EmailManual

EmailManual

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Home page: http://www.emailmanual.co.uk

Posts by EmailManual

Googlemail creates tool to try and take some Hotmail and Yahoo market share.

1
2 years ago
by EmailManual in ,

Googlemail aka Gmail yesterday announced on its blog that it was to remove one of the most common excuses for consumers not switching email providers, “It’s too difficult to switch”.

Google have done this through making a new tool available within the newly named “accounts and import” tab which allows new users to import both emails and contacts from their existing accounts. Nearly 50 existing domains are supported from the launch of the tool. A full list is available on googlemail help here. The list includes Microsoft’s hotmail and Yahoo!, two of google’s biggest webmail competitors.

The new feature is not yet rolled out to all existing gmail accounts but google have said it will be slowly rolled out to all users.

Massive percentage of consumers are suppressing your images.

1
2 years ago
by EmailManual in , ,

At EmailManual we don’t normally post about content or html related issues but instead focus on the more technical elements of email, this time we are making an exception.

Approximately half of all consumers have images turned off by default according to a study by the email experience council.

This statistic shows that marketers need to ensure they are using text effectively within their email marketing content in addition to images. Having text with a call to action or targeted offer will encourage the reader to allow images to be displayed within their email which will also register as an email open if you use email open tracking and failing to do this may result in your email being simply deleted or worse, the “this is spam” button being clicked.

One of the easy wins, if you do not want to redesign your content is to use alt tags. These are html snippets within your email which will show a word or sentence when an image can not be displayed. By doing this you give your subscribers who block images by default a chance to decide whether the content is relevant to them and allow the images to display. Without text surrounding your images or alt tags your subscribers will only see empty boxes where your images were supposed to be and this will result in your email not being read and just deleted.

Seems simple enough? We thought so too but surprisingly in a separate study titled ‘Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study’ from the email experience council showed that :-

“Only 42% of the 104 top online retailers included in our study designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63% used alt tags adequately or extensively.”

Email Manual recommendations:

  • Use a good mix of text and images, don’t include your text within the images.
  • Use alt tags for your images where appropriate.
  • Trial sending your emails with embedded images rather than linked *

* N.B the figure you should look at here will be your clickthrough or conversation rates and not your open rate, if the images are embedded within the content and the only image that is linked is the open tracking image then users will not see the need to allow the image through and therefore you can reasonably expect a slightly reduced open rate but you may also see a higher clickthrough and conversion rate.

If you want to see more results from the ‘Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study’ you can read the executive summary here.

Online Trust Alliance shows more than 50% of .Gov domains do not comply with Email Authentication Standards

0
2 years ago
by EmailManual in , , ,

Further to yesterdays article on fortune 500 companies and US government domains and their non-compliance to adhere to widely used email authentication standards we thought you might like to see the Online Trust Alliance findings for the .gov domains.

Government Agencies such as the Whitehouse, Secret Service and the Federal Communications Commission all fail to adhere to these standards.

A full list of .Gov domains which were analyzed is available from the OTA here.

Yahoo Feedback Loop made available to all.

0
2 years ago
by EmailManual in , ,

For a long time Yahoo! have offered a feedback loop which was developed and maintained by themselves. For a brief period this was available to the public but involved signing paperwork, sending it off and waiting over 6 weeks for it to be processed.

This was a major inconvenience to anyone who was mailing for several domains as the feedback loop itself was not done on an IP level like most, but instead a domain level using Domain Key technology which Yahoo! developed with Cisco.

Yahoo have now deprecated their feedback loop by preventing further signups and have now partnered with Return Path and are using them to deliver their feedback loop messages which uses ARF (Abuse Reporting Format)  back to the organisation who has signed up to receive the complaints. Organisations should then automatically process these and unsubscribe the complainant. If these ARF messages are processed correctly and complainants are unsubscribed this allows the organisations spam complaint levels to remain low and therefore a good reputation is maintained with Yahoo allowing better delivery of emails to Yahoo users.

For more information on the Yahoo! Feedback Loop see http://feedbackloop.yahoo.net/

Brands must do more to protect their subscribers from phishing.

3
2 years ago
by EmailManual in , , ,

According to the OTA (Online Trust Alliance) organisations must do more to protect their email subscribers from being victims of phishing scams.

Phishing scams are emails sent by a spammer which mimics a well known brand in order to get the subscriber to disclose usernames and passwords or other personal information. For instance every one of us has received an email claiming to be from our banks. Most of these are easy to spot and consequently easy to ignore but some are not. Spammers will often put in considerable effort, registering similar domains to the genuine brand, putting many hours into the site design containing the genuine brands logos etc which often makes them indistinguishable to the average internet user.

The online trust alliance released a report last month claiming that 56% of .gov Web sites and 45% of leading e-commerce sites are not taking appropriate e-mail and domain security measures.

The report measured 25 government domains, as well as the top 300 online retail­ers as measured by sales volume during a 10 day period last month.

Analysis was done against the DNS records of the US government and ecommerce sites which shows whether the organisation uses SPF, Domain keys or its slightly younger sister, DKIM and found that a huge percentage of these domains had not adopted one of these email authentication technologies which allows spam filters to pickup on phishing emails/spam and either block or quarantine them.

Whilst big brands and government organisations continue to fail to adopt these sorts of technologies there will always be successful phishing scams. If large organisations like these started to adopt these technologies, spam filters could become more aggressive against domains that don’t authenticate correctly which will apply pressure for smaller brands and individual companies to follow suit which would dramatically help reduce the amount of phishing and spam emails sent across the globe.

A Gartner survey of 5,000 adults in the US estimated that 24.4 million Americans have been duped by a phishing e-mail in 2006. If the larger organisations did their bit in helping IT departments block these sorts of emails it would undoubtedly save the economy millions of pounds which are lost to fraudsters every year.

Email Manual Recommendations:

  • Implement SPF on your domain, initally with softfail, then switch to hardfail once you have gained confidence.
  • Implement Domain Keys/DKIM on outbound email.
  • Block inbound email which hardfails SPF checks.
  • Block inbound email which is not Domain key/DKIM signed where the policy record for the domain indicates all mail should be signed.
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