@Hotmail #Fail #Mail

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Number 1 tip on how to get your emails delivered to inbox: don’t allow the recipients to have Hotmail accounts!

I’m helping out a service that sends out quite a lot of emails. In this case the list size is +150k double opt-in subscribers. Since Feb 2012 we’ve been getting questions from Hotmail users wondering why they are not receiving our emails anymore. It turns out that Hotmail is silently dropping much more emails than any other big email provider.

Many times the easiest & quickest fix is to ask the recipient to add our sender in their addressbook and mark the sender as “trusted“. But in some cases even this didn’t work. We dug deeper and realized that these people – who are asking us about the undelivered emails – have accidentally marked us as junk mail sender. Ok, accidents happen. But what about these stats: 99% of all our spam reports come from Hotmail users. And guess what? The remaining 1% comes from Windows Live and MSN accounts.

While there are not that many spam reports, to me this seems like a serious usability problem in Hotmail. Hotmail users are not receiving the emails they want. In addition, our reputation as a sender takes a tiny hit every time someone claims our email as spam, accident or not. #Fail.

The irony is that Hotmail is boasting about their success in preventing spam. Seems like the fine folks at Hotmail have worked so hard to be the #1 in spam filtering that they are throwing away loads of valid emails. While journalists are excited, the users are not so happy.

Hotmail says: “Complaints related to spam, including phishing, junk and malware, have dropped by over 40% over the past year.” The flipside in our case is that the complaints related to undelivered email to Hotmail users have increased by over 400%.

Dear Hotmail, you may be preventing spam efficiently but looks like your users are not enjoying the ride anymore.

Should You Delete Your Google Web History

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Google’s new privacy policy kicks in on March 1st. According to their announcement, the new policy makes possible for Google to integrate their different products more closely.

So, instead of having a separate privacy policy for Youtube, Calendar, Gmail, Search, Analytics, Picasa, Docs, Adwords, etc etc there will be one account and one policy covering (almost) all Google products.

On Feb 22nd, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that “EFF isn’t happy with Google’s plan to expand its use of the information it gleans about you”. Helsingin Sanomat (the biggest newspaper in Finland) picked the story today and strongly suggests that you erase your Google web history now.

Eh. Why?

I don’t see how this policy change affects the well-known fact that if you choose to use Google’s free products, you agree that Google gathers data about you and uses these data to further develop the products, to provide a better user experience, and – yes – to serve accurately targeted ads.

However, having so many Facebook friends point out this story made me curious.

First, I went to see my personal web history at https://www.google.com/history. The list of my past searches sure is extensive, totaling to 24k searches or, on average, 13 Google searches every day for the past 5+ years. :)

Second, I Googled (irony?) to find out more. The first link explained the issue

As I understand it, Google is changing it’s privacy policy so that my personal search history (which was previously kept separate), will now be tied to my Google profile for other Google products (Google+, Gmail, Google Voice, etc.). In other words – my search history will now be associated with my actual name and personal phone number.

Ok, I can see why that’s an issue for some. Maybe it should be an issue for us all? I am quite happy with having Google point out the links that I’ve visited in the past and push the interesting (for me) links up on the search results page.

I’m not going to delete my search history. Are you and if yes, I’d love to hear why?

P.S. If you want to save your search history before erasing it, there’s a tool for that at Data Liberation Front (that’s a Google product, btw)

Wasting Time or Improving the User Experience?

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I’ve become a fan of cohort analysis! Cohorts provide a great way to focus on product development and the effect our RnD is having on customers. Cohort analysis tells us if we’re making the product better or just adding clutter and obsolete features.

Often it would be the best to “simply” focus on the existing features and make them even better. And as often, in my experience, we tend to consider the existing features done and want to make new exciting stuff that the customers are bound to adore and enjoy.

Eric Ries puts this well in the context of web startups on Techcrunch:

Most product teams don’t know if they are making their product better or worse; that’s why customers feel a twinge of fear every time they have to update or upgrade. Despite this, those same companies may be having extremely fast growth because even though the product is getting worse, other things are going right: network effects are kicking in, the company is being lauded in the press, or they are surfing on a general wave of growth in their industry.

So instead measuring just the averages, we want to utilize cohort analysis. A “cohort” may be the set of people who signed up during a specific month. For example: Do the people who signed up this month convert to buyers at a higher rate than those who signed up last month? If the conversion rate remains the same, we just wasted a month of RnD effort!

How is this different from measuring the overall conversion rate?

The difference is that using cohorts, you will know which feature or addition got your audience’s attention. This is like utilizing A/B testing in product development. And you will be able to track customer life-cycle events. Ash Maurya writes about this in his post 3 Rules to Actionable Metrics in a Lean Startup. By checking the cohort analysis table you can see if the customer retention is going the right direction. Here’s an example table by Ash:

 I can’t wait to find out our numbers. Lot’s of SQL:ing to do…

Right Timing for Email Marketing

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You’d better send your marketing emails weekly on Saturday mornings. Then it will get the most clicks and least unsubscribes. That is what the statistics tell us.

MailChimp, the email-marketing service, scanned through 10 billion emails as part of their Email Genome Project. Their findings were surprising. Dan Zarrella of HubSpot put together an interesting webinar from the data (see his slides embedded below). In my opinion the main points – or as Dan would probably say: The super-duper-DUPER-important key takeaways are:

  • Click-through rates spike on weekend. Marketing emails will get more share of mind when people have less work to attend to. Or is it just because very few companies send their messages on weekends, and those who do will get noticed?
  • The unsubscribe rates are highest on Mon and Tue. Don’t send your messages in the beginning of the week! It is the busiest time of week for so many people.
  • The actual time of day is not that important. But sending email early morning (around 7am) is slightly better than other times.
  • If you want people to click a link on your email, you’d better have a LOTS of links. More links equals higher overall click through rate. Dan’s rationale is that the more links there are, the more ways you have to convince the reader. All of the links may of course point to the same url.
  • High frequency is not a bad thing. The unsubscribe rate is at highest if you send email only once or twice a month. Sending daily is no worse than sending weekly (in terms of unsubscribe rate). Thus high frequency outweighs any decline in click rates.
The Science of Email Marketing

View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing.

A Groupon Deal Analysis

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Stephen Joyce wrote a great post on how Groupon advertising works. He offers insight into Groupon’s impact on sales and profitability from a local small business’s perspective. The bottom line is: you’re gonna lose!

Groupon is the 2-year-old group buying service that has received a great amount of attention (and a billion $ in venture capital) because of its huge growth. Groupon partners with local businesses, agrees on a heavy discount on the local business’s service, and sends a daily coupon by email to the local members.

It is geographically targeted risk-free advertising: the local business pays only if a certain amount of the discount coupons are bought, i.e. there are interested customers. There’s no upfront cost.

The customer pays Groupon for the coupon and Groupon splits the revenue with the local business. Let’s say there’s a 50% discount: a €100 product would be sold for €50 of which the local business gets half, i.e. €25. Now, a 75% discount sounds like a no-go even with healthy profit margins, don’t you think?

Groupon has inspired hundreds of clones. In Finland the most prominent is CityDeal that is currently running an overwhelming advertising campaign on Adsense and other ad networks. Today, for example, CityDeal.fi is offering a Spa treatment in Helsinki at a 53% discount. Groupon bought CityDeal last May and will rebrand it and maybe then we’ll have Groupon.fi…

Another interesting clone in these parts of the world is the Estonian Cherry.ee. They made a deal with Estonian Air to sell travel vouchers at a 40% discount last December. Their coupons were sold at such a pace that Estonian Air had to stop the deal! The travel voucher’s face value was 1000EEK and they sold 6500 of them at 600EEK. If Estonian Air gets 50% of the proceeds, that adds up to 50% x 600EEK x 6500 = 1.950.000EEK, i.e. 4.550.000EEK less revenue than at the retail price. Four and a half a million EEK is about €290.000… Quite a marketing stunt for a small airline.

99,9% of Display Ads Are Not Clicked

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Are the websites relying on display ads doomed to fail? Only 0,1% of banners get clicks. Most people downright ignore banners altogether. Compare this with search-related ads’ 35x higher click rate and it becomes obvious why so many online media are resorting to gigantic panorama banners and other desperate measures in order to increase their click rates.

BUT: Measuring the click rate is wrong!

comScore’s Gian Fulgoni wrote an interesting post on display ad’s efficiency. He refers to comScore’s research that followed the purchase process all the way to the actual offline in-store buying. The most interesting points are:

  1. There was 16% lift in sales among people who were exposed to display ads only. Even if the click rate was only 0,1%. Display ads support search ads very well.
  2. There are only a limited number of people searching for a product. Display ads reach much wider audience. Thus the total dollar sales gained from display ads may be much larger than from search ads. According to comScore: the sales volume lift index for search ads is 100 and for display ads 198. Interesting and totally unexpected.

Another comScore research done in Europe reveals that Internet users exposed to a banner campaign are 94% more likely to conduct a trademark search on the advertiser’s brand.

comScore’s numbers sound reliable. Display ads seem to be much more efficient than I thought. Combine this with personalization and targeting (as in TripSay) and you’ll get a money-making machine like TripAdvisor. ;)

High Margin = Poor End User Experience

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Tripadvisor really knows how to monetize travel. And according to a post on Techcrunch: “It’s more or less the worst experience in the world for an end user.”

The worst end user experience somehow generates spectacular growth: Tripadvisor’s revenue for Q3/2010 grew by 40% from 2009 (.pdf). It means their revenue for 2010 will be around $495 million with margins “well north of 50%”.

$250 million yearly profit!? And what does it mean to the 40 million unique monthly visitors? According to TC:

You’re greeted at the top by a banner ad. Below that, you get 10 sponsored links. To the right of that, affiliate links. Below that, hundreds more affiliate links. And more banner ads. There is not a single piece of actual content on this page. It’s one giant ad. And there are 76 pages of this.

Right. :)

Here’s their page that is the 1st hit on Google: Paris Vacation. In all fairness: it’s not Tripadvisor’s main page for Paris. The main page is better, but I still prefer Tripsay’s version of showing information about Paris, France.

Social Media in Russia

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Russia is big in social media. According to Natalya Koroleva from Редкая марка (a marketing agency in Moscow):

Russia ranks first in the world in social networks involvement

Huh? 1st? Don’t know if that can be true. But after Natalya’s presentation I’m convinced that the russian Internet or Runet is worth a closer look. It’s a parallel universe with its own Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube clones (Vkontakte.ru, Moikrug.ru and Rutube.ru, respectively). The localized versions are typically much more attractive for the 50M russian Internet users than their western counterparts. приятно познокомиться!

In general, the rules for marketing and PR sounded the same than what we’ve learned in the States and Canada: Be personal and interesting, and that achieving results require long term planning. Nothing new.

Natalya showed us some interesting travel PR cases. My favorites were the Insipired by Iceland campaign because the video soundtrack is by Emiliana Torrini, and the Keep Exploring campaign by Canadian Tourism Commission. The Keep Exploring campaign launched interactive “Twitter Walls” displaying tweets about Canada travel. Looks interesting.

The Best Location for Your Hotel

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Google Maps and hotel data fit together extremely well. Seeing the hotels on a city map along with the most interesting sights (and airports etc.) makes choosing the most suitable accommodation a breeze. Instead of scrolling through long lists of hotels ordered by popularity or profitability, you can pick the hotel next to your favorite sight. Cool, huh?

I’m talking about TripSay’s hotel booking tool. We built a tool that:

  • Locates hotels on a map.
  • Shows distances to the selected sights as well as to the airports and city centre.
  • Shows hotel ratings, photos and facilities.
  • Compares hotels based on their price and customer rating.
  • Allows you to filter based on e.g. price, stars, location, and facilities.
  • etc…

The combination of a map and hotel data is powerful. For example: on a business trip it’s great to set the map center to the address you’re going to visit and then say “show me all hotels with Wi-Fi that are at most 1 km away”. Or on a skiing trip to the Alps it’s good to check the ski lift locations and choose among the hotels that are a walking distance away from the lifts.

The hotel booking tool can be localized and co-branded. The first partnership is up-and-running on HS.fi Matka (in finnish). It looks like this: http://hotellihaku.hs.fi/hotellit/suomi/helsinki. The original english version is here: http://www.tripsay.com/hotels/helsinki.

An old saying states that hotel business is all about location, location, location. So why not use a map to book hotels?

Google Follows Microsoft’s Lead?

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Google has been reported to be in talks to pay $1 billion to acquire ITA Software – a software company specialized in travel industry. ITA’s customers include Kayak, Tripadvisor, and a number of major airlines. The acquisition would enable Google to become the metasearch for travel information such as flights and accommodation.

Considering Google’s vast audience, this would be bad news for the existing metasearch engines. How much room does it leave for sites like Kayak or Skyscanner or any of the other numerous metasearches? Google already has a greap set of tools for travelers: a map, calendar, docs, etc. And it began showing hotel information (with prices) on the map in March. Searching for flights would be kind of a logical next step.

Microsoft already provides hotels and flights search as a part of its Bing Travel. They got a kick start about two years ago (April 2008), when they acquired Farecast. Farecast had an interesting value prop: they tell you when is the best time to buy flights for your selected route.

Now it looks like Google is following Microsoft’s path and buying it’s way to travel search space.

How would this shake the travel industry? ITA has developed technology for MS’s Bing as well. Yahoo! Travel (ex-Farechase) is playing on the same field. Kayak is supposedly trying to move from a ‘mere’ metasearch to a booking site.