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Fab stops sending you emails you don’t read, even when you don’t ask them to
- signed0 14y agoBy tracking whether or not you read an email via a tracking image I imagine...
- ben0x539 14y agoIs your email client really set up to phone home to the sender to retrieve additional images when it opens an email? Doesn't that strike you as an information leak/privacy issue?
- signed0 14y agoMine (Gmail) is not, but many (Outlook, OSX Mail) allow this by default. The URL of the tracking image contains a number or hash that is used to uniquely identify the person opening up the email.
- corresation 14y agoOutlook hasn't done this by default for at least two if not three versions now. However if you read a heavily stylized with images email you'll almost certainly tell it to download images (just as one does in gmail), giving them that feedback that they want.
- signed0 14y agoGood to know, it's been several years since I used Outlook.
- ancat 14y agoMost modern clients prompt the user to allow remote images to load - it's usually not automatic. If there are some images you want to see (ie the message is in the image, etc) and it's from a site you trust, chances are you won't even think twice about allowing images for the message.
- ZoFreX 14y agoPeople tend to enable images on newsletters because many of them are unreadable without them.
- shabble 14y agohttps://emailprivacytester.com/ https://emailprivacytester.com/ seems like a way to check how your usual clients fare with these various tracking methods. Or a cunning way of snarfing emails, I dunno.
- estsauver 14y agoThis actually seems like a great idea. I remember reading that your spam score is in part based on email open rates, by dumping users who have no chance of opening you decrease your likelihood of getting blocked for a campaign. It also has the nice benefit of publicity and reduced mailchimp/other provider fees. On second thought, I'm not sure if any of these would offset the cost per acquisition of even a few users who were accidentally "let go" by this tactic. I hope fab posts some statistics at some point.
- yRetsyM 14y agoI would love it if this option was offered by the providers such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor et all. They have the opportunity to improve their industry and in turn improve clients business. The tracking is already happening. Put it to good use!
- duck 14y agoI know MailChimp has an article on how to do this in a managed/safe way: http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-can-i-remove-someone-from-my-list-who-has-never-opened-a-campaign http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-can-i-remove-someone-fro...
- mpyne 14y agoI wonder how they track this? I haven't been able to attend any local Meetups for example (and sometimes just delete the email outright), but this is one of the few I want to keep receiving because, you know, someday I'll have time...
- jonathanjaeger 14y agoVery good point -- I will delete emails from Meetup that I have no interest in, but certain verticals I will open the email to check it out. You can customize these emails in Meetup a bit based on categories you choose, but they'd have to be pretty sophisticated to track unread emails by meetup type.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoMost emails these days contain graphics or other 'call home' sorts of bugs that are activated on render. Its another form of analytics. Especially easy to do for 'shopping' sites.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- seshagiric 14y agoPixel tracking is one way. http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ywa/faqs/tracking/advtrack/3520294.html http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ywa/faqs/tracking/advtrack/...
- espadagroup 14y agoHey, I'm on the marketing team at Fab. We send our email through Sailthru. Like most email providers tracking is done through image pixels. So we're able to pull data on which users have not opened certain emails over a given time period.
- betterunix 14y agoFor what it's worth, you would have gotten no data from me. My email client will not load anything external and will not even attempt to render HTML mail. Also, I am in a minority with this, but when I receive an HTML message without any plaintext portion I delete it; if it is an unsolicited message I mark it as spam.
- zaidf 14y agoIt isn't universally accepted that regular unread emails provide no value to the company or user. There is a whole argument about how even if you don't open emails, just seeing the name of the company in your inbox increases recall value so tomorrow when you do have a need for a pair of shoes, you'll more likely check out the company that's been emailing you daily than a company you haven't heard about much.
- GhotiFish 14y agod... I can't... I am not one of your biggest fans.
- enraged_camel 14y agoAt least equally likely: your daily emails will generate so much noise that the customer will train themselves to ignore you. (One could argue that that's why they stopped reading your emails to begin with.)
- biot 14y agoBut they may provide value to someone in marketing whose targets and/or compensation is naively tied to subscriber count without a measure of engagement.
- AJ007 14y agoThere is some idea that this impacts email inbox rates, at least with certain large ISPs. I do something similar, but its based on if the person has not clicked on anything in the e-mail for a while. If your not on Amazon SES paying tiny 10 cent CPMs, then there is some financial incentive to throttle your sending back a bit too.
- tommccabe 14y agoThis isn't just good will towards the consumer; retailers are paying per e-mail that is sent out, so it is good practice to prune the list of addresses that haven't opened e-mails in a while.
- mistermcgruff 14y agoThe crappy thing is that some clients (Apple Mail) download images even if you haven't opened the email, so Fab would think you're opening all the sends. But if you moved over to a better sign of engagement like clicking on an encoded URL, then you might be throttling sends to some folks who are actually opening. I wonder where Fab landed in this discussion.
- espadagroup 14y agoHey, on the marketing team at Fab. We know that a lot of people love to purely just open our emails because they are pretty visual and there is a huge part of discovery; they might not always see something they like and thus click. We thought the risk of opting out these people outweighed the risk of accidentally leaving in people with clients like Apple Mail.
- aviswanathan 14y agoThe issue for me is that every unread email is a to-do item for me. So I often just click on an unread email without reading it just to mark it read.
- tg3 14y agoI used to use unread emails as my to-do list. I recently started using Mailbox, and have embraced the Inbox Zero philosophy of every email in my inbox (regardless of read status) as a to-do item. I've found that nearly everything I do with email works better this way.
- chris_j 14y agoI received a similar email a few months ago. I was rather annoyed to receive it, to be honest, because I had been reading the emails. Just with images disabled.
- bthomas 14y agoIs there a way to detect whether user has read an email with the standard Gmail image filter enabled?
- okamiueru 14y agoFacebook does a "trick" by playing an empty sound file. http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/06/facebook-knows-when-you-open-their-emails-how-creepy-silent-sounds/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/06/facebook-knows-when-you-ope...
- jcampbell1 14y agoInteresting, but that is a hack for IE / Outlook, not the GMail image filters.
- cma 14y agoThat should be a violation of the CFAA... charge Zuckerberg with ~300 billion counts
- encoderer 14y agoWhere I work we run a batch job that looks for inbound clicks from an email without a corresponding "email opened" tracking pixel being fired. Gives us an idea of how many people are engaging with images turned off or some other form of tracking pixel blocking. Our analytics wizards then use that and other data to come up with some estimates on how many users are opening our emails with images disabled.
- nwh 14y agoCould you share any rough statistics?
- hissworks 14y agoFab is notoriously bad about email delivery. It's become a joke between my girlfriend and I that when one of our phone buzzes it "must be Fab again". I can't recall how I ended up on their lists but I believe it was due to some competition.
- jsiegz 14y agoMost major daily e-mail sites do this, they just don't always send an additional e-mail to let the customer know that they do it. Basically, it's best practice to auto-unsubscribe users who never open their e-mails to reduce risk of being marked as spam after a while.
- stevenou 14y agoYeah I work for a daily email site and we do this too. We just don't send another email letting them know - that's more spam! I was surprised that this was considered newsworthy... Most people in the industry do this. It's definitely considered best-practice - it reduces costs, improves metrics, and probably doesn't subtract much value compared how much it costs to keep sending them emails.
- trotsky 14y agoYou'd be surprised at how little most startup focused journalists know about the day to day of the industry. If it hasn't been touted in a press release or mentioned at an investors conference they probably don't know about it.
- espadagroup 14y agoHey, on the marketing team at Fab. Honestly for us we never really considered the cost savings or have had to worry about being blacklisted. The decision wasn't almost entirely jump-started by anecdotal evidence from customer service that it would be a good idea. Obviously there are plenty of financial and operational reasons to do this, but ultimately if it's good for the customer then it's good for us and the brand.
- eli 14y agoI think it's often not that cynical. I worked for a fairly large B2B email newsletter company and we would periodically clean the list mainly because we wanted an honest, accurate count of our list size.
- betterunix 14y agoIt sounds like the emails were mostly HTML mail that fetched external images. HTML mail is a terrible thing that should be stopped, and HTML mail that fetches anything external is a security problem. It's nice to know that these Fab people were thinking about their customers, but the bigger picture here is that HTML mail was being abused to violate those same customers' privacy. It may have been for a good reason, but it was still a bad thing to do and legitimizing the practice will make it easier to carry out attacks via email. The solution to inbox clutter is filtering. If users are too lazy to make filters, then the problem is with the effort required to make filters.
- encoderer 14y agoObviously you're entitled to your opinion. But I think the fact that users opt-in to HTML emails and engage with them far more frequently than text opt-in and engagement indicates that your opinion is an outlier. I like HTML email. I opt-in only to companies that interest me enough to do so. Those times when I'm opted-in accidentally by not unchecking a box or whatever during checkout I just unsubscribe from and move on. What I have left is useful content in my inbox, some of it more directly sales oriented, the rest more generally informational. Similarly, for certain senders, I chose to tell Gmail to always load their images — including tracking pixels. It's not a violation of my privacy any more than the numerous pixels on any other website I read.
- betterunix 14y agoI have little doubt that I am an outlier, since most users have no idea what HTML even is. I am doubtful that people are truly "opting in" to receive email; it seems more likely that they were not paying attention to the "yes by default" checkbox. HTML mail itself is a security problem. It has been used for fairly sophisticated phishing attacks in the past: http://blog.mxlab.eu/2010/03/13/phishing-emails-with-attached-html-forms-instead-of-embedded-urls/ http://blog.mxlab.eu/2010/03/13/phishing-emails-with-attache... It is almost certainly being used for phishing attacks now. It makes it difficult to give users visual cues about which emails can be trusted, since the sender could have embedded HTML in the message to present that same queue. An attacker might give the user the idea that a message was digitally signed by using HTML mail. Security with HTML mail is a serious enough concern that the DoD will sometimes convert all incoming HTML mail to plaintext as a precaution: http://it.slashdot.org/story/06/12/24/1922216/department-of-defense-now-blocking-html-email http://it.slashdot.org/story/06/12/24/1922216/department-of-... "It's not a violation of my privacy any more than the numerous pixels on any other website I read." In other words, it is a violation of your privacy. The fact that it is a common practice on the web does not somehow make it less of a violation.
- WillyF 14y agoFab uses Sailthru to deliver their e-mail. See here: https://www.sailthru.com/clients https://www.sailthru.com/clients I'm in the process of moving my e-mail to Sailthru. I'm really impressed by their capabilities, though the transition hasn't been quite as smooth as I would have liked. I'm finally starting to dive into doing stuff like this, and I'm really excited about using data to improve the experience from people who get my daily e-mails. Not only can I stop bothering people who are no longer reading my e-mails, but I can also cut costs by removing users who aren't engaged. It's a win-win.
- pyre 14y ago| removing users who aren't engaged ...and people that were reading your emails, but use a method that breaks their tracking methods. :P
- WillyF 14y agoThat's why you send a warning e-mail. You could also opt them down to a weekly digest instead of daily e-mails. One good thing about Sailthru is that it you can track all clicks on links. So if you have a user with no opens and no clicks over a few months, you have a lot more certainty that they're not reading (especially if your e-mails have a considerable amount of links).
- extesy 14y agoI hate when SAAS websites don't include pricing information and instead require you to call them.
- majani 14y agoI'm pretty sure they don't like clients like you either. Avoid each other and everybody wins. Back on topic...
- espadagroup 14y agoHey, on the marketing team at Fab. Yes, we use Sailthru and thus can track which emails users open over a given period of time. Sailthru has a decent api however this operation was actually done manually with a bulk pull of data from Sailthru and then a query to the database on our end. In the future we'll probably automate this, though for right now our dev cycles are too precious :)
- SODaniel 14y agoAre you sure? I am getting AT LEAST one email a day from them and never read them.
- gadders 14y agoThey just spam the living shit out of your facebook page instead in my experience.
- dminor 14y agoWe've done this too, and the reason is this: dropping people who don't read your newsletter increases your open rate, and decreases your spam reports. This makes it less likely some large mail host will drop your newsletter entirely. The reason you send an email is for people who don't turn on images or click on links, but still want your newsletter.
- jchin 14y agoI can understand the removing non-readers can decrease your spam reports because I have seen numbers where a significant number of non-openers hit the spam button. However, do you have any evidence that an increased open rate helps your deliverability? There seem to be lots of people claiming unopened emails are bad for you but I have not heard anything like that from someone on the inside like someone at Gmail?
- dminor 14y agoWe've read it from various experts, but you have a point - I don't think it's been said directly by any mail hosts. They tend not to say much on the subject though.
- tomwalsham 14y agoThis is definitely good email sender behaviour, but I would hesitate to purely put this down to the altruistic notion of 'keeping your inbox tidy' - Inbox Zero is a problem fairly isolated to the Newserati and similar thin slices of population. Fact is, Email Deliverability is increasingly engagement-driven these days, especially with the major ISPs, and additionally sending email costs money. -- At its most basic level, a sender's 'spamminess' is determined by percentage of spam reports against overall deliveries from that IP. Levels over 1% put your reputation in the 'severe' category, and risk lack of inbox delivery, blacklists and more. Having more engaged users leads to a better ratio - for this reason alone keeping your recipients 'fresh' is valuable. Additionally, another common pattern of email (or more correctly a sender:template combination) falling into the 'spam' category for an ISP is to see a few percentage points in drop, followed by a complete /dev/null-ing. When the initial drop happens, whether or not your recipients correct that as a false-positive will determine whether you get the Full Monty. Naturally therefore removing the least engaged users has a significant beneficial effect on overall deliverability. These days though, it's getting more complex, nuanced and ultimately more individual. Gmail moved some time back from a centralized concept of 'spam' to a much more personal view by using your positive and negative engagement signals: opens, clicks, replies, 'delete without reading','report spam' etc. They explicitly modify the visibility of email in your personal inbox through the 'important' flag (http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=186543 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...), but there is good evidence that negative engagement can carry an email all the way to the spam box for a given user and consequently affect the overall deliverability. This has a strong benefit for Gmail in that they become much harder to 'game' - something Google Search team also has plenty of experience in avoiding. They essentially eschew the classic SMTP 5xx return codes for 'Accept All, Ask Questions Later' in all but the most egregious cases, and provide little to no feedback for senders to troubleshoot delivery problems on the basis that if your users want your mail, it would be getting through. -- The second primary motivator here (still with me?) is that sending email also has a non-zero cost which is almost entirely driven by sheer subscriber count and delivery attempts. Consider a typical mass-marketing email with a 10-15% open rate, delivered multiple times a month. Even assuming a varied engagement profile that mailer is engaging with at most 50% of their list over the month. A simple list of 1MM recipients would incur an increased cost of a couple of thousand dollars a month to send into the vacuum of disinterest. There is, in certain circumstances, a benefit to be gained from 'eyeballs on subjects' for brand awareness, but that metric is near impossible to track, and as mentioned above unopened emails can be deleterious to your overall delivery to the more engaged segments. For both the reasons highlighted above, mass-market email has been using the 're-engagement' method (breathlessly described in the OP as a customer-driven action), to keep their lists fresh and costs down. I do applaud the application of metrics to provide intelligent subscription management. At PostageApp we see the best delivery rates come from our clients who take active interest in the concept of humans at the end of the SMTP pipe. The growing provision of engagement data through APIs is helping drive solutions like FAB's, and the end result is a better experience for the user. That said, this particular innovation came not from the consumer-friendly high visibility consumer and SaaS markets, but has been around for many years in the risk-heavy line treading bulk marketing industry.
- petercooper 14y agoI did something similar with my Ruby Weekly list (basically removed 1000 folks from a 18,000 list) and sent a message saying what I'd done and invited them to resubscribe if I'd got it wrong and.. I got quite a few nasty mails. People ranting that they read with images off or saying that I didn't appreciate their subscription if they didn't click on things, etc. Nonetheless, open rates did improve significantly. Lesson learned.. if I do it again, I won't send the mail telling people I have ;-)
- dutchbrit 14y agoShould save them a lot of money removing the non active subscribers :)
- cardine 14y agoAt first I thought this was for a startup that offers this service. I don't know if I'd use it, but it seems like a pretty cool offering someone could easily code up - have it detect what types of emails you don't read and then automatically send those emails into another folder.