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What do you think of Hotmail's Graymail?
A recent Hotmail blog announced changes to the way they handle mail. How will it change your tactics and approach, if at all?
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3 Answers
First thoughts from me are that hopefully Hotmail will -not- be deciding what's right for me as an email user. In that the legitimate emails that are sent to me, still just arrive in my inbox. If I really don't want them, I'll unsubscribe.
The trouble is that many people have been using their (or several) Hotmail address as 'junk' address, compared to for instance GMail users. When those Hotmail users have to register for anything, they'll use that address, and never give out their other 'real' email address, private or work. This has been backed by stats from the industry, where GMail users showed higher interactivity with email newsletters than Hotmail users, despite same (or even lower) numbers.
See MailChimp's blog: http://blog.mailchimp.com/gmail-users-more-engaged-than-yahoo-hotmail-aol/
As long as an account is active, Hotmail will let the account live: but they will want to reduce the burden of all sorts of offers, newsletters etc for both you as an end user and for their own team and systems as well.
Could it be that Hotmail themselves (because of their public reputation) have caused the way their users use its service, and therefor this load of graymail? I think so, at least partially.
Battling graymail is only fighting symptoms without handling the cause: the way people use email.
The changes at Hotmail are part of a now well-established trend of inbox providers giving their users more control over the email that reaches them and where it appears in their inbox. Gmail's Priority Inbox is part of this trend as well. At a high level, this trend benefits email marketers because it makes inboxes a more pleasant place that consumers want to spend time in.
The new Hotmail feature that potentially benefits email marketers most is Scheduled Cleanup. The two top reasons why subscribers opt-out is "too many emails" and "irrelevant email." Scheduled Cleanup addresses both of these issues by allowing users to set up rules that delete old emails. It's a feature that daily deal providers should consider actively encouraging their Hotmail users to use, as these senders send lots of emails with very short lifespans.
Of course, not all the changes at Hotmail are good for email marketers. For instance, the One-Click Unsubscribe circumventing unsubscribe and preference center pages, denying marketers the opportunity to present opt-down and opt-over options to subscribers.
But overall, Hotmail's changes are good and are in response to the consumer belief that unwanted mail from legitimate senders is the new spam. You can resent consumers for this belief or you can accept that the bar has been raised and use data analytics to power segmentation, dynamic content, personalization and other tools to create highly relevant emails that subscribers anticipate and are engaged with.
+1 Remy
+1 Chad
Let me add another spin to all of this that I think some in the industry are overlooking. You see..I have a microwave with a "pop popcorn" button, a "baked potato" button and "defrost meat" button. Those are neat features of my microwave, but I never use them. Why? Well...sometimes they don't work well for my bag of popcorn or my overly large potato.
I love that Hotmail and other inbox providers are coming out with all these great features..but does the subscriber/end user even care? Do they even know what all of this means and is is right for them even if they were to figure it out.
Its no secret that webmail usage is declining. In fact most of the tests we see for clients, the engagement within the webmail clients is trending downward. Since most of us have our noses inside a mobile device a good portion of the time, I doubt this graymail thing will have a tremendous amount of impact to the end user.
People are inherently lazy.....and I suspect that the laziness carries over to how they "use" their inbox. If Hotmail is going to make decisions for them....they might not even notice or even care to a certain degree.
Don't get me wrong..I am not trying to poo-poo innovation on Hotmail's part....but my hypothesis is that this sort of thing is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.
Andrew Kordek
Co-Founder, Trendline Interactive
A Strategic Email Marketing Agency
Twitter: @andrewkordek & @trendlinei
Email: andrew@trendlineinteractive.com
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