Yahoo Mail Ramps Up Add-to-Sender-List Imperative
Encouraging subscribers to add your e-mail address to their contact lists has become more important than ever. Here's why.
Encouraging subscribers to add your e-mail address to their contact lists has become more important than ever. Here's why.
A new inbox-sorting feature for users of Yahoo Mail, one of the world’s most popular Web mail clients, makes it more important than ever that your subscribers add your e-mail address to their sender lists (which e-mail clients call contacts, address book, safe senders, or other variations).
The new “View From:” feature allows users to view e-mail only from their Contacts lists (all the addresses they’ve whitelisted by clicking the “Add Sender to Contacts” icon in the header field) or their “Connections” (a new social-networking feature based on the Contacts list).
Here’s a sample inbox scene with “View from: All” chosen:
With “View From: Contacts,” almost all of the commercial e-mail vanishes. (Both images are from the June 2, 2009 Yahoo Mail blog post, “Important Emails Always Win in Yahoo! Mail.”)
Can you see where I’m going with this? If you aren’t listed in Contacts, and your subscribers choose this more restrictive view of their inboxes, your messages won’t show up in their inboxes unless they choose the “All” view.
Note: The “View From:” feature doesn’t prevent delivery of your e-mail messages. Assuming your messages don’t trigger blocks or spam-folder filtering, they’ll still be in the inbox. But, viewers have to enable “View From: All” to see them unless they add your address to their sender lists.
Consider a Dedicated Add-to-Sender-List Campaign
I always recommend that e-mail marketers send a sender-list request or reminder e-mail whenever they change gears, such as switching e-mail service providers, changing e-mail sending addresses, or warming up a new IP address.
Even if everything is status quo with your e-mail program, a stand-alone sender-list campaign can help boost deliverability. That’s because this form of personal whitelisting is often counteracting the spam filters and helps direct your message to the inbox.
Now, with Yahoo Mail instituting its “View From:” feature, and other e-mail clients potentially following suit with similar services, your add-to-sender-list campaign moves up in priority.
As ISPs find ways to prioritize messages for users by increasing filters of friends/contacts, you as a marketer must find ways to stress the value of all of your messaging and drive consumers to add you to their sender lists.
Best Practices for Sender-List Campaigns
Create segments for low responders — those who seldom open or click, or recent openers or clickers who have stopped responding. Target those segments with messages that not only spell out the benefit of adding your address to their sender lists but also provide more explicit directions.
Track actions on these messages. Also, watch your delivery reports to see if delivery and inbox placement improve.
However, it definitely belongs in the footer information of every e-mail message, where you include other standing information, such as postal address, contact addresses and phone numbers, etc.
Every e-mail should have add-to-sender-list language in the footer. Again, don’t just ask to be added. Highlight the benefits subscribers will miss if they don’t do it.
For example: “Don’t miss out on future subscriber-only offers. Add [email protected] to your address book or contact list.”
This allows the e-mail channel to work the way it is intended: as a dialogue with your subscribers, not just a one-way street pushing out offers.
Until next time, keep on deliverin’!