Senders of email will have noticed changes to the way in which ISPs (particularly AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail and Google) are filtering email messages and in turn how it’s affecting the number of emails actually getting to the inbox. It’s pretty obvious that not-so-legitimate senders are always looking for ways to ‘trick’ ISPs and as a result filtering rules and techniques are changing all the time to tighten things up.
In the constant battle against Spam, to improve the accuracy in identifying a user’s most important messages and to reduce false positives, ISPs are starting to monitor email engagement as part of their overall reputation-based systems. Yahoo! and AOL were first to make use of engagement monitoring followed in August 2010 by Hotmail when it announced that it also would begin to filter based on engagement metrics.
It is important to note that ISPs aren’t looking solely at standard engagement metrics like opens, clicks, Spam complaints and unsubscribes. They are now looking at more passive indicators of engagement based on how users interact with a message on the whole. Take Hotmail for example. According to Return Path founder and president George Bilbrey, Microsoft has stated that it would be looking at numerous metrics, including:
- Messages read, then deleted
- Messages deleted without being read
- Messages replied to
- Frequency of receiving and reading a message from a source
Yahoo! Mail product Manager Carol Catajan has also confirmed that Yahoo! is tracking how many emails are being read, opened and clicked on with the data collected then being used to fine-tune it’s reputation system. In other words, if most of a sender’s emails aren’t being opened or clicked, their sender reputation will be adversely affected.
Similarly, Google is embracing engagement metrics with Gmail’s new “Priority Inbox”. This new feature flags email that it feels its users will want to see. It makes this determination based on the level of engagement it has seen from the user with certain types of emails. They look at the mail you have read and the mail you have replied to and elevate those messages in priority. When you log in to your Priority Inbox for the first time, you get a pop-up showing how a sampling of your messages has been prioritised and then are giving the opportunity to change the prioritisation.
Hotmail and Gmail also respond to prolonged inactivity by turning a user’s account off after 270 consecutive days without a login. Hotmail will give users an extra 90 days to reactivate the account, but after that, the account is deleted to make the storage space available to active users. Yahoo! is even more severe, closing accounts after only 160 days of inactivity – although this doesn’t apply to paid Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts.
With the lack of any activity (i.e. engagement) negatively affecting sender reputation, marketers need to make sure their programs are focused on increasing engagement, and that means leveraging customer data to better understand what interests them. Of course, this is in everyone’s best interest. These changes mean that companies can no longer afford to simply send the same email to every customer in hopes that a small percentage will open and respond. Instead, marketers need to ensure that they are gathering the data they need to maximize campaign performance and engagement – before it becomes the only metric that matters to the ISPs.
Useful links
Yahoo! Inbox Placement
Hotmail Engagement Metrics
Google Priority Inbox
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