Hotmail’s spam filter, and testing email creative.

April 21, 2009 in All posts

Hello! It’s been a while, so I thought I’d open with a short (but obviously terribly witty and incisive) comment on an email I received from the Windows Live team. Please bear with me; I’ve written it in the style of a story. I hope you like it. It’s not long, I promise.

Read on!

Picture this: you work for the Microsoft Windows Live team, and things aren’t going well. You’re sat in Redmond, and gosh-darnit no-one seems to want to agree to you emailing them promotional bollocks! Outrageous.

So, at one of the weekly team huddles around the shiny Microsoft Surface table that uses technology you stole from someone else, John from the Legal Grey Areas team in Marketing comes up with this little gem:

“Why don’t we just email them anyway?”
“No, John, we’re not allowed to do that.”
“Naha! But…if we do it under the pretense that we’re concerned they’re missing out on stuff, and to encourage them to change their profile settings…would that work? It’s a service email then, not a promotional one.”
“Bloody good thinking. Get to it.”

So off they trot, email campaign designers in tow, to create this stunning campaign. They crank out something in double-quick time, John gets complimentary cappucino enemas from his colleagues, and a payraise…AND a girlfriend…all in the same week.

Except…well, as you can probably tell, someone’s forgotten something quite key. Quite important. A mantra, if you will, that should accompany any email campaign creation.

TEST YOUR EMAIL CREATIVE.

And by creative, I don’t just mean the look & feel – I also mean the wording. And how it’ll look in multiple browsers, email clients, and similar stuff.

So – goddamit John, you’re gonna be proud – here’s what landed in my Hotmail inbox:

Microsoft's email - caught in their own spam filter.

That’s right folks: it got caught in their own spam filter. The moral of the story: TEST EVERYTHING. ASSUME NOTHING.

And bring me pie.

Bravo!