Yahoo delays

Word to the Wise Blog – Part 1 (Feb 20th, 2008) -  You may have noticed increase in delays and rejections from Yahoo. I am certainly seeing a lot of customers complaining and hearing a lot of other delivery people commenting on problems getting mail into Yahoo. I have even heard from multiple ISPs that are struggling with full queues and delayed email.

No solutions or suggestions right now, just that everyone is having problems right now. I expect it will take some time for the backlogs to dissipate, even after the underlying problem is fixed.

Part 2 (Feb 26th, 2008) - A number of people have posted to various mailing lists and made blog posts pointing to the Yahoo Mail blog post discussing recent problems Yahoo was having with mail. The general feeling seemed to be “AHA! That’s what is wrong!”

Unlike many of my peers, I do not think this explains the delivery problems senders have been seeing while attempting to deliver mail to Yahoo. The Yahoo mail blog article is talking about the Yahoo outgoing mailservers (smarthosts) for their non-webmail users. It is extremely unlikely that these are the same servers used for incoming email.

While I sympathize with everyone who had the AHA! moment and thought their delivery problems were being acknowledged and addressed by Yahoo! I do not think this is really what that blog post is saying.

I am hearing from people that Yahoo is aware of a problem with delayed incoming email, and they are working on fixing it. This does seem to be a broader problem than just bulk mailers, I am hearing from small and mid-size ISPs that they are having significant problems delivering email to Yahoo, too.

For more information about what Yahoo is doing to filter mail check out my previous post Greylisting: that which Yahoo! does not do.

Part 3 (Feb 27th, 2008) - Yahoo is aware of the recent problems and have been working feverishly to fix them. A Yahoo employee posted to a mailing list earlier today, explaining some of the recent issues. The summary is:

1) The Yahoo delays are a result of a tighter spam filtering policy. The delays are the result of the system erroneously recognizing email as spam and deferring delivery. They do believe that retrying long enough will result in all mail being delivered to Yahoo recipients.

2) They have been continually making fixes to the system over the last few days and senders should see queues start to empty over the next few hours.

3) They believe the adjustments made will resolve the deferral problems. If you continue to see problems, you can contact them through the form at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/.

4) They are working to provide more self-serve information at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/ as well as timely service updates.

Loose ends from my previous Yahoo posts:

1. The rumors of an attack were just that, rumors.
2. The Yahoo blog post about outbound servers is unrelated to the problems seen by senders recently. Outbound SMTP servers are not the same as the MX machines.

Good news all around. Thanks to the people at Yahoo for working so diligently to fix the problems.

Testing: What Do You Really Learn?

mediapost.com – IN THE WORLD OF EMAIL marketing and marketing in general, everyone loves to discuss testing.  It’s usually the second thing out of a marketer’s mouth when discussing email, outside of how often to send email.  On the surface it seems quite straightforward: test a subject line here and there, maybe a different creative, maybe different offers to different segments.  In actuality it is likely the most misunderstood practice in email marketing and the most poorly administered.

Here’s my view of testing, how to break it down and how to develop a testing strategy.

Testing starts with developing a hypothesis and a log.  Why?  You can’t optimize without a hypothesis of what you hope to achieve and a planned action behind it.  Without storing a history of your tests or what worked and what didn’t, you will likely recycle the same tests over and over again.

So, what are the things you can test, and why are they important?

-    Targeting – Which segments will perform best to existing promotions. Could be based on past purchase, customer state, value, product affinity, site behavior or simply cohorts that you’ve established.   This is the best area to test cadence, pull out a few customer segments and hold out a group; you’ll see incremental effects of frequency on different customer segments.

-    Promotion -  This can be reward or incentive, but testing variances in promotions is probably the most typical method of testing today.  20%, 30% off, free shipping, multiple purchase discounts.  Many test this in simple fashion A/B style, primarily due to the complexity this can cause on different value segments and cadence.

-    Design – Obviously this is talked about a lot in the email world.  Short versions, long versions, use of product images, text links, layout.  This type of testing is best to do in a multivariate scenario, as it will save you a lot of time during the production crunch. The difficulty is isolating it to a few key elements that you can take forward into all your email communication streams. If you test a promotional email, will the learnings pass to your newsletter and triggered messaging?  Depends on your hypothesis.

-    Subject Lines – As we all know, subject lines are the “context” for which the receiver decides to open the message (although the from address/name is important to “scanners” as much as “poll position” is).  What do you test?  There are essentially three main elements you can test: Brand-specific subject lines, action-oriented subject lines and benefit-driven subject lines, which can be combined to test infinite combinations. Add personalization to this and placement (front, middle, end) and you get an interesting testing matrix.  It’s critical that you log these types of tests, as they are often done very adhoc, which means that at the end of a year, no one can tell you the top winning subject lines, tests or approaches.

-    Landing Pages – Don’t forget the destination!   Just because they clicked through doesn’t mean they will do what you want.  Landing page tests are best suited for multivariate testing as well. There are simply too many variables to test, frrm abandonment, form layout, sequencing of pages, and all the creative variables.  Small changes can have dramatic impact on performance.

Testing isn’t just about finding a winning solution, it’s a process of trying to find the greatest variance in tactics and validating your hypothesis.

Most companies I know have tested A/B methods, some have tested multivariate, and very, very few even think about doing more sophisticated methods like Taguchi.  Just remember, adding complexity to the test doesn’t make it valuable, it just makes it a bit more efficient — so if you have limited bandwidth, it may make sense to do less frequent, but more in-depth, testing a few times a year.

As I’ve preached for years, we don’t test unless there is a prescribed action associated with the winning hypothesis; this includes even simple things like subject lines.  Ask yourself, if “Your bonus offer is ready to view” performs better than “Get your bonus offer today” as a subject line test, what action will you take in response? Does it mean your audience is averse to directive statements, and you’ll sequence the next few messages with more passive language?

Testing can be fun, it can be a lot of work, but your job as a marketer is to find the most efficient methods to build learnings about your customers and their behaviors with email.

Your Email Marketing Recession Survival Guide

mediapost.com – By all accounts, the U.S. economy and others around the world are either in recession now or heading for one before 2008 ends. How long it will last and how rough it will get is anybody’s guess, but I’m not waiting for the official proclamation, and neither should you.My original column idea was to initiate a strategic discussion around the potential impact of a recession on our industry, but since fellow Insider Bill McCloskey stole my thunder in yesterday’s column, I’ve opted to outline survival strategies during an economic downturn.

Now is the time to strengthen your position inside your company. At the same time, reach outside to your customer base by making your email marketing as relevant and valuable as possible. By following a proactive strategic plan, you also guard against committing irreversible mistakes as you recession-proof your email-marketing program. Strategies to follow include:

• Launch or beef up your campaign to remind management how email marketing helps drive your company’s success. Many executives view email simply as an inexpensive marketing vehicle. Now is the time to reposition email as a strategic relationship-management channel.

• Implement programs that integrate with and extend the ROI of other channels such as search, direct mail, RSS, broadcast or trade shows. For example, optimizing landing pages to convert prospects into an email relationship even if they don’t take your core conversion action can greatly boost the long-term ROI of your search spend.

• Leverage your email editorial content for search-engine optimization. Particularly for publishers and B2B marketers, optimizing your article content for search engines can pay off handsomely. When planning your editorial content, write your articles and titles using high-priority keyword phrases. Improving your natural search rankings for certain keywords might enable you to reduce your paid search spend when the CFO comes wielding an axe.

• Assess the value of your customers and relationships. Use RFM or similar analyses to determine which customer segments are the highest value and most loyal and who will likely continue to spend during a downturn. Then, initiate or enhance loyalty or incentive programs to reward and encourage them.

• Learn more about your customers. Add or update your preference center, and incentivize subscribers to update their profiles. Survey subscribers for insights to help you deliver more relevant emails and greater personalization. Integrate Web analytics data, and deploy more highly targeted messages based on Web activity.

• Use more trigger-based emails, following up with subscribers based on specific open, click or Web activity.

• Implement measurement systems and management reports that demonstrate the impact email has on the company. Move beyond process metrics — opens, clicks, delivery rate — and gather output metrics tied to the company’s overall business goals, particularly strategic changes to adjust in a slowed economy.

• Identify ways that the company can switch to email to save money, such as e-billing statements or special notices.

What not to do now:

• Don’t panic, and don’t wait for your CEO or management to tell you to cut your email budget. Take the lead by proving value beforehand. Don’t expend energy on unproductive email-versus-direct-mail arguments within your company. Focus on demonstrating what email does best and how it extends the value of your company’s other marketing channels.

• Don’t revert to batch-and-blast techniques to boost or maintain revenue. I expect some marketers will be forced to just “send more emails” to their entire database. This might deliver short-term results, but it can also hurt your brand and deliverability, increase costs to replace lost subscribers and potentially anger many otherwise happy customers.

• Don’t compromise on permission and privacy. Resist the temptation to build your lists more aggressively. Focus instead on your most valuable prospects.

The reality of company politics and decision-making could make achieving all of these strategies difficult. So, don’t feel you have to adopt them all.

However, do something. If nothing else, go to management with your plan to leverage email marketing to drive both the top and bottom lines during the coming downturn. You will be way ahead of peers who wait for uninformed instructions to drift down from the high command.

HTML email coming soon on the Blackberry

campaignmonitor.com – Some important news if you send to a lot of mobile subscribers, or view emails on your own Blackberry. While existing Blackberry devices and software only support plain text email rendering, RIM has announced that an upcoming software update will add HTML and rich text support to the platform.

HTML and Rich Text Email Rendering – BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to view HTML and rich text email messages with original formatting preserved including font colors and styles, embedded images, hyperlinks, tables, bullets and other formatting.It is not yet clear whether this will be optional, allowing Blackberry users to select their desired format, or whether HTML will always be shown when available. In any case, sending multipart text+html will always be the safest option.

The update is set to be released in ‘the first half of 2008′, and once it becomes available we plan to run our normal HTML/CSS rendering tests and post here about the results.

Of course, if you do know your audience is mostly mobile, then you will want to ensure your emails are shorter, to the point and simpler than you would typically do for a an audience using a desktop client.

A mobile context is very different, and even the type of content itself may differ considerably – information that is useful when at your desk may be pointless when sitting on a train or in a taxi.

See original post on campaignmonitor.com

Delivery & Subject Line Tests Results

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30280

marketingsherpa.com – Why It’s Best to Test Your Own Email Practices – Delivery & Subject Line Tests Results

SUMMARY: Honing in on the best day of the week to send an email and writing great subject lines are always key ways to raise response rates. What to do? Test, of course. See how an eretailer tested their enewsletter for the best delivery day and a shorter subject line. And they got some surprises, too, which they turned into a happy opportunity to lift conversions 50%.

CHALLENGE
The Organic Dish was continually disappointed with their monthly enewsletter — particularly open and clickthrough rates — even after following industry best practices.“We had reached the point where we were malcontented about every aspect of our performance,” says Toby Hemmerling, Managing Partner, The Organic Dish. “I was certain that the general content wasn’t the culprit in terms of why we weren’t getting a better response.”Hemmerling’s enewsletter advertises updated menus for their organic meals, so it’s critical to revenue. He and his team questioned their email delivery day. Days that were early in the week, like Monday and Tuesday, seemed good for their email, but would one day or the other make much of a difference? They also wanted to know which was more important: a stronger call to action or shorter subject lines.

Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30280