The Email Week in Review: Dec 7-11th 2015

  1. Verizon reports that they have begun deleting inactive email accounts. Verizon Email accounts that have been inactive for 6 months are being removed. Some ESP’s have begun reporting spikes in “unknown” bounces coming from Verizon.
  2. Question came up about the percentage of folks using Windows Live Mail.  Windows Live Mail uses Outlook Web Access to render and it is notoriously difficult to get email to render properly using OWA.  Fortunately the answer is less than 2% according to  EmailClientMarketShare.com.
  3. An Influencer was looking for Budget Conscious Email Appends for a file of less than 10,000. One recommendation was Towerdata whose pricing starts at $50.
  4. Mailbox Says Goodbye:  Mailbox which was the email app acquired by Dropbox just a few years ago for $100 Million is being shelved starting in February 2016.  Here is what Dela Quist had to say:
  5. “What is illuminating about the Mailbox goodbye is this line. we shared a passion for simplifying the way people work together. And solving the email problem seemed like [a good thing to do]. There is no email problem. There is however a messaging problem we get too any messages in EVERY channel. The thing is email while getting the majority of the bad press (like direct mail historically), is the digital channel of choice for normal people because it makes it easy to process the deluge of marcoms they receive. By process I mean respond to both positively and negatively - reading when convenient, ignore, delete, file, block, and complain about etc. These are all things that are far from easy to do if at all possible in other channels – search, retargeting, radio, TV, press, billboards etc. Funnily enough this is also true of DM. So it is somewhat ironic that the 2 most accountable channels available to marketers have such bad press and spend their time fighting the dread labels of spam and junk, while unaccountable channels continue have no such problem. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would be inclined to say that is not coincidence.”

    But Mailbox’s decline may have less to do with a problem with email apps as it does a problem with Consumer Productivity Apps in general which are on the decline according to The Verge’s “Why Mailbox Died.”

    Others have pointed out that many of the features that users liked about Mailbox, such as the Swipe feature and “snoozing” have already been incorporated into other email browers.

  6. LiveIntent Acquires Data Onboarding Startup Mojn to Map Intent to Email Opens.
  7. Congratulations to Journey Designer from IBM/Silverpop for winning last week’s Email Innovation of the Week pitch.
  8. Newest OI Blog article: A good one from Dela Quist on Subject Lines and how to increase response: Originality is the Key to Sustainable Success.
  9. This week’s LiveIntentional is on “Lookalike Modeling”
  10. Happy to announce our latest OI sponsor: Sparkpost.
  11. Chris Marriott announces that he has launched a new company called Marketing Democracy and will be taking over the Relevancy Group’s RFP Consulting Business.