eROI Days Email Agency

In my last blog posting, I mentioned Microsoft’s deliveribility guy Brian Holdsworth but ran out of time before jotting down my notes about his talk, so here they are:

MS Outlook and Windows LiveMail (formerly Hotmail) represent 600 million people / users in the world. Microsoft expects this to climb to 1 billion in the next few years.

Big change in Outlook 2007: it automatically postmarks emails to email addresses NOT in your address book. It delays the send several minutes per email address not in your address book. This will significantly reduce the amount of spam generated by botnets and zombies that send email through unprotected PCs (which is responsible for 80% of the increase in spam in the past year).

Spammer Trends and Tactics:
Microsoft has brought 376 successful lawsuits against spammers in the past 3 years. Part of the lawsuit process requires the spammer to come into Microsoft’s office and explain why they spammed. Recently, a 17 year-old came into to talk to the Microsoft deliverability team - he started when he was 9 years old and was now sending 25 million emails per day and made $300 per day on affiliate revenue (which breaks down to roughly $1 per 100,000 emails - not great ROI, but pretty good when considering there are no costs other than his eventual fine and jail time).

Of the 4 billion emails per day that Hotmail processes, 90% is spam. Much of this is image spam, and spam generated from botnets and zombies.

Next version of Hotmail is Windows LiveMail which is very similar to Outlook.

An Unsubscribe link is built into every email in Windows LiveMail in the Return Header.

Microsoft Goals:
1. Reduce Spam in Inbox
2. Improve deliverability for legit senders:
a. volume based reputation
b. Sender ID + past reputation (Outlook postmark)
c. Unsubscribe built into Windows LiveMail

Last note is the phenomenon of communication barriers within Microsoft. The Outlook team makes major changes/shifts every 3 years, and for Outlook 2007, they are moving to a content rendering engine built in MS Word instead of the natural choice of Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s deliverability found out about this at the same time the general public saw the press release a couple weeks ago - doesn’t know why this decision was made by the Outlook team. Maybe the next ReturnPath event can address this topic in more detail…

I attended Return Path’s Seattle Workshop yesterday and learned a lot more about “Email Strategies that Increase Deliverability and Response” than I expected. They even had a guest speaker from Microsoft Hotmail (now branded Windows LiveMail) - Product Planner Brian Holdsworth who shed light on Microsoft’s deliverability strategies. Apparently, over 50% of email browser use is MS Outlook, so maybe we should listen to what he has to say.

Here are my notes from the event (Return Path speaker):
Large ISPs getting significantly more email volume each day - recently showing 7.4billion emails per day.

What is Email Reputation?
1. Complaints (Informal)
2. High Unknown Users (unclean list)
3. Spam Traps (spamcop.com and other types of spam-catching email addresses)
4. Sending Infrastructure (IP address must be clean)
5. Sending Consistency (similar daily email volume)

Where you are sending from matters a whole lot more than domain reputation and email content.

Feedback loops are important - automatically unsubscribes people who complain. Added benefit of decreasing complaint rates up to 40% at Yahoo, Hotmail, when feedback loops are implemented by senders.

Strategies to Reduce complaints:

• Welcome email upon subscription 
• Link to sample newsletter
• Use double opt-in
• Always respect unsub requests
• Make it very easy to unsubscribe
• Content relevancy is key
• Conduct complaint analysis