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Hotmail Revamps Usability Features; Declares War on Newsletters

Hotmail claims that a good 75% of their spam complaints consist of legit email, most of which are newsletters and / or sales offers. Because of this, they are classifying this email as “graymail”. Hotmail recently explained their reasoning behind this on their blog. See their piechart breakdown of what their average user’s inboxes consist of.

So what Hotmail plans on doing is creating a “Newsletter” category, which emails will filter into automatically. How do they determine which emails are newsletters exactly? They plan on using their “Smartscreen” technology, which they claim to have a 95% success rate.

This may be a little troublesome for us email marketers. I have a feeling open rates for Hotmail users will drop briefly, but only until Hotmail users get used to the new automatic filtration process.

Along with their newsletter filtering process, they’re also unveiling a new unsubscribe process which is independent from the CAN-SPAM compliant links within emails. See the screenshot below for what users will see:

Another cool feature they’ve announced is Sweep, which is a part of Scheduled Cleanup. This feature basically removes all previous marketing messages from a specific sender, only leaving the most recent email in your inbox. The rest are filtered out into a different folder. Check out the video below:

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the new Hotmail. It’ll be interesting to see if any other major ISPs adopt similar tactics to keep users’ inboxes cleaned up by default. Personally, I think this is a little too intrusive on Hotmail’s part, but I suppose they have their reasons. What do you think?

Read more about their new features on their blog.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 07, 2011

WordPress Unveils Email Service

Bloggers who’ve struggled with implementing an email newsletter into their blog can rest easy. Wordpress—with assistance from Feedburner—have developed a plug-in for their users that allows them to set-up and send emails from the convenience of their dashboard. It works exactly how you’d imagine… The newsletters take posts & snippets of content from their blogs and update their users via the inbox. The service also provides access to statistics like click through rates, open rates and the like.

Granted, there are competing email services specifically for blog, but aren’t free. The other service providers have many more capabilities than what Wordpress is offering at the moment. For right now this is a bare-bones method of delivering updates straight to the subscribed users. Although, I’m sure the developers at Wordpress will continue to improve this feature over time, especially if the majority of their users adopt it.

An announcement like this won’t overwhelmingly effect top-tier ESPs, but I have to imagine that this will definitely impact their acquisition of small businesses. And something like this should be seen as a threat to those ESPs who specialize in small businesses or individuals for the majority of their revenue stream. With such pro-active solutions as this, it’s no doubt that Wordpress is one of the biggest blog platform providers out there. A free service like this will only help maintain their dominance in the blogware market.

If you have a Wordpress blog, you can find out more on implementing your newsletter here.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 09, 2009