Author Archives: Simon Hill

Simon Hill

About Simon Hill

Simon is the co-founder of Extravision, a privately owned ESP based in Manchester and have been involved in email marketing for over 10 yrs. His role has been to develop the technology and product from the ground up to provide a stable and secure infrastructure. Today his current focus is moving more towards looking at how we deliver the emails and our “delivery reputation” as well as growing the business and investigating new technologies.

Before Extravision, Simon was development manager at Productivity through Software, a software house specialising in reselling and developing tools for software developers. They started using email as a marketing tool in the late 1990’s and Simon headed up the development of their first email marketing tools. Simon joined the DMA Email Marketing Council Best Practice and Legal Hub in May 2010.

Stop everything – we need to re-design for mobile devices

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There has been a lot of talk over the past few weeks among various groups about whether or not mobiles have become so important that we should all be designing new templates for mobiles either optimised or using responsive design. A recent study by Blue Hornet says that 80% of people will delete an email on a mobile device if it doesn’t look good so this suggests that we should.

Now, a survey is only as good as the questions it contains and how these are phrased so let us look at the question. “If you get a mobile email that doesn’t look good then what do you do”. So what constitutes “does not look good”

Lets go back a few years to the days when Blackberrys where the only smartphones we had to worry about. In these days the html renderer on a Blackberry was pretty terrible and only the simplest of html would be readable and older versions would only give you the text version of the message. If was pretty safe to say that any html you sent would not look good.

old-blackberry-219x300

Nowadays the html renderers on smart phones are excellent and they will pretty much render anything that a desktop email client will. Just because people are opening your email on a mobile device and you haven’t fully optimised your campaign for mobile it doesn’t mean these people aren’t engaging with your campaign.

So, everyone can relax a little. Without doing anything, you have a mobile strategy because people can read your emails on a smart phone and engage. It maybe harder to navigate around the email on a mobile device and the calls to action a little difficult to click but if your email looks good on a desktop then the odds are it will look ok on a mobile device.  If you want to improve the user experience on a mobile device then it is not about getting your campaign to render on a mobile device but about optimising it for mobile devices.

The question is will this improve your campaign results? Every campaign is different and just because Litmus say that 43% of emails are read on a mobile device it doesn’t necessarily translate to your target audience. Tim Watson from Zettasphere analysed the data and found there are still campaigns at both ends, some with almost no mobile activity and some with almost only mobile activity. If you have historical campaign data to your subscriber base then look at your open stats and see what your mobile open rate is across a variety of campaigns.

However, don’t be misled by your mobile open rate. Just because someone opens your email on a mobile device it doesn’t mean they don’t then open it on their desktop as well. If I receive an interesting email on my mobile device but find it difficult to read I just wait until I’m in the office and read it on my desktop.

One thing that does generally improve campaign performance is re-designing an old template whether it is related to mobile or not. If you put the time and effort in to look at your existing template and re-design it with the mobile user experience in mind then I would expect your results to improve. No matter whether this is related to mobile opens or not.  Its a win win. The new template should get more opens on the desktop and mobile devices.

Everyone should be thinking about mobile devices and how this affects their campaigns but you don’t necessarily have to drop everything and rethink what you are doing. Look at your recipients and stats. If it has been a long time since you changed your template then it may be time to think about creating a new simplified template with mobile devices in mind.

EU Data Protection Regulation – Subject Access Request

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A lot has changed in the world since the EU Data Protection Directive was first introduced in 1995. The internet was just beginning and much less data was stored and transferred electronically than today. It is no surprise then that the legislation is being updated to meet the challenges of how global business is conducted in the 21st century.

The Data Protection Act of 1998 followed the EU Directive and one of the key rights for individuals was to give them access to their personal data on request. By making a “subject access request” any individual can request all personal data held about them to check the accuracy. The current Act states that the data controller can charge a fee of up to £10 when supplying individuals with a copy of their personal data. The £10 fee does not cover the cost of collating and supplying the information but does, at least, act as a small check to discourage frivolous or vexatious requests.

Under the new proposed EU Data Protection Regulation, organisations would have to supply this information free of charge.

In 2009, the Ministry of Justice estimated that UK businesses spend £50 million a year in fulfilling subject access requests through additional manpower costs alone. If the ability to charge for a request is removed then this figure could increase massively and put a huge financial burden on UK companies.

If we consider that the volume of data held by organisations now is significantly greater than when the original Directive was passed in 1995 and the fact that collating all the personal data relating to an individual is more difficult now than it ever has been, then removing the charge for a subject access request would seem to be the exact opposite of what is required.

Some organisations hold a vast amount of personal data in many different formats and in many locations. You have live data that might be online and backup archives in various formats. Much of this data in the past would normally have been in a structured format such as a database. This made searching the data simpler. Now data controllers have to deal with unstructured electronic data, such as emails, with no indexing and try to identify what data refers to the individual and therefore falls within the definition of personal data. Consider an organisations’ email records. One person might be referenced in these emails by many different names. Not only that but these emails also might refer to other records stored in other formats i.e. paper files.

On the positive side, the proposed Draft Regulation does allow the data controller to provide the personal information asked for in a subject access request to the data subject in electronic format, if the information is held electronically and the data subject agrees. This makes perfect sense and would save a lot of unnecessary printing of information which when received by the data subject may be then transferred back into electronic format.

One of the aims of the changes in the draft Regulation is to put all EU countries on a consistent footing, but removing the charge for a subject access request surely cannot be good for anyone.

Reporting and Metrics – the open rate debate

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Everybody has heard of open rates and click through rates and all ESP’s report them but what do these figures really mean in relation to the success of your campaign? As mentioned in the DMA whitepaper on Email metrics and measurement, Einstein once said “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”. This is very true when talking about email campaign metrics. Can you judge the success of your campaign based on the open rate ?

Tim Watson recently wrote that “open rates are as useful as your appendix“. I agree with everything he says in his article and that open rates need to be understood and in context to have any useful meaning.  Increasing your open rate doesn’t necessarily mean a more successful campaign.

What does the open rate tell us and is it reliable? Let’s start by looking at things from a slightly different perspective. What metrics do we want to know about our email campaign? In general we want to know if the intended recipient received the email and was it of interest to them. Did they read any of it or did they delete it without looking at the content? Did they follow any calls to action in the message? Armed with this information we could make a better estimate about the success of our campaign.

These are difficult metrics for an ESP to collect. There are companies such as Litmus that can help with this using CSS techniques and streaming images but really, in the B2C world, it is only the ISP’s who run the webmail applications that can get the accurate stats. ISP’s gather lots of statistics about how mailboxes are used to try and measure user engagement and whether or not you want the email you are receiving. Included in these statistics must be whether you actively open an email or send it straight to the trash as well as many others.

The read rate of a campaign is really the holy grail of email marketing. Even ISP’s would find it very difficult to give you a truly accurate measure. Consider your own inbox in whatever webmail or email client you use.  If you select a message and the content loads in the preview window, does counting how long you are previewing this message accurately say how interested you are in the content? Possibly not. For me, the last email selected in my inbox is the last message I read before I became distracted doing something else. Everybody has different inbox triage but there is no way of knowing if the user is still reading the message unless there is some interaction. Do they scroll the window, do they click on a link, do they mouse over content? However many stats the ISP’s collect it is very unlikely they will make them available to ESP’s so we have to try and “best guess” the stats.

The only metric that ultimately matters in an email campaign is the goal that you set for success before the campaign is sent. Whether this be form registrations, product purchases, website traffic, telephone calls etc. Many people have differing views on whether open rates are a useful statistic as the great open rate debate shows. However there is one thing that everyone agrees on. A campaign should never be judged on its open rate alone.

 

 

Disposable email addresses in your subscriber lists

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Disposable email addresses, sometimes referred to as anti-spam addresses, are email addresses that people use for a period of time and then disappear causing emails sent to that address to either bounce or get automatically filtered to the trash. No email address lasts forever but these types of addresses can have very short life spans. They can be categorised into two types. Those that exist permanently until the recipient removes them, which we will call semi-disposable, and those that exist for a short pre-defined period of time or for a set number of messages before disappearing. A semi-disposable email address is in effect an email alias. For example I have the email address shill@ but also the alias sh@. At any time I can remove the alias sh@ and the emails will start to bounce without it affecting my main email address. Many disposable email addresses are unrelated in any way to your main email address as they use a third-party email service and forward replies to your main account until the address expires.

Disposable email address services

Most ISP’s will allow you to create semi-disposable email addresses. Yahoo! Mail call the service AddressGuard. Gmail and Hotmail allow you to set up alias addresses so the new address gets delivered as normal to your main account.

Some ISP’s including Gmail and Hotmail also allow you to append a tag to your email address to create a new address. For example, if your address is simon@example.com, then you could also use simon+newsletters@example.com or simon+friends@example.com and they would both get delivered to your inbox. You can have any text after the “+” symbol to create an infinite number of possible email addresses.

The downside of using a tag to create a disposable address is that there is no way to remove the address should it start to get spammed. It will always be valid and if you no longer want to receive anything from the address you will need to setup filters to send it to your trash.  The advantage of an alias is that they can easily be deleted and the address becomes invalid and will then bounce.

If you want to create true disposable email addresses then there are many free services available such as SpamGourmet, TrashMail or Guerrilamail. Some give you the option of setting the number of messages your temporary address will receive before consuming or bouncing messages, others allow you to set a life span for the address. Some give you the option to do both.

Why do disposable email addresses exist ?

Disposable email addresses have been around for a few years now. People are very protective about their email address and are very aware that the more they give out their email address the more likely they are to receive unwanted emails and spam.  The idea is that you only give your real email address to friends,colleagues and trusted sites. For everything else you use disposable or semi-disposable email addresses.  You can give a different email address to every website or company that requests an email address. If you start to receive spam you not only know who shared your details but you can also simple remove the address and the spam will get consumed by the disposable address service.

How does this affect your subscriber lists ?

Semi-disposable email addresses or aliases are a standard part of email and shouldn’t really cause a problem within your subscriber list. If you’re sending relevant content at a good frequency to these addresses then the recipients will be less likely to remove the alias. Basic list maintenance such as removing your hard bounces in a timely manner will ensure that any addresses that are no longer valid will be removed from your list and not affect your reputation.

Disposable email addresses can cause more of an issue if they exist in large numbers in your lists. They can cause damage to your IP reputation and waste resources.  ISP’s use engagement as a measure for deliverability. If you send to disposable email addresses that aren’t being used then the emails will likely get consumed (deleted) by the service and your level of engagement will be lower. Some disposable address services bounce emails when they are no longer used and these should be removed in the normal way.

The best solution is to stop people subscribing to your lists with disposable addresses. When requesting an email address if you tell people exactly what you need the email address for and what you are going to use if for then you are more likely to get the “real” address you are after. As a second line of defence there are services such as www.block-disposable-email.com that allow you to check for disposable addresses when the address is submitted and reject them.

It’s all about trust. If the user trusts that their email address won’t be abused then they are more likely to give you their real email address and not use a disposable address.

 

 

Autoplay video in email

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Video in email is not a new concept. A static image with a “click to play” call to action that starts the video playing in the browser or media player is a standard technique. However, since the advent of HTML 5, having a video that starts to play in the email client as soon as you open the email has become simpler. In theory.

Whether this is something you want to do in an email campaign is open for discussion. In the Implix 2010 Email Marketing Trends Survey, video in email marketing was shown to increase click-through rates by over 96% in some cases. I believe, like many marketing techniques, there is a time,place and audience for which autoplay videos will work and give improved campaign results. If someone is sat at their desk at work they might not appreciate a video playing in an email with the soundtrack blasting out of their speakers. Video is probably better targeted at a B2C audience rather than B2B but thats not to say it wouldn’t work for B2B with the right content. Horses for courses.

Unfortunately HTML 5 is not the total solution for video in email. Not all email clients support HTML 5 and of those that do, some have disabled the support for the <video> tag. But lets look on the bright side.

Hotmail starting supporting HTML 5 in 2011 and you can get a video to autoplay in Hotmail for most browsers (not IE7 or IE 8 as HTML 5 isn’t supported). The same is true if your email client is Apple Mail. On IOS devices (iPhone or iPad) the video shows as a clickable video link which then starts the video in the media player. For all other desktop and web based email clients the fallback  image is displayed, which can include the call to action to click the link to play the video.

So, using HTML 5 you can get a video to autoplay in Hotmail and Apple Mail and all other recipients will see the fallback image with a call to action to click to watch the video.  Using an alternate technique you can also get the video to autoplay in Yahoo.

Earlier this year Yahoo released the Yahoo! Mail Widget Engine which allows you to play video in the body of the email received by Yahoo without using HTML 5. The first stage is to email them and ask nicely if you can test drive the widget engine. Once they email you back  and you accept the invitation you then need to enable the widget within your Yahoo email account. The widget engine doesn’t use any custom html tags so the code will work in any email client and the video is identified by the id of the span tag “yEmbed1″.  Yahoo then converts the span to an embedded flash video player.

If you send yourself a test email with the subject “witness the inline video magic” the video should automatically start to play in your inbox. The initial span class is treated as an image so unless you are a certified sender the image will be blocked by default and hence the video won’t play unless you enable the image. If Yahoo agree to approve your production emails then they will whitelist your DKIM-verified sender and the recipients won’t need to change anything to see the autoplay video.

So what do Yahoo gain by creating their own way to play inline video rather than supporting the HTML 5 video tag ? Firstly I guess it gives them more granual control over who can send inline videos to Yahoo email addresses. Probably the biggest advantage is that they convert the span tags to an emded object so the video should play in any browser including those that don’t support HTML 5. However in my tests I couldn’t get it to play in either IE 7 or IE 8.

I think autoplay video could have a massive impact if used in the correct scenario with video content that is relevant and exciting to the recipient. Due to the technical limitations some segmentation is required to achieve the best results and as ever test,test,test.

 

Related articles

Email authentication and the new DMARC standard

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I think most marketers have heard about email authentication and the use of Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and the Sender Policy Framework (SPF). If your using an email service provider then its likely that they will handle the authentication for you and you don’t need to worry. But why do emails need to be authenticated ?

Authentication wasn’t created to reduce spam, althought indirectly it does help, but it was designed to reduce the amount of phishing emails and emails with fake sending addresses. It is easy for anyone to send emails pretending to be from a particular domain and without authentication you have no way of knowing if the sender is valid or not. Authentication works using DNS (Domain Name Service) records. You can think of DNS as a giant phone book for the internet. To check if an email is authenticated the receiving email server will look in the phone book to verify details about the sender. Only the owner of the sending domain has the ability to change entries in the phone book (DNS records) which makes the authentication process secure.

Unfortunatley this does not entirely stop phishing emails. A spammer can easily purchase a domain very similar to the one he is trying to copy and then setup the authentication correctly. The emails will pass authentication and you may think nothing is wrong unless you look closely at the domain being used.

In January 2012 the new DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) standard was released and I have to admit I was a little confused to start with. People talked about it strengthening DKIM and SPF but didn’t understand how ? Then suddenly the penny dropped. DMARC is in essence a two way feedback loop for authentication.

Until now, the SPF and DKIM standards have lacked a communication loop between the sender and receiver. A sender has no way to tell the receiving ISP that emails from this domain are authenticated and any that aren’t should be quarantined or rejected. Conversely the receiving ISP also has no way of telling the sender that the emails it is receiving are passing or failing authentication. DMARC provides this communication mechanism and closes the loop between the sender who is authenticating messages and the receiver who is trying to interpret these records. DMARC, like DKIM and SPF is another DNS record that is added by the domain owner or administrator.

DMARC doesn’t change anything in the way the two authentication processes work but brings them together in one standard. To fail DMARC you need to fail both SPF and DKIM authentication.  The feedback from the receiving ISP’s is in the form of an aggregate report. Currently we have only ever received reports from Gmail but hopefully Yahoo and others will follow soon. The report is sent daily in a zipped tar file and is in xml format.  You can import the report into Excel so you can read it like a spreadsheet or use a website such as www.dmarcian.com to format the results. What is staggering about the report is the number of emails that are being sent from other mail servers pretending to be from domains under your control.  You can enter the IP address of mail servers where the authentication is failing into www.projecthoneypot.org and immediately see if the address is a known spammer.

Authentication doesn’t help your emails find its way through the mine field of spam filters and smart inboxes but without it it is likely your emails will be rejected at the first hurdle. DMARC gives the sender a way of checking if emails are being authenticated correctly and what action the reciever should take if authentication fails.

You can learn more about DMARC at the website www.dmarc.org

 

The changing face of emails – literally

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At the email evolution conference in Miami last year, Yahoo and Hotmail announced that they were looking at allowing dynamic content within an email. ISP’s are concerned about users leaving their site when they follow links in an email. The idea is that when a user clicks on a link they don’t leave the ISP’s site but the content of the link is displayed in the email. This was an encouraging sign that ISP’s would start allowing us to do more with our emails.

In Hotmail these are called Active Views. This basically gives partners the ability to run scripts within an email and produce true dynamic content. Such partners include YouTube, LivingSocial and LinkedIn. But what about the rest of us?

Email service providers talk about dynamic content all the time but this is in regards to personalising the message for individual recipients. When the email is actually sent it is very static.

The more sophisticated marketers can change images that are served to the email to make the email look dynamic. Suppose you are sending a campaign offering a promotion then ends on 1st Feb 2012. The main promotion could be in the form of a number of images. After the promotion has expired you can change the images that are served to say that the promotion has expired. Simple but effective. It is not 100% accurate but there are several companies around that will facilitate this for you if it is something you want to try.

However this still isn’t true dynamic content. What about if the HTML of the email actually changed within email client to give a different message? For example, if the email was promoting restaurant discounts then it might show you different offers depending on the time of day you read the email. Lunchtime offers around midday and Dinner offers later in the day. This could be extended even further to personalise based on your current location. If you read the email in the office then it would show offers for a restaurant round the corner from work. You then go home and look at the same email again and you would see totally different offers for local restaurants near home. The email itself has changed the content based on its location and time of day.

All this is technically straightforward and something you could do on a webpage easily. Many websites already personalise the content based on the country you are in. The difference is that email clients don’t allow background scripts such as JavaScript to run in an email as this opens the way for malicious code to be implanted and run without the user knowing. Active Views is the first step to allowing such scripts to run but in a very secure environment.

So how would dynamic content like this affect your email campaigns? Obviously more targeted content is going to lead to better engagement of the user but would varying content actually work? It may scare and confuse the recipient and lead to reduced click through rates. Only time will tell and I look forward to trying this when it all becomes possible. We will wait and see if anything else regarding dynamic content is announced next month at the email evolution conference in Florida.