The Globe and Mail today had an article about new “stealth” spamming techniques that evade filters. A lot of it, I’ve talked about before in this blog, but the article also has a great list of tips for not getting spam.

Although one of them, “Do not click on any links contained in a spam message, especially the “unsubscribe” links.” I’m not too sure about the validity there – I mean I get tons of spam and I’ve never seen real spam with an “unsubscribe” link. It’s just not even there. However, I hear this “warning” all the time, and it leads to people reporting legitimate opt-in email as spam (which causes problems for legitimate email marketers).

If anyone has any info or examples of this, please share with me!

UPDATE: OK I swear someone is playing a cruel joke on me, because the day after I posted this, I received this in my inbox… and I’ve gotten similar ones everyday since!

If you are in Ottawa, and interested in Social Media, I definitely recommend checking out Third Monday, which happens (you guessed it!) the third monday of every month.

This was my first time, and it was great! The speakers, Marc Snyder (from Montreal) and Darren Barefoot (Vancouver) were interesting and informative, and the informal, conversation-style presentation was great too. Plus I loved the location – Fresco Ciela – a 30-second walk from our office.

Some other bloggers I met there were John and Brett from 76design (blog = shift+control), Joseph Thornley from Thornley Fallis (blog = Pro PR) (one of the organizers) and Michael O’Connor (Uninstalled).

I met some other cool people too, these are just the ones that told me about their blogs.

Ok so my last post was all about best practices for the unsubscribe function, well not long after I posted that, I recieved a forwarded email from a friend with a really bad example for unsubscribing, and the culprit is Chapters/Indigo!

First of all, after the email, there were four pretty lengthy paragraphs of “fine print” and buried at the bottom was the instructions to unsubscribe:

This email was sent to: …. If you no longer wish to receive our promotional emails, click here to log into your Online Account, select “Your 1)Settings”, deselect the email checkbox in the “Email Extras” section and click “Submit” to update your settings. If you are an irewards member and do not have a Chapters Indigo Account, you can unsubscribe by emailing your irewards number to iRunsubscribe@indigo.ca.

Please allow up to 7 business days for your request to be processed.

So let’s look at this closely, in order to unsubcribe, you must:

1. Click the link
2. Log in to your account (what are the chances you even remember your username/password?
3. Select “Your settings”
4. Deselect “Email Extras”
5. Allow up to 7 days to take effect.

That seems a little ridiculous to me! Oh wait – you can also unsubscribe via an email to a seperate email address, but you must include your iRewards member number (which is not included in the original email) so that means you have to go digging around in your wallet to find the card then type out the long number.

This is very unacceptable, especially when it’s so easy to make a quick, and instant, unsubscribe feature. Your subscribers should not be “punished” for not wanting to receive your emails anymore!

PS- I may be a little cranky today due to my horrible cold… I will say that aside from the lousy “unsubscribe” instructions, the email was very, very good.

Ok so this was released a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been so busy spreading the word about it that I forgot to blog about it (oh the irony!!)

If you haven’t had the chance to check it out yet, I urge you to, because there are lots of interesting stats this quarter!

First, we were shocked to see how much better the nonprofit industry does, compared to B2B, B2C/Retail, and Event Planning. Though when we put some thought to it, it makes perfect sense because of a few factors, including the fantastic relationships these organizations have with their databases. Also the way they speak to subscribers is different then most, there’s no hard selling, it’s all about communicating valuable information – that doesn’t mean they don’t get anything out of it though, because many have a “donate” call-to-action somewhere in there, and they do fairly well.

Another very interesting tidbit I found when piecing the data together, is that emails sent in July and August actually outperform those sent in September. It’s interesting because many people (admittedly even us) say to relax email marketing in the summer because people are on vacation, the weather is nice and everyone would rather be outside, etc., etc., etc.,. Well in actual fact, people are not only checking their email, they’re opening more and clicking more! Why? We’ve come up with a few possible explanations:

• Inbox competition is low: Since a lot less email is being sent, people have more time to read the ones they get.
• Less “busy-ness”: In most organizations, the work seems to slow down in the summer giving employees more time to check and read their email.
• We’re all email addicts: Can someone honestly tell me they don’t check their email while on vacation? I mean who likes coming back after a vacation to find 23,904,832,234 new messages in their inbox?

Finally, if you’ve been following past reports, you may notice our deliverability has gone WAY up. No shady cover-ups or dealmaking going on here… The truth is these quarterly reports are an important benchmark for us as a company, and they have helped us identify areas we could improve. We have now implemented email authentication for all of our clients, and we’ve added extra list hygeine strategies above and beyond what our platform uses for optimal results.

So I hope you’ll check out the Q3 Email Trends Report, and bookmark the page for upcoming reports! I’m not making any promises, but I’m hoping for Q4 we’ll have a “year in review” section and I will try to come up with some new interesting perspectives.

Do you love finding great resources about email marketing, but hate all the legwork of searching for them?

Well, we may have a solution for you! With the help of Google, we’ve created an Email Marketing Resource Search Engine on our website. Basically we’ve taken the best of the best email marketing resources and created a search engine that will only search those websites included. Now you don’t have to worry about getting bad advice!

Get your search on…