Best Practices and Etiquette for Setting up Email Notifications

Question

If you were going to set up a Email Alerts for the customers of your website to subscribe to, what rules of etiquette ought to be followed?

I can think of a few off the top of my head:

• Users can Opt-Out
• Text Only (Or tasteful Remote Images)
• Not sent out more than once a week
• Clients have fine-grained control over what they receive emails about (Only receive what they are interested in)

What other points should I consider?

From a programming standpoint, what is the best method for setting up and running email notifications?

• Should I use an ASP.NET Service? A Windows Service? What are the pitfalls to either?
• How should I log emails that are sent? I don't care if they're received, but I do need to be able to prove that I did or did not send an email.

Answer 1

Make sure your privacy statement is available before you subscribe and it mentions your e-mailing policy.

Answer 2

The option to request HTML or plain text is important to me.

Also make sure you never send attachments.

Make sure that the reply-to address is valid and goes somewhere that is checked from time to time. Not everyone will look for the opt-out link.

Depending on your scenario, you may want to use a full on mailing list sort of thing whereby people can reply to the entire group. Whatever you do though, make sure you never use carbon copying for contacting everyone -- compose each mail individually.

Answer 3

-The should be able to Opt-Out with one click.
-The Opt-Out Process should allow a user to opt-in if they mess up.
-You should always let the users opt-in. Do not automatically opt-in users.
-No selling or giving away email address to other sites, companies or for money.

Answer 4

Opting out

It's not merely etiquette it is United States law:

From the CAN-SPAM Act:

It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a "menu" of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it's illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.

Text only

I'm not entirely sold on this feature. From certain websites such as amazon.com or guitarcenter.com I like the ability to view the products that are offerred directly in the email without having to click an external link. Besides, GMail has the ability to block the images anyway if I don't want to see them. However, I suppose if you're controlling the entire process you could offer a checkbox for the user to pick HTML or plain text emails as well.

Frequency of distribution

It's tough to decide how often you should send out mass email notifications because it really depends on the content of your website. I agree that a weekly submission is a good start.

Method of distribution

I imagine the real answer to this depends on scalability. How many emails will you be sending and how often? I imagine creating a Windows service would be the most maintainable and customizable solution if you have a relatively low number of emails to send. If you need a more robust solution, I would look for a professional mass-email product.

Logging

You could do this in a SQL database or in flat text log files. This really depends on how you will audit these details. You could build a system easily around the database if you need other people to validate that certain emails were sent. I imagine though that this will not be necessary.

If you go the flat text log file route, you could use a proven logging system such as log4net since you mention .NET.

As for what to log, I would expect something like:

• Start time for the queue
• Per email:
  • Position in queue
  • Recipient email address
  • Time sent
• Time of completion

Miscellaneous

• Make sure to include the name of your website or the address of your company in every email
• Keep the relevant information at the top of the email so the user doesn't have to scroll down
• Use correct spelling and avoid ALL CAPS
• Use tasteful, low-bandwidth images
• Make sure you only have one recipient per email, so the To: line doesn't contain 100 email addresses
• Don't send personally identifiable user information in the email (e.g. credit card info)
• Avoid attachments

Answer 5

Frequency Etiquette

I think that more important than 'not sent out more than one a week' would be 'sent out as infrequently as possible'

If you NEED to send out two in one week, then do so. But if you don't need to send them out, then don't send out anything.

Alternatively, you could make it 'newsletter' style, and send it out on a regular (scheduled) basis. But in that case you would need to ensure that you have specific relevant things to say in each message.

Ease of use

Make it incredibly easy to sign up, and sign out.

Make it incredibly easy (and optional) for them to customize it.

You mentioned fine-grained control, but keep in mind, when the customers see long lists of checkboxes about what they like and don't like, they know that the more boxes they click, the more mail they'll receive, so they'll tend to click fewer.

A method you could use would be similar to Facebook's "I like this" "I don't like this" the only problem being that you need a LOT of data (and complex) logic to implement a schema like that.

Short direct emails would be best (unlike this response). Include links to the information, although that could get your emails marked as spam.

Many people mentioned not selling the emails, I think that's a given, but the other facet is something Frakkle mentioned. Do not have any way for any person on your mailing list to glean the information about anyone else on the mailing list. Not even bccing people. Always compose individual and direct emails.

Programmatically

In this case, as with many other programming issues, use whichever service type you are most familiar with. I do not believe the differences between and ASP.NET service and a Windows service would be larger than the difference in your own skill levels.

Logging

For logging, when using a Windows Service, I've had good experience with Log4Net. In terms of (the much more important) content. You should be logging a few things (if applicable).

1. Recipient
2. Time Sent
3. Content Tags
4. Current Message Queue

1) Recipient

An integral part to log, because oftentimes errors in the 'service' are actually errors with the recipient. You can imagine the havoc that would occur if your test mailbox fills up and starts rejecting messages.

2) Time sent

Very important for obvious reasons. Most loggers time-stamp every message anyway though.

3) Content tags

If you are sending out some sort of customized modular content, then there will likely be a set of content tags based on their preferences ("VideoGames,StackOverflowNews,Lederhosen") this allows you to track in a much more fine-grained manner what could be wrong with a certain class of emails that fail.

4) Current Message Queue

Many of the problems can be enlightened by logging this value every time. It shows you the times when your program is wildly slow, and it also shows you when it is curiously faster than normal (suspiciously empty queue). More problems will be illuminated by this one than by any others.

Answer 6

The Opt-Out Process should NOT be "Reply to the email with 'unsubscribe' in the subject". I use a catch-all for all my subscriptions (helps control spam) because of that I can't reply from every address that I give out ([email protected]). Making it really hard for me to unsubscribe from certain lists.

Opt-Out links work the best.

Answer 7

I prefer opt-in to opt-out.

Answer 8

How should I track emails that are sent?

If by track, you mean tell if someone actually looked at the email then there are 2 ways (that I know of) to "track" emails.. The first is to have links in your emails that the read can go too. The downside is this only give you a recording if a read clicks on the link. The other way is to embed remote images in the email. When people view the email and if the email application actually displays the images, you should be able to look at how often the remote images where view to get a good idea of how many people are viewing the email.

Neither of these are all that great because they both have flaws but it would give you a ballpark number of views per email.

Answer 9

Summarizing from your question and answers:

• opt-in only
• "good" privacy policy, made known to users, including no sharing of emails with other parties
• single-click unsubscribe (not reply) with easy "I changed my mind" mechanism
• option of HTML or plain text
• CAN-SPAM compliance for US

I'll add:

• "Forward to a friend" option
• "If this was forwarded to you and you want to subscribe..." option
• An option when users unsubscribe for them to send you comments as to why they unsubscribed - often as checkboxes (comes too often, I'm too busy, I get too many emails, content is not not relevant to me, etc) and an "other reason" text box
• Permission reminder: "You are receiving this email at <email_address> because you clicked..."
• If user has opted for HTML, a "If you can't read this, click here to view the page online" link

Answer 10

One thing I noticed that nobody suggessted is an option to choose a text or a picture containing email. I also prefer to get more smaller news since I check my email multiple times a day so it might be useful to ask the user if they want daily or weekly e-mails.