Golden Leads

I’ve just spent the past 4 days interacting with some of the best minds in the email marketing industry. What a blast!

Many topics were presented; however, the theme of relevancy always seemed to be a key driver. Another topic was deliverability. Charles Stiles, AOL Postmaster (who by the way is more dapper in person than he appears in his head shot) made an appearance at the Summit. He made a few points regarding how to improve your AOL deliverability; however, many of the same things he said were a regurgitation of 2001 rhetoric. It all comes back to abuse complaints originating from recipients clicking the “Report Spam” button.

Denis McGrath, interactive marketer for P&G was here and reported that they actually did a post mortem survey on people who clicked the “This is Spam” button at AOL and found that 80% of the people surveyed “didn’t remember doing it” and of the 20% that did remember, 25% of those people said they “always use the Report Spam button as a removal tool.”

Michelle Eichner of Pivotal Veracity presented similar finds on the issue whereby her research found that a recipient has the highest propensity to click the “Report Spam” button after the 30th month on the list. This is great information for email marketers, however, it begs the question – when are people clicking the spam button on you? Is it after the first campaign (permission problem!) or is it after the 30th monthly newsletter (relevancy problem.)

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.