Essence of Email Weekly - Email threats you need to know about

Threats like spam traps, and honeypots have the highest probability of damaging your email reputation, your performance, and ultimately, your brand. The study adds that honeypots can impact you even if your list is 100% double opt-in.

What to do? “For a list that has been manually added or an old list that has not been used in a long time, it is recommended to do a list cleaning using some software like Xverify. That would clean the list from any suspicious email addresses that might cause the mentioned problems. Manually removing the unresponsive addresses is a daunting task and will not give the same results as pushing the list through a cleaning software. An additional point of list cleaning is pushing any dormant subscribers through a Sunset or Winback flows with the purpose of reactivating them or if not, suppressing them,” says Vladimir Bosheski, Deliverability Expert @ Essence of Email

Fraud threats, the second-most dangerous type of email addresses on your list, include bots, scammers, and bogus users. They get on the list for one reason only: to find fraudulent ways to harm your email reputation and your brand by masterfully mirroring your email program.

What to do? “There are two options to deal with bots. Either to enable double opt-in or to find a pattern that the bots use and exclude them from the list using it. Misspelled emails or bogus users can be denied access to the list using the same method of double opt-in. Scammers cannot be stopped from entering a list but a well-educated staff that deals with the shipments can find its way around a scammer and their intentions,” advises Vladimir.

Conversion threats, which include accounts like support@, help@, etc., profanity usernames, and known complainers, are one of the moderate-level threats affecting your deliverability and overall performance. Even though people behind these email addresses don’t complain, they’re unlikely to convert, and will negatively impact your metrics.

What to do? “Either cleaning the list using software like Xverify, pushing them through a Sunset flow, or just excluding any hard bounced emails which are done automatically. Another solution is adding an email validation checker on the field itself before the subscriber ever enters the list. This is a bit costly but it will keep the list clean at all times,” says Vladimir.

However, beta threats (soft bounces, and previously suppressed names) have been stable since July 2020, when they spiked due to aggressive list growth activities. These threats are still considered to have a moderate-to-low impact on your email list health.

What to do? “The usage of previously suppressed subscribers is highly discouraged. Any ESP will not allow this to happen and there is a valid reason for it. If a client has been suppressed, it means one of the following three things. The email has hard bounced, meaning the email address is invalid, the subscriber has marked the emails as spam, or the email has been pushed through a Sunset flow and the subscriber has been suppressed as they have not engaged with the brand for a long time. In addition to this, if a client has marked the email as spam and they receive another email from the sender, that violates the other CAN-SPAM laws that regulate email marketing,” concludes Vladimir.

Final advice: Keep your email list clean, whether you do it yourself or delegate the (essential) task to email experts.

On one hand, we have Walmart – a giant multinational retail corporation. On the other, we have TikTok – a video-sharing social media platform, mostly used by the younger generation. Even if it doesn’t seem like a perfect match at first glance, Walmart’s TikTok channel is becoming increasingly popular among young people with its fun shoppable content.

In December, the Walmart team organized its first live stream event to help young people choose toys for the holiday season. Now, at the beginning of the new season, Walmart hosted its second event – a Spring Shop-Along: Beauty Edition, inviting influencers to demo beauty products.

Beauty is a particularly successful category for TikTok, as users can see the latest beauty products in action, tested by their favorite creators. Since Walmart has been stepping up its beauty game during the pandemic, TikTok seemed like a perfect way to engage with customers and “to understand what kind of fun the users are having and what they’re talking about. This helps us ‘join in’ through owned content and 1:1 engagement, so we can authentically talk to users about what we offer,” says Walmart CMO William White.

One of the important learnings for Walmart from live stream events is: People want to shop on TikTok, but they also want to see the product in action before they add it to the cart. That’s why the Spring Shop-Along: Beauty Edition focused on providing a dynamic experience, featuring demos of the products and giving the creators the freedom to engage with the viewers in the way their followers are used to.

“We were pleased with the engagement we saw during our second experience and happy to see that the number of unique viewers who tuned in was higher than our first shopping event; we netted a significant number of new followers after the event concluded,” concludes White.

Check out the whole Walmart’s TikTok story here.

Millions of stats and metrics have appeared throughout the year to inform us that this year has been THE year for eCommerce. To put all of the data in one place, Adobe analyzed trillions of online transactions across 100 million product SKUs in 18 product categories.

A total of $844 billion was spent online within the 12-month pandemic period from March 2020 to February 2021, with eCommerce having an extra boost of $183 billion. In the calendar year of 2020, online shopping saw a 42% year-over-year growth.

It’s predicted that 2021 will see even higher online sales, while 2022 is expected to be the first trillion-dollar year for eCommerce.

Product categories. As expected, people have been buying more home goods as they’ve been staying indoors more. This product category saw a 60% YOY in the first two months of 2021, while apparel showed 22% YoY in the same period.

Meeting demand. Trying to meet the demand has been one of the top challenges for eCommerce businesses: shoppers received three times more “out of stock” messages in July 2020, compared to pre-pandemic. This continues to be an issue, as stock-outs were still elevated at 4x pre-pandemic levels in January 2021.

Do branded shopping days matter anymore? Memorial Day 2020 sales grew 20% less than other days that week and resulted in $32 million less revenue (Labor Day: 26%/$40m less; President’s Day: 15%/$22m less). Online shopping became a routine and special shopping days lost their importance.

2021 so far: In the first two months of the new year, consumers spent $121 billion online – a 34% growth YoY.

Just like restful sleep isn’t possible without a comfortable pillow, a beautiful email design doesn’t work without a great copy.

Casper clearly knows the secret for a winning welcome email – just look at their Snoozeletter above! They set the right mood and get their audience acquainted with the brand and tone of voice from the very first lines.

What else? The dreamy, starry background is accompanied by straightforward copy, which is sprinkled with sleep-related words that tie the customer to the brand.

Even though there’s a CTA at the bottom, Casper doesn’t push you to take action right from the first email. Instead, they show you what you’ll get by subscribing to the newsletter.

We love it!

Source: ReallyGoodEmails