The above will no doubt be a familiar scenario for many who have commented on an acquaintances status or someone you know, without knowing most of their friends. The mass of irrelevant ‘comment’ emails that follow are pretty frustrating, causing many users to turn notifications off. Although turning off notifications would stop the flood of unwanted emails, it would also stop you being notified of comments you would be interested in.

Facebook have attempted to address this frequency and relevance issue and have announced the following:

Whilst the debate into the optimum frequency of send is normally applied to marketing emails, brands need to consider this issue even if they are ‘just sending notifications’ and ‘not trying to sell anything’.

Facebook is trying to sell its users something – a place to spend time whilst online. As such Facebook need to treat all emails as marketing emails and ensure they contain more relevant notifications at an appropriate frequency.

All users are different however and wish to be notified of activity to varying degrees.  It is good to see that Facebook is directing users to their preference centre, where users can decide the exact type and frequency of emails they receive – something all senders can learn from.

Facebook’s new found respect for its users is likely down to the emergence of its first main competitor in recent years: Google+.

For more information on the optimum frequency of sending emails, read Choosing the right email frequency by Sean Duffy.

Listen to a podcast of the Interview for some useful insights into email marketing topics ranging from customer relationship strategies and design tips all the way through to email analytics, the recent data breaches effecting the industry and the what the future may hold for email marketing.

You can view this and other digital marketing podcasts at www.targetinternet.com

If you would like to discuss any of the topics covered in this podcast please get in touch.

Today it is no longer the case that the content of an email determines whether it is junked or not. It is now the reputation you have as a sender with the receiving ISP or filter that is important.

Why is reputation important? Well it’s because you can change content to bypass content filters (think of the shift in spammers technique from Viagra to V1agra) but you cannot fake your reputation.

In a nutshell reputation is made up of the following factors:

How clean your list is:

If you have a lot of unused email addresses because employees no longer work at a company or a person has closed down their email account this will count against you

The number of complaints you get about your email:

Often recipients will prefer to use the spam button rather than the unsubscribe link. In this case these will still normally be unsubscribed by Maxemail as ISP’s send them to us via what is termed a ‘feedback loop’

How often you send your emails:

The longer the history of good email coming from your IP’s the more confidence an ISP will have in you. However if you only say send one email a week rather than a fairly consistent load over the week then this can count against you too, because you will look like a spammer in the eyes of the ISP. A spammer will send lots of email out in one hit, the IP will get blocked and then they will do the same again once the block is removed. Now you can see why it is difficult for an ISP to tell the difference between a spam attack and your weekly newsletter!

Content is still a factor although just not as crucial as it used to be. If you have a good sending reputation then using ‘free’ in the subject line should be fine. However, you should still use a tool like our ‘Inbox Seeding’ to check that you won’t be tripping any filters before you deliver the email to your list.
To help with your sending reputation there are a number of tactics. Firstly you must send good, permission based email. If your list has been collected in a suspect way, has been purchased or rented you will definitely have deliverability issues.

Even if you have followed the height of best practice in data collection you still need to remember that it is not the law you need to be perceived in a good light by, but the consumer. Consumers consider spam to be commercial email they don’t want so make sure they will want your emails by making the content valuable, relevant and don’t over email your lists.

Non-active subscribers could be segmented out of your list as they are the most likely to bounce or report your emails as spam.

Not only is everything above important to aid your reputation there is another more important reason – these steps are what makes a successful email programme!