sherpa. Marketing Sherpa focused on PCH’s 99.2% deliverability rate despite heavy usage of “blacklisted” words.

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Mailbox Providers Suggest Collaboration with Senders

In a panel presentation here at Mediapost’s Email Insider Summit, Yahoo! and Hotmail struck a very cooperative and collaborative tone for working with marketers and other senders as the two major global mailbox providers aim to expand their inbox products and spam filtering.

Carlo Catajan, Product Manager for Yahoo! Mail and Daniel Lewis, Sr. Product Manager for Microsoft Windows LIVE Hotmail both said …

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INDUSTRY ALERT: COX has a new Postmaster Page

Congratulations to our partners at COX for launching a new postmaster site.

Lots of ISPs have postmaster pages, so what’s the big deal about this one?

It’s frequently difficult to get all the information you might need to understand the rules of the road at an ISP. The Cox postmaster pages provide error code definitions, preferred connection configurations, instructions on how to sign up for Cox’s feedback loop (which is proudly powered by Return Path) and other useful information to help understand delivery issues. …

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Prioritization of Spam at Gmail

UPDATE: The original version of this post had a link to the main Google YouTube channel, which had featured the spam video. After we published this, they swapped in a new video, causing confusion for some readers. We’ve now updated the link to go directly to the video about Gmail spam priorization. Sorry for any confusion we caused.

Google’s Gmail can be somewhat of a mystery. They do things a bit differently than other large ISPs and they do it well. From our perspective in deliverability, Gmail is always a tougher ISP to understand and troubleshoot.

Most of the experts know that Gmail relies heavily on their user feedback and “this is spam” vs. “this is not spam” voting, but many questions remained around how they really prioritize complaints. Recently, they posted a video to YouTube that helps us understand just a little more and pull back a bit more of the mystery.

Google’s Matt Cutts says Google does order complaints, and that typically, they try to think about what the impact is on the user. So, if they get …

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How Deliverability is Like SEO and SEM for Email

I admit this is an imperfect analogy, and I’m sure many of my colleagues in the email industry are going to blanch at a comparison to search, but the reality is that email deliverability is still not well understood — and search engines are. I hope that I can make a comparison here that will help you better understand what it really means to work on deliverability – they same way you understand what it means to work on search.

But before we get to that, let’s start with the language around deliverability which is still muddled. I’d like to encourage everyone in the email industry to rally around more precise meanings. Specifically I’d like propose that we start to use the term “inbox placement rate” or IPR, for short. I think this better explains what marketers mean when they say “delivered” – because anywhere other than the inbox is not going to generate the kind of response that marketers need. The problem with the term “delivered” is that it is usually used to mean “didn’t bounce.” While that is a good metric to track, it does not tell you where the email lands. Inbox placement rate, by contrast, is pretty straightforward: how much of the email you sent landed in the inbox of our customers and prospects?

Now let’s come back to how achieving a high inbox placement rate is like search. If you run a web site, you certainly understand …

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Don't Snip Your Best Asset

Alongside the rise of Twitter and its famously 140-character message size limit has come an explosion in URL shorteners like bit.ly and tr.im. But with spammers gleefully abusing these systems and some shortening services on the verge of disappearing, we must question whether the use of URL shorteners in any other medium — such as email — is a wise practice.

A URL shortening service takes a long web address like https://hostedjobs.openhire.com/epostings/submit.cfm?fuseaction=app.allpositions&company_id=15953&version=1, and converts it to something short (but often even more obscure) like http://bit.ly/9sUe3. When you click on the shortened link, your web browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, et cetera) contacts the shortening service’s web server just like any other request for a web page. Most services will reply with a simple HTTP Redirect, telling your browser to go open the longer URL instead. A few open the target URL in a frame, with a bar at the top encouraging you to share the site too — while tracking your activities, and possibly showing ads.

These services have been around for years: TinyURL, which was for a long time the most popular, launched in 2002 and was almost immediately adopted by pranksters. One memorable prank was …

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Gmail Provides Unsubscribe Option for Mailing Lists

As reported in Lifehacker, Gmail is now providing an unsubscribe option for mailing lists to users. They are doing this using the mailto: type of the List-Unsubscribe header. This means that you can get a complaint message in ARF format when someone unsubscribes from you at Gmail.

How do you take advantage? According to the Gmail postmaster: …

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Memo to Europe: Do You Know Where Your Email Goes?

American marketers have been aware for some time now that the email they send doesn’t always make it to the inbox as intended. But this is not the case for marketers in Europe, as we found in a recent survey: Emailing in the Dark: What European Email Marketers Don’t Understand about Deliverability.

In fact, we found that nearly 2 out of 5 marketers surveyed weren’t sure if their email is making it to the inbox. More troubling still, 38% believe that deliverability is the sole responsibility of the email service provider who sends the email on their behalf. As we’ve written here, here and here, the ESP cannot completely control your deliverability. In fact, most of the factors that lead to blocking by top ISPs are …

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