As far back as 2007, we noted that “spam” was about email subscribers don’t want or value. Not just email that they didn’t request (although that’s still spam, too).

As I noted in that post, “If you’re not providing value to subscribers, their actions with your messages will reflect that. ISPs track what’s done with your messages, and can choose to filter you out if they find you’re not ‘what the consumer wants.’”

This week, Gmail announced a new feature that makes this a reality.

Introducing The Priority Inbox

To manage our overflowing inboxes, a lot of people already sort email into groups of emails to read and respond to now, later or never. (Your own groups’ names may vary, or you may not even have a specific system like that… but I’d bet you read emails from certain people more often and/or more quickly.)

Gmail’s Priority Inbox attempts to simplify and automate this process for email users by figuring out which senders’ emails are important, based on how (or whether) you interact with those emails and senders.

Here’s how they explain it:

Priority Inbox is a beta feature that will be rolling out to users soon (I haven’t gotten it yet, but am eager to get my hands on it and see it in action).

What Are People Saying About It?

Here are a few of the articles I’ve read about it:

• Gmail Priority Inbox Launches (Mashable)
• Gmail Priority Inbox Sorts Your Email For You (TechCrunch)
• Inbox Hero: Gmail Priority Inbox Has Doused My Raging Email Fire (also TechCrunch)
• Priority inboxes, intelligent inboxes, quality bars and you (Email Marketing Reports)

I especially recommend you read the last one of those.

“So Do My Marketing Emails All Go Into The “Everything Else” Pile Now?”

Not necessarily, but consider the examples in the Gmail video… note whose email is getting prioritized (email from contacts, friends, people you email back and forth with regularly) and whose is not (the “Special Offer” email).

It’s early to make predictions about what all of this means – or if it will even stick around as a feature. You never know, Gmail users might end up not liking it (although I tend to doubt that’ll be the case).

That said, it’s clear that whatever the future of the Priority Inbox holds, ISPs are continuing to move toward creating systems that reward email that people want at the expense of email people don’t want. (Gmail isn’t the first to try this – the same sort of thing is happening at Yahoo! and Windows Live Hotmail.)

What this should tell you is that you need to take a long, hard look at whether your emails are something your subscribers really want. Because if they aren’t, you’re going to find it harder over time to continue getting them opened and clicked.

It’s Not All Gloom And Doom

In fact, this is excellent news if you’re creating and delivering email marketing campaigns that people want.

So the question is, how do you create emails people actually want?

Engage your subscribers in conversation via your emails. Invite feedback. Ask them questions. Increase the value that you deliver in your emails.

Start identifying groups of subscribers within your list who have similar interests. Start segmenting your list and creating more relevant emails.

Here’s a list of posts we’ve written on email segmentation. (If it seems like we talk a lot about segmentation on this blog, well… this is why.)

They’ll ask questions like:

• Are you whitelisted? How do I get whitelisted?
• So if you’re/I’m whitelisted, I won’t ever go to the spam folder?
• How do you make sure I don’t get spam complaints?
• How do I know who marked my email as spam?

If you’ve ever been concerned about your email deliverability, you’ve probably wondered the same sorts of things.

All of these questions can lead to useful discussions about getting your email delivered. But a lot of times, those discussions require more than a simple one-word or one-sentence answer.

I recently came across a handy resource on ISP whitelisting and feedback loops that gives us an opportunity to clear up some misconceptions and uncertainties that many people (perhaps even you) have had about email deliverability.

Fact: Not All ISPs Offer Whitelisting or Feedback Loops

The problem with asking a question like “are you whitelisted?” is that it assumes that whitelisting is an everybody-or-nobody proposition.

Even if you’re whitelisted (as AWeber is) with the ISPs who do offer it, there are other ISPs who simply don’t offer whitelisting.

The same goes for Feedback Loops – not all ISPs will tell you when a subscriber marks an email as spam.

For a handy list of ISPs that do and do not offer whitelisting and/or feedback loops, see this blog post at Word to the Wise.

Keep in mind, if you’re using AWeber, you don’t need to get whitelisted separately for your email campaigns through us.

What Does It Mean to be Whitelisted?

What’s interesting about this question is that I cannot recall anyone ever asking me this in my 4+ years at AWeber. People will ask if we’re whitelisted, but they don’t ask what that means or what the implications of being whitelisted are.

Here’s something that a lot of people don’t know about whitelisting…

• Whitelisting does not in any way guarantee that your emails will all end up in the inbox.

It doesn’t. That’s not why it exists.

Being whitelisted at an ISP is not a “free pass” to send whatever you want, whenever you want, without any potential deliverability repercussions.

I think of it this way…

Being whitelisted is like taking a pledge – by providing information about your mailing practices to an ISP, you’re saying “I practice responsible email marketing, and I’m willing to prove it by letting you keep a close eye on me and how recipients treat my email.”

After all, one of the effects of getting whitelisted is that you make it easier for an ISP to identify email coming from you – and potentially block it.

This doesn’t mean whitelisting is bad. It’s a good thing to do, and whitelisted senders have an advantage over those who are not whitelisted. But don’t think it’s a free pass to send unsolicited or irrelevant emails to people.

What About Feedback Loops? What Do They Mean to You?

Here’s the lowdown on feedback loops:

• When an ISP offers a feedback loop, it means that they will tell us when one of your subscribers marks your email as spam.

  The feedback loops are what enables us to show you complaint rates within your account.

• If your complaint rates get too high, an ISP may not deliver your email campaigns to the inbox.

  What is an Acceptable Complaint Rate?

  Being on a feedback loop is kind of like being whitelisted – you’re taking responsibility for your email practices, and their consequences.

• Whenever someone marks your email as spam, we immediately unsubscribe them from your list.

  As a couple of us were discussing on Twitter earlier today, this is just common sense, and it also helps prevent future emails from being blocked.

  If you run any email campaigns outside of AWeber, you should regularly export your unsubscribes (this will include people who marked one of your emails as spam) so you can make sure that they’re not on those other campaigns.

What Other Questions Do You Have?

Is there anything else you’ve wondered about email deliverability, but not asked about before?

Share your thoughts and questions below!

Others don’t want to be bothered locating the unsubscribe link in your email.

In both cases, recipients may click the “spam” button in order to unsubscribe – raising your spam complaint rates and possibly reducing deliverability.

Wouldn’t it be nice if ISPs made unsubscribing easier and more trustworthy for users (at the same time reducing your complaint rate)?

One major ISP is already doing so.

List-Unsubscribe Header Allows ISPs to Add an Unsubscribe Button or Link

By adding a “list-unsubscribe” header to your outgoing email marketing campaigns, you enable ISPs to add an unsubscribe link or button into their user interface.

That way, readers who want to unsubscribe, but who don’t want to be bothered with locating the unsubscribe link in your email, can do so without clicking the “Spam” button in their email clients.

How Hotmail Uses the List-Unsubscribe Header

Windows Live Hotmail (for simplicity’s sake, I’m shortening it to “Hotmail”) is the first major ISP to implement support for the List-Unsubscribe header.

Here’s what happens.

When a Hotmail subscriber first gets a message from you (like this welcome message from our Test Drive), since s/he hasn’t added you to the Safe Senders list yet, images and links are disabled.

The top of your email looks like this in Hotmail:

(Click the image above to see what the full email looks like.)

When someone clicks the “mark as safe” link, images are turned on and the top of the email changes to include an unsubscribe link:

If someone clicks the unsubscribe link, they see an alert box:

When they click “OK” they’re taken to the unsubscribe page:

What Do I Need To Do To Use The List-Unsubscribe Header In My Emails?

If you’re an AWeber user, nothing at all – we automatically add this header to your campaigns.

We’ll keep you updated on any other major ISPs adopting the list-unsubscribe header (if you haven’t already done so, follow this blog by email or RSS and be the first to know!).

But “who wants them” is more complex than “anyone who filled out my sign up form” in an age where message relevancy, bounces, complaints, and authentication increasingly way in.

Just today, AOL announced two new or revised documents they’ve published that should give a firm understanding of both what they suggest strongly as well as what they require.

Your ESP should help you take care of most of the requirements they list, since most are technical or procedural in nature. A quick read of the suggestions validates recommendations you’ll find being expressed in the permission only email community over and over again.

It’s also nice to see where we’re on the same page with those who decide what happens with our email. This type of transparency helps everyone but those who don’t adhere to the standards.

Opens and clicks tell us some things, like the rate at which our subscribers positively respond to messages. But at best, that’s only half of the story.

That’s why we’re glad to be a part of Comcast’s new feedback loop system.

A Win-Win Situation for Email Deliverability…

The other half of the story is recognizing when subscribers react in a less beneficial way, such as when they mark our messages as SPAM. This is crucial because nothing good can possibly come from messages that don’t get through as a result of ISP blocking.

By passing a more complete subscriber complaint rate to users, we can help them to better understand what is relevant and important to subscribers and what they don’t want to see in their inboxes.

At the same time, our administrators now have another tool at their disposal to monitor our system to make sure the actions of a small subset of people sending irrelevant messages doesn’t affect those of us adhering to email marketing best practices.

So, while it’s not a flashy new feature, it’s something we’re happy to implement.

Before sending, I test our blog newsletters to Gmail, along with other popular clients (generally a smart thing to do).

By and large, the messages tend to look fine, outside of one detail that might seem minor to some but meaningful others who spend some time thinking about optimizing emails for best results.

Take a look at a few of the recent tests in my inbox and see if you notice what I’m seeing:

See what I mean? Here’s another view – what I see pop up from my task bar when I receive the tests:

To subscribers, the frequency of “AWeber” and “AWeber Logo” could be trance inducing…at best. At worst, I fear it bores our Gmail viewers (who comprise 15.3% of our active list at the moment) and could suppress our open rates.

Why does that text appear there? Well, we use a template that includes a logo and a header image, both of which we use ALT text for (another good idea).

Meanwhile, Gmail displays whatever the first set number of characters appear in an email (alt text or otherwise) in this brief preview section of the inbox or Notifier app.

What Can We Do About It?

Get a free Gmail account for testing, if you don’t already have one, and send yourself tests of your messages. Do you see the same type of undesirable results?

Whether it’s ALT text or some other headline, it’s a good idea to replace it with something more enticing to subscribers to give them something worthwhile during that split second decision that makes them want to open the message rather than ignore or delete it.

You could tweak the layout of your template, or add some visible text at the very top of your message, but I did something else to avoid messing with the design or content of our messages.

Use an Invisible Image to Say Something Meaningful

In the free image manipulation software we use at our office, the GIMP, I created an image 1×1 pixel in size with a transparent background. Placed in an email, this image effectively goes unseen.

I then uploaded this file to our website and placed it in our blog broadcast template, just beneath the opening “body” tag, to make it the first thing Google “sees” to render in the email:

Remember how Gmail was pulling text from the ALT tags of our top placed images to my chagrin? Well, I found a way to use it to our advantage.

I simply added some ALT text to the image attribute that made more sense for the message I was sending out:

The result? Something much more appealing in the inbox and in the notifier. Check it out:

You can take the same image I used and upload it to your website. Just add the following HTML just beneath the “body” tags like I did:

<img src="address where you uploaded the file to your site" alt="text you'd like to appear after the subject line of your message"/>

What Were the Results?

To be honest, I didn’t split test this before implementing. Why? My feeling was that it was one of those limited things worth implementing straight off the bat without testing, but I’m willing to bet it will help our opens given the number of Gmail subscribers we (and presumably you) have.

I hope it helps some of you to engage your Gmail subscribers better. I’m happy because, at very least, I can stop griping about the way it looks when I test.

While it’s certainly not the only thing you can and should do (check out our Email Deliverability Guide for more tips), it’s a best practice that clearly correlates to more email getting to the inbox.

And as time goes on, it’s become less of a suggested best practice, and more of an ISP requirement.

Just ask Yahoo!

Yahoo! “Recommends” Confirmed Opt-In

A recent post on Tamara’s BeRelevant! blog addresses the divide between what email marketing practices are “legal” and what practices actually get your email delivered.

First up on the list of ISP recommendations (and bear in mind, when an ISP recommends you do something, it’s a pretty good bet that your deliverability will depend partly on whether you do it)?

Confirmed Opt-In.

From Yahoo’s Postmaster area:

Now, that’s not the only recommendation on the page (for example, they also talk about things like keeping your message content relevant to what subscribers signed up for), but the fact that they place Confirmed Opt-In at the top of their list of recommendations speaks volumes about how important its use is.

It’s also worth noting that Yahoo! isn’t the only ISP that recommends this. Others do too — for example, Gmail outlines it directly on their site, while Microsoft advises that senders “comply with industry standards” (among which they include Confirmed Opt-In).

Learn More About Confirmed Opt-In

Head over to our Knowledge Base for more on why Confirmed Opt-In is a key to good email deliverability.

Or join us for a free live video seminar:

Protect Your Business & Maximize Results Using Confirmed Opt-in

• Thursday, December 13, 2007
• 12:00 – 1:00PM Eastern Time

Not on Eastern Time? Click Here.
What does this seminar cover?

For more email marketing advice, check out Tamara’s BeRelevant! blog — she aggregates anticles and tips from numerous sources, and it’s a resource that several of us here at AWeber read regularly.

The video they included with their post gives a basic — and amusing — overview of what they do to filter out spam while delivering wanted email to the inbox. (Bonus: the lab costumes add a nice Halloween touch!)

Check out the video:

A Couple Observations

• The “community clicks” system they talk about (where spam complaints help them determine what should/shouldn’t be filtered) is pretty typical. All major ISPs use complaints to determine what they should deliver and what they should filter.
• On the other hand, the use of their Book Search technology to read the text that appears in HTML images is a new twist.
• Did you notice that they talk about the importance of making sure that wanted mail gets delivered, and not sent to the spam folder?

  It’s a good reminder that deliverability isn’t a “you vs. the ISPs” situation. It’s a “you + ISPs vs. the spammers” one, so be sure you’re marketing responsibly and not making yourself look like a spammer through tactics like unnecessary punctuation.

• Check out the page they link to from the blog, particularly the last section. Unlike many other major ISPs, Gmail does not offer whitelisting, instead relying on email authentication and their filtering technology to process incoming mail. If you’re not already authenticating your email, you should start.

  (PS: if you’re an AWeber user, we authenticate your campaigns already )

More Resources on Filtering, Authentication and Email Deliverability

If you haven’t already done so, snag a copy of our Email Deliverability Guide — it’s free to our blog subscribers — and check out the links below.

• ISP Content Filtering
• Addressing False Positives
• Deliverability Tips from SpamAssassin

Not especially eloquent, but the first word that leapt from my mouth when I read about Yahoo! blocking PayPal & eBay phishers using DomainKeys.

Just the other day we blogged about phishing and a great game from CMU that teaches people how to recognize phishing sites.

Now. according to Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog, whenever you get an email that looks like it’s coming from eBay or PayPal:

Hopefully this greatly reduces the success of phishing attacks on their users, and induces other ISPs and common phishing targets to pick up on Yahoo’s and eBay/PayPal’s lead.

What’s DomainKeys?

DomainKeys is one type of email authentication — one of many methods that ISPs and responsible mailers use to get requested, legitimate email delivered while keeping spam out of inboxes.

You can learn more about DomainKeys directly at Yahoo’s site, or by checking out our own overview of email authentication.

As a responsible member of the email marketing community, AWeber authenticates all of our users’ email campaigns.

At AWeber, email deliverability is serious business. We and our customers take great care to manage their lists well so they can enjoy the best possible deliverability.

Even so, occasionally subscribers lodge spam complaints.

When your subscriber does this, you feel indicted. After all, you’re not spamming. Your subscribers come to you and sign up. Nameless, faceless guys hawking drugs and penny stocks are sending spam. You’ve gotten enough of it in your life to know the difference between it and what you send.

So why did your subscriber cry “SPAM?”

“Spam” Buttons from the Subscriber’s Point of View

Whenever someone gets an email in their inbox, several buttons can be used to take action with the message, such as:

• Reply
• Forward
• Print
• Delete

In most, if not all, email programs, there’s also a button labeled “Spam” (or “Junk”). If the subscriber clicks on it, the message is deleted. The subscriber is also telling the ISP that he/she doesn’t want to get email from this sender. Whatever else happens behind-the-scenes doesn’t concern Susie Subscriber, at least not in her mind.

This is the button that generates a spam complaint against the sender. It’s located high on the screen in front of the user, and it’s easy to click (prominent as it is, for some people it’s hard not to click it). For example, here’s where it is in…

AOL Webmail	Hotmail	Yahoo
Yahoo’s New Mail Beta	GMail

Even zooming out as we do here, it’s easy to see that in each email program it appears at the top of the page, near the center and is easy to find and click on.

So I DIDN’T Spam…but am I still in trouble?

One spam complaint won’t ruin your day. Getting a lot of them can cause problems for you. One possible effect of a high complaint rate may be an ISP content filtering your messages (not delivering messages with your website URL in them, for example).

What do I do?

ISPs know that their customers use the “Spam” button to unsubscribe.

Since your subscribers are coming to you and asking for your information, you shouldn’t be getting many complaints. If you are getting more than you’d like, however, there are steps you can take to minimize your complaint rate.

Confirm Your Subscribers. Prompt your subscribers to confirm their subscribe request (via a link in a confirmation email) prior to making them active on your list. This helps to qualify your subscribers, which helps to minimize your complaint rate.

Include Subscription Details in Your Messages. Place a section at the beginning of your messages that details why the subscriber is receiving them, along with instructions for unsubscribing. This can reduce your complaint rate and possibly your unsubscribe rate, by jogging your subscribers’ memory of why they’re getting email from you.

Stay On-Topic. Your subscribers are signing up to get a specific set of information from you. If you send something that’s not consistent or relevant to what they signed up to receive, it’s likely that you’ll get more complaints.

Following these guidelines will help you to keep your complaints to a minimum and free your time and mind up to focus on other areas of your mailings and business.