I’ve got to admit, I don’t like spam. Not just professionally, it really gets my goat personally as well. It’s not that I’m a particularly sensitive soul when it comes to email communications, but I just don’t like being sent stuff I haven’t asked for. Ok, I acknowledge that most of the downright illegal and virus laden traffic is now being successfully filtered by the great work of the spam filtering businesses and ISP’s, so what’s left to Grinch about?

Email is a powerful marketing channel, and its superb revenue driving potential is now becoming widely acknowledged. Email hasn’t got to this position by itself, it has needed to be understood and strategies carefully put together by some pretty clever people to bring it to where it is today. Some recent DMA reports show that the public now acknowledge email as a marketing channel that provides value. In anyone’s book that’s an achievement, and it isn’t as if everyone is using the same strategies. However the similar thing about all the successful strategies is they are done well, with considerable thought and great execution. So in a channel that is going from strength to strength, why am I throwing my presents out of the sleigh about spammers?

The most fundamental practice and legal obligation regarding sending someone a marketing email, is that you need to have the person’s permission to do so. I’m not going to start splitting hairs about the pros and cons of opt in opt out etc, but it is pretty widely acknowledged that the person should know what they are signing up for. But that’s right isn’t it, you don’t want anyone on your list who doesn’t want to be there, right?

And if they unsubscribe, it means they want you to stop sending them emails; so you stop, because it would be crazy to carry on, wouldn’t it?

So… why have I been sent marketing emails from a company I’ve previously unsubscribed from, with text saying “we’d like you to subscribe to our newsletter”. No thank you. I’ve unsubscribed once – isn’t that enough? Someone even sent me an email Christmas card that automatically signed me up to marketing emails!

Those are two examples from a very limited sample size. It is possible I have been very unlucky, but it does demonstrate this issue exists. It wouldn’t take long for the trust that has been built up with the public over the last few years to be eroded. At a time when we should be encouraging as many subscribers to sign up to our email communications, playing fast and loose with email permission is not the way forward. New European legislation threatens to make permission and data use more of an issue for the online marketer, we need to develop the public’s trust, not damage it.

With the revenue driving potential of the channel, it is easy to see how some could be tempted to go against the express wishes of their customers, in an attempt to drive a few extra sales. But in doing so marketers must consider the cost to their reputation.

Okay, that might be a bit harsh. Perhaps the resolution should be: “I resolve to stop and take a breath before hitting the ‘Send’ button.” Maybe it is because we all spent a bit too much time in that strange place called Christmasland during December but there were some very high (and a lot of very low) profile errors during December that could have been easily avoided.

Starting with the high profile, the New York Times accidentally offered more than 8.6 million people a half-price subscription in an email meant for a few hundred, because they sent it to the wrong list (http://bit.ly/uHerov). It is one thing to send an email to the wrong list when it is about the same size as the one intended, but to be off by a factor of 10,000…!

Another much lower profile (in the sense that The Guardian did not write an article about it) but potentially just as damaging case occurred to a client who sent an email with some broken links and images. After the obligatory call to both Support and his account manager, we discovered that the client had sent a test message. Now you are probably asking yourself what we asked the client: “If you noticed that the links and images were broken in the test message, why did you send the email to your customers?” The answer was delivered without embarrassment or acknowledgement of the obvious: “We were under time pressure to get it out.”

So, for 2012 I ask all email marketers to do the following before each email Send:

1. Ask a colleague who did not help you write the email to proofread it. If a colleague is not available, use spouses, partners, the postman, or even English-speaking baristas.
2. Send a test message to a number of accounts on a number of platforms.
3. Go into each test message and make sure it looks as you intended.
4. On one of the test messages click on all of the links and make sure they go to the page you intended.
5. Think about the list you are going to use for the campaign and without looking at it write down the number of people you expect to receive the email on a piece of paper. This part is important because by writing it down, you will be less tempted to look at the number and convince yourself that it is right and you are wrong.
6. Now look at the stats for the list; are the numbers similar?
7. If you really want to be sure, pull a couple of random recipients out of the list to see if based on your segmentation you would expect them to receive the email.
8. Go make a cup of tea to give your brain a few minutes to catch your pending mistake.
9. Send your email.

I should also add that you should make sure you monitor the stats for your campaign while it runs its natural course but that is probably a separate resolution.

Early this year the DMA’s Legal and Best Practice hub and I published a whitepaper on Email Creative. It was never meant as a definitive guide to creating great email campaigns but more a collection of ideas to consider during the design process. The world of email is constantly changing both from the sender and the recipient’s perspective and as such we always need to be adapting how we design our emails for the best results. A template that worked well last Christmas may not achieve the same results this year, although that may not all be down to the creative.

The way in which people read their emails has evolved. New browsers, desktop clients and mobile devices are always being released along with upgrades to existing readers. Subtle changes can make a big difference in way your email is received by your audience. Since Apple launched the iPad the tablet market has rocketed and more people than ever are reading their email on a tablet. Why carry your laptop when you are travelling when a lightweight tablet will do the trick ?

We are seeing more evidence that the first open for many emails is on a mobile device. This may not be the only device they view the email on but could be the most important. Whether they can delete your email from their mobile device and never see it again or whether it will still be in their inbox on their desktop really depends on their email setup. In the B2C marketplace many users will only ever read their email on a mobile device and might never access their email from a desktop.

It’s also worth remembering that the timing of your emails can greatly affect the device used to read it as well as the length of time you have to grab the recipients attention. An email sent early in the morning might catch people on the way to work. They could be on a bus/tram/train and reading their emails on a mobile device. The chances are they have more time to read emails that might normally just get deleted if it were to arrive in their inbox on their desktop.

You can use historical data to get a good overview of how your recipients are reading your emails and what tools they are using. This will give you a better idea on which areas to focus your attention when designing your email.

In the past ISP’s have been keen to limit what you can do within the content of an email in an attempt to give the user increased confidence about their inbox security. Now users are demanding more functionality in their emails and ISP’s such as Hotmail and Yahoo are expanding what you can do. Hotmail has Active Views and dynamic content is the next step. Embedded video in email is now also a real possibility. This new functionality can really enhance your email but to use it you need to have a clear understand of who your audience are.

Having said all this, some of the principle of good email creative will always be the same.

1.  Test ! Test ! and Test again

Decide on what you want to achieve from the campaign and using these metrics to create a testing plan to get the best from your campaign. Use split testing to compare different options.

2.  Design and Content

Think about the images you use and keep your calls to action clear even when images aren’t displayed. Validate your html to make sure there are no mistakes.

3.  Rendering

Preview your email in as many different clients as possible focusing on the clients you expect your clients to be using.  You want to give the recipient the best possible experience whether on desktop or mobile.

4.  Personalisation

The aim of personalising a message is to demonstrate you know and understand enough about the recipient and their interests to have deduced that your email is relevant to them.

5.  Relevance

Segment your data to make the content more relevant to the indiviual. Take a look at the DMA whitepaper The Guide to Segmenting your Emails.

The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub has been reviewing the current email marketing best practices document over the past few months, and the publication of a revised version is imminent.

One of the things that the review process has identified is a need for more detailed guidance in certain key areas of the email marketing customer life cycle. For this reason, a number of supporting white papers have been produced, which can be found in the “Toolkit” section of the DMA’s website (www.dma.org.uk/toolkit), where they are available for download free to Members.

Here’s a quick summary of what has been produced to date:

Deliverability: Aimed at email program owners who have realised that their broadcasts are experiencing delivery problems, and are trying to identify why this may be the case. Looking at key factors such as sender reputation, spam filtering, blacklist operators, the document provides common-sense guidance on how to deal with them, including 10 easy-to-follow steps to improve your email deliverability.

Creative: Good creative is still an important determinant of a successful email campaign, and is sometimes the only connection a subscriber has with your brand. This document demonstrates that email creative is not a dark art requiring witchcraft and technical know-how! Rather, in non-technical language, it provides some easy-to-implement recommendations that will quickly optimise the performance of your email campaigns.

Data Analysis & Segmentation: Sets out a simple process to help email marketers start segmenting their data, and analysing their results. It defines five key areas to focus on, including: setting objectives; finding the right data; choosing the right segments; different segmentation models, and; effective use of segmentation. It also examines the best methods and approaches to implementing segmentation, as well as how best to interpret the results.

Split Testing: Provides email marketers with the basic capabilities that they will need to run split-testing activity. It looks firstly at the fundamentals that need to be in place to run a split testing program, and then examines ten prime opportunities where split testing can be introduced into any email marketing program to identify the optimal approach to maximise campaign response rates.

Triggered Campaigns: Delivering timely and relevant email messages, using trigger-based email marketing, plays an important part of email best practice. By analysing subscriber behaviour and identifying meaningful changes and/or events, organisations can communicate with their customers at a point when they are most likely to be receptive. This strengthens customer relationships by making them feel valued, and it is not unusual for trigger-based emails to attract high open rates as a result.

In addition to the documents that have been described above, there are also three new white papers whose publication is imminent:

• Using 3^rd Party Data For List Rental & Lead Generation
• A Layman’s Guide to Email Marketing Law
•  Email Lifecycle Marketing

And there are a further two which are scheduled for arrival during Q1 of the New Year:

• Organic List Growth
• Measurement & Reporting

The production of these documents is a collaborative process and the Email Marketing Council, as the representative body of the much larger interest group, is constantly feeding in new ideas about key issues which email marketers would like to have expert guidelines for. Hopefully, the documents described in this article are servicing this need, but it would be great to have direct feedback on whether they are useful, and what the email marketing community would like to see produced next. If you have any feedback for us, then drop a line to email@dma.org.uk , or online via LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Guy Hanson Chairs the The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub. He is Director, Response Consulting for Return Path.

I’ve been hearing the phrase email cadence a lot lately and its sometimes been confused with frequency. So let’s look at how frequency and cadence differ and how to set them.

Ring-ring

If you’ve not heard a traditional UK phone ring it sounds like this

That’s a rhythmic pattern of 0.4s ring, 0.2s silence, 0.4s ring, 2s silence, which then repeats.

The cadence is the rhythmic repeating pattern and the frequency is how often it repeats. In this case the frequency is once every 3 seconds.

What does this mean in terms of email marketing?

Often there are several independent streams of email activity running concurrently and these different streams beat together to form the cadence.

Take a scenario of an offers email being sent every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a newsletter email on the second Thursday in the month and a tips email every Tuesday, then the individual frequencies are monthly for the newsletter and weekly for the tips. The timeline for all activity is shown below (offers in blue, tips in red and newsletter green bars).

The same pattern of emails or cadence is repeated every four weeks, so the overall frequency is every four weeks.

If you have automated sequences of triggered emails for welcome, post purchase, abandoned basket and so on then these are overlaid too.

Setting a contact policy

When setting your contact policy for cadence and frequency think about:

• Setting a minimum time between emails.
• Setting a maximum time between emails.
• Prioritisation or suppressing scheduled sends during triggered sequences.
• Set many emails on average per month are received per customer.

Having a contact policy like this also means that you can set a clear expectation at time of signup, which will reduce spam complaints and improve deliverability. Daily emails need not be an issue, if that is the expectation.

Make it a user preference?

Should you offer individualised contact policies as a user preference? I don’t believe it always makes sense and this will be the topic of my next post.

Acknowledgements: My thanks to @jvanrijn as it was my recent conversation with Jordie that persuaded me there was value in writing this article.

One of the contentions that surround email marketing at the moment is the issue of when you retire an email address. Leading up to Christmas, when the heat is on, ambitious sales targets tempt even cautious marketers to push out the boat and send to everyone. If an email list is causing deliverability issues, it is quite common for a bit of a clean up to be suggested. It’s not a “stab in the dark” strategy, because when used correctly it can lead to a net increase in response and revenue.

However, you cannot ignore, when retired email addresses are mailed, they often produce some revenue. This almost flies in the face of the no response/retirement strategy, but in reality, some fine tuning is in order to squeeze all the value from your list.

To deal with this issue properly, you will certainly need response (sales) data for your customers, and need to know which email addresses the data relates too. In most instances the full picture of your list can only be achieved through wider knowledge of the customer.

All too often, the most responsive customers are the ones who have been opening and clicking your emails recently. But it’s also important to segment those who are no longer interested, from those that have disengaged from your emails due to a higher contact frequency than their needs require.

The first stage of the solution should be test the differing frequency of those people who haven’t opened or clicked for a while. Although a 6 month open/click window might be fine for some businesses, it might not suit those businesses with a longer sales cycle or a wider range of buying frequency. In these instances, sending mailings for twelve months or even longer might be better, but proper testing should help you decide when a customer is signalling defection.

If you have transactional data, you can use the principles of RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary value) to build up a model which predicts your most responsive customers. In an ideal world you could marry up the purchase RFM data alongside the online engagement data, to see the point where Recency for online engagement (opens/clicks/visits) signals a lapsed customer.

Using email response data, we create two segments, those that are recently engaged, and those that are not (don’t throw any away yet!). The engaged segment can carry on receiving the main campaign emails at the normal frequency. The less engaged segment now gets a rest (for about three to four times the normal frequency of you campaign emails). So if you generally send weekly, rest this segment for a month.

What we are trying to do is identify a segment within the email database that has stopped responding to emails due to a mailing frequency that is too high for them. By responding to the users behaviour, you are able to make changes to the email frequency of this group.

If people from this lower frequency segment, respond, it is important that they don’t go straight back into the main campaign mailing frequency, but give them more of a rest between mailings.

What we are trying to do is to start down the road of mailing people at a frequency that suits them, keeping them engaged and encouraging them to buy more. Managing frequency is the easiest way to respond to behaviour (or lack of it) but if you have more resource, you could try content too. One of the other top reasons why people stop opening emails, is that the emails are no longer relevant to them. The difficultly with content relevance, is that it relies on a deeper customer knowledge, or web behaviour data.

Unfortunately there will be those email addresses in the list that despite your best efforts will never be responsive again. So, at some point you will have to bite the bullet and let these addressees go. It is important to accept that the damage that is done to the whole email programme (in the shape of poor inbox deliverability and reduction in response) will outweigh any extra revenue gained by mailing these inactive email addresses.

The four key eCommerce marketing trigger emails are; welcome, transaction confirmation, basket abandoned and ratings/review request. Of course there are other opportunities for trigger emails such as Birthday, back in stock emails, win-back and more, however those first four emails are the key emails to put in place before any others.

Here I’m looking at the ratings and review request email. Social proof ratings and reviews have become essential in eCommerce, Reevoo benchmark the average sales uplift due to reviews at 18%. The natural human instinct is to value the opinion of others. My six year old daughter demonstrated this to me. I’d pulled up a page of Nintendo games for her to look at. A few seconds later she exclaimed how one had four stars and another 284 comments. I hadn’t explained social proof or reviews to her and I’m sure its not something taught at school. She seemed to naturally ‘get it’.

A very effective way to build the necessary ratings and reviews is to send a post purchase request email. When Argos implemented such a practice they found 10% of their customers provided a review. If you consider how many purchases you have then 10% is quickly going to add up to a lot of reviews.

The following charts show two ratings examples are from Reevoo:

Which review would you find more persuasive? If you are like most people it will be the one on the right.

The most interesting point about these two bar charts is that they are for the same product. The only difference was reviews for the chart on the right were proactively requested by means of a post purchase email. By asking there is a difference in not only quantity of reviews but the number of positive reviews.

This difference is easily explained. If not asked for feedback, only the less satisfied customers are likely to make the effort to find out how to make a rating and provide it.

Here are some tips for a good review request email.

• The reivew request email should be sent a few days after the customer has experienced the product or service. This should be enough time that they have developed their opinion and not so long that the enjoyment of the new purchase has passed.

• The email subject line and body should reference the item purchased.

• The copy should be short and clear with a well positioned call to action button.

• The process to provide review should be quick and easy. A simple star rating could be collected right from within the email using images for each of one to five stars. That’s easy.

• Avoid clutter that could distract from the review request.

• Remind the customer of your normal support and service channels. If they are not happy, you will want to know directly rather than have a poor review.

ClickZ recently posted this model for ROI calculation of reviews and user generated content and in the last dotMailer ‘Hitting the Mark’ report only 48% of companies studied sent any sort of post purchase email. There is clearly opportunity for many to improve their bottom line.

Oh, and yes I did end up buying the Nintendo games for my daugther that she picked out from the ratings.

Driving home last night, I saw a dead badger on the roadside, and I started ruminating on similarities between dead badgers and email marketing programs ! Not so much from the perspective of being a bit flat, somewhat run down, or showing the first signs of decay ( although all of those are potentially applicable ). Rather, that badgers are notoriously shy, so to be able to estimate their population size, a simple rule of thumb is to take the number of dead badgers on the roadside, and multiply that number by 10 to arrive at a rough estimate of the number of living badgers in that area. The key point is that an apparently small cause can provide a pointer to a much larger effect, hence my unlikely association between badgers and email marketing.

Consider spam complaints. Provided that they are being monitored ( that’s another point ! ) they will form around 0.1% of a good sender’s broadcast . Such a small number is easy to ignore, but it can point to bigger issues:

• According to Return Path’s recent Sender Reputation report, 0.1% equates broadly with a sender reputation score of 90+, with the program achieving ISP accepted rates in the high 90% as a result. By comparison, a complaint rate of 0.4% maps roughly onto a score somewhere between 50 and 80. The corresponding accepted rates decline markedly – anywhere between 27% to 88% – as a result.
• There is also churn to be considered. Let’s say you have an email list of 1M addresses, sending on a weekly basis. That 0.4% complaint rate equates with losing 1/5 of your subscribers over the course of a year, and every single one of them is leaving because they are unhappy with your program.

Unsubscribe requests are a similar case in point. The most recent edition of the DMA’s Email Benchmarking Report shows average opt-out rates for retention campaigns at 1%. As above, that small percentage actually provides the frame for a bigger picture. There are also some additional points to consider :

• Leading on from my comments about spam complaints – if you aren’t reporting on this metric, and are only using unsubscribes to measure levels of disaffection with your program, then you are under-reporting the true state of affairs by a probable factor of two, and possibly more.
• Disengagement should also be regarded as a form of opt-out. Your recipients may not physically request their removal, but if they stop responding then they have become “emotionally unsubscribed”. A re-activation program is your first step, but all the non-responders should then be opted out.

Another small number that can conceal bigger issues is bounce rates. The same DMA report shows average bounce rates for retention campaigns as 2%. Using the same example as above, you would lose your entire database in slightly under a year at this rate !

But there is another alarming dimension to this metric – bounce rates for new subscribers are nearly always substantially higher than the average bounce rate for your entire list. For example, if new subscribers form 2.5% of the total broadcast, then an average bounce rate of 2% might easily mask a new subscriber bounce rate of 20%. To counter this, email marketers need to be doing the following :

• Report separately on the first-broadcast performance of new email addresses.
• Ensure new registrants have a strong imperative to supply a good address.
• Validate new addresses using a process such as double entry, or confirmed opt-in.

So – at the risk of mixing my metaphors, my advice is to look between the trees ( the small numbers ) and see all the badgers that are frolicking in the woods ( the larger considerations ). Learn to interpret these metrics, and act quickly on what may at face value appear to be small variances. In this way, you can remain confident that the first whiff of putrefaction really is coming from that poor badger alongside the A5, and not from your slowly decaying email program instead !

Morrison’s have just finished running one of the best promotions I have seen.

For those of you who missed it, it basically involved going shopping and for every £30 you spent you received a pack of Disney top trump cards. They also added in bonus products that when you purchased them you got an additional pack of cards.

This was advertised heavily on the TV and also the kids at school were swapping cards and this prompted my 6 year old to ask to go shopping to Morrison’s. So somewhere kids have been chatting and with the power of TV I swapped super markets (and have continued to go there after the promotion ended)

Benefits to Morrison’s

• New customers
• The ability to push the sales of products by just putting a bonus Disney sign on them. The shelves where they were positioned could not be stocked quick enough. Mainly been emptied by a hoard of children who had suddenly decided shopping was fun.

They also sold rather a lot of the collector albums priced at £4.

What’s this got to do with email?

Well not a great deal apart from to highlight a missed opportunity by Morrison’s. At no point did anyone have to register to take part in the promotion, so they had no record of who the new customers were and no way to market to them to keep them coming back.

Once the promotion had finished there was lots of information about how you could get any missing cards by visiting the website. I actually wanted to celebrate the stroke of genius, what a great idea get people to register at the end to claim the missing cards. However when I logged on to see what happened it was simply out sourced to the card company where you can buy the cards for 10p each, and despite having to give my name, address, postcode and email in order to order them at no point was I given the option to opt into receive information from Morrison’s.

When could data have been captured?

Although on a professional level, I sometimes subscribe to things to see what happens, my personal email and details are only given out when I can really see the advantage in doing so. There were so many opportunities to do so here, it was just crying out for someone to do so.

People could have been opted in to a Customer database

• At the point when you collect the cards? This was done by the customer service desk and a registration process would have only taken a couple more minutes and an extra pack of cards would have probably got quite a high take up.
• When purchasing the collectors album a reduced price or free folder would have offered an incentive.
• They could have created a community page on the website for swapping cards, this group of people could then have been used for focus groups and research moving forward.
• At the point where you can claim any cards you are missing.

Summary.

An example of a great marketing campaign, but also an example of where a company miss an opportunity to engage and build an ongoing relationship via email. The lessons this highlights it to ensure that email is a fully integrated piece of any business strategy and when appropriate opportunities should be sued to collect information and options from individuals who you can then engage with moving forward.

Previously, I wrote an article about the number of different ways that common domain names get mis-spelt. In the case of “Hotmail”, I stopped counting once we got into three figures ! It was a tongue in cheek article, although it did have a serious point to make about the importance of list hygiene.

More recently a new dimension to this topic has been emerging. All email marketers should be familiar with the principle of spam traps – ISPs co-opt dormant email addresses, and monitor the e-marketing traffic that is sent to these addresses. The rationale is that good email programs know who their dormant records are, and will suppress them from their broadcast activities. Those programs that continue to use these addresses are regarded as being more lax in the list hygiene standards that they apply. In turn, this informs spam filter and / or mail blocking decisions that are applied against these programs. Ultimately, that’s bad news for your email program’s sender reputation metrics.

However, a close scrutiny of even “clean” lists will identify email addresses that – in theory – ought not to work. Let’s take guy.hanson@homail.com as an example. The initial assumption is that this should have been guy.hanson@hotmail.com, but that it was mis-typed at point of data entry. However, despite multiple uses, this address has never generated a bounce notification, which is what one might have reasonably expected. In addition to the sender reputation implications, this is bad news for your campaign response metrics, which are being diluted as a result of because you are broadcasting to addresses that will never generate positive response behaviour.

So the next assumption is that maybe “www.homail.com” is actually a valid domain. That’s an easy one to prove – put it into your web browser, and don’t be surprised when it re-routes to www.live.com ! That’s right – Microsoft has registered a lot of the most common mis-spellings as valid domains, and it is not a big leap of faith to believe that at least part of the reason for this to get a handle of the email traffic that is being sent to these invalid domains. Not convinced ? Try “hotamil.com”, “hortmail,com”, “otmail.com”, “hotamail.com” – same result. Behold – a new spam trap is born !

Hotmail is also not the only ISP to be doing this. AOL does something similar, and you will see the same effect with the likes of “a0l,com” ( with a zero ) and “aool.com”, both of which re-route to “aol.com”.

Of course, some of these mis-spellings are not necessarily mis-spellings at all. It’s the same principle as the smarter SEO programs which, in addition to leveraging their most popular search keywords, will also extend their reach to include incorrect variations of the same. So if you got to “hotnail.com”, you won’t be able to access your inbox, but you will find some great deals on manicures ! It strikes one as being an almost parasitic relationship, and Hotnail must benefit from shedloads of inadvertent web traffic – especially with “n” being right next to “m” on a standard QWERTY keyboard. “Hotmale.com” is another good case in point, although I wouldn’t recommend this website to those of a less broad minded disposition !

So what should e-marketers be doing about these mis-spellings, especially as they could be generating negative sender reputation consequences for your email programs ? A good starting point is to extract a list of all your “never bounced / never opened / never clicked” addresses. Sort them by most common domain first, identify all the obvious mis-spellings, and suppress them. There are also third party tools available on the web that can do this for you.
 
Then make sure that you are fixing the problem at source. Making double opt-in your preferred permissioning mechanism is the gold standard solution. Failing this, validated opt-in, double entry of the email address ( to mitigate against finger fumbles ) or real time domain validation would all represent effective solutions to the problem.

Ultimately, it’s all about recognising that good data hygiene practices are fundamental to a healthy set of sender reputation metrics. Good email marketers will already know this, but even for them the science of email deliverability is not as black and white as was once the case. Increasingly, it is a case of learning to read between the lines, and list hygiene practices such as the ones described in this post can certainly be expected to become more commonplace as a result.