Hotmail / MSN email client Delete and Junk button confusion
December 2nd, 2008
This is a blog note intended for other email marketers.
Have you seen a pattern with spam and Hotmail / MSN?
We email 15,000 customers with email address domains anything other than @hotmail.com or @msn.com and we get zero to a handful of “spam” reports from this mailing, which we do through our mail partner Constant Contact.
We email 15,000 customers with email addresses only including @hotmail.com or @msn.com and we get 150 spam reports, again through Constant Contact.
The only difference is the email client. These are permission based customers, similar aged lists, acquired same way, mailed at same time with exact same mailing. We separated them out as a test, so we could see these numbers for ourselves.
We can’t be the only ones seeing this pattern. I’d appreciate any insights anyone has on this.
My best theory is that the hotmail interface has a delete button right next to a junk button with no divider in between. I believe customers often think of delete and junk as doing the same thing – emptying out their inbox. When in fact pressing the junk button issues a spam report back to hotmail and the ISP and also permanently takes them off our mail list. The junk button has an ALT tag that reads "mark the sender as unsafe and delete the message" but I wonder how many people see that.
We offer unsubscribe options right at the top and bottom of our emails, and in customer accounts, and we don’t mail often.
I find this discrepancy with Hotmail very interesting and my hope is they would change their email client so that users better understand what action they are taking. But I am not able to wait around for the day that might happen.
My email partner Constant Contact suggests that we delete all 15,000 customers with @hotmail.com or @msn.com email accounts and never mail to them again.
Does that seem like it would be in the best interests of my customers?
There are thousands of ZapTel customers in that 15,000 that want these communications from us, yet I face removing all of them from my database due to this user interface problem of Microsoft’s.
Am I chasing up the wrong tree? Anyone else find a good solution to this or have similar numbers? Want to set me straight?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
