Intela Visits Seattle
Seattle - the only city in America where pre-school children answered “gray” to the question “what color is the sky?”
Jennifer Hanson (our Director of Email) and I found ourselves in this northwestern home of hi-tech, coffee and Kurt Cobain memorials.
We were there in early June to attend the annual AOTA (Authentication and Online Trust Alliance) Summit. This two and a half day program had working groups that covered the spectrum from Hotmail security, feedback loops, “user experience” and FTC thoughts on future regulation. Jen and I attended parallel paths – she focused on technology and I focused on compliance and market conditions. Some of the high level issues were new to us (and to you) and some of the issues were well covered ground.
To highlight a complicated (and expensive) show, here were some of our key take-aways:
- Some ISPs (AOL and Hotmail, in particular) view mailers as part of their client base as long as the mailer is sending relevant mail that generates few complaints to the consumer. They provide tools for mailers to gain greater insight into their mail performance so that the right mail is getting to the right people. Other ISPs apparently don’t believe that mailers are a key constituent – Yahoo! and Gmail were noticeably absent.
- In terms of delivery, content has taken more and more of a back seat to an IP’s reputation. When an IP is fresh, the ISP will look carefully at the content and use tools like Spam Assassin to rate a message. However, as traffic moves across an IP, the ISPs will examine at least 40 different variables to determine that IP’s reputation. A few issues that help create your reputation are:
- hard bounces
- complaint rates
- speed at which an IP is warmed up
- volume at which the IP transmits
- consistency of traffic
- consistency of destination
- consistency of message types
- frequency of IP rotations
- The representatives from Hotmail spoke at length to the things mailers can do to give a “gray mail” recipient a better experience:
- Remind them in the header where and when they signed up for a message. This helps the user separate true spam from unrecognized mail.
- Instead of one unsub link, send the user back to a preference center landing page where they can change the frequency of mailings, the email address at which they receive the messages and /or the products and services that they receive messages about.
- On the compliance front, there were active discussions about the final release of the CAN-SPAM updates that took effect in May of 2008. In addition, representatives from the FTC indicated that they would be taking a much harder look in the future at Affiliate Networks and how liability flowed through these networks. All in all, the theme of the compliance section was “get your house in order”.
- Finally, the show organizers spent the final half day going over important settings to your MTA, your Domain Keys as well as changes in DKIM and a host of other technical issues that went well over my head. Fortunately, Jen Hanson is much smarter than I and was soaking all of this in like a sponge. ISPs are using more and more tools to authenticate and verify who you are (as a sender) and who you are sending your messages to.
For our firm, this was an invaluable opportunity to network with other mailers, swap trade secrets (after buying our competitors a few drinks at the hotel bar) and check to see where we stood with the rest of the industry in regards to our mailing practices. We have begun implementing a number of these new ideas and fully expect to see the results on our bottom line.