DM News, December 1, 2011
According to Microsoft Corp., 75% of email messages that Hotmail users report as spam are actually legitimate email marketing recipients just don’t want anymore. To help address this issue, Windows Live Hotmail has released five new tools to make email inboxes more user-friendly by weeding out “graymail” messages, or these unwanted, legitimate marketing messages.
With the new setup, Hotmail users will continue to get email messages that they have signed up for, but newsletters will now be filtered into a separate newsletter folder. Hotmail also has new tools that make it easier for users to unsubscribe using one click, and schedule regular cleanups of old newsletters, as well as tools to categorize email into folders and to flag important messages. “What really characterizes graymail is that the same message that one person thinks is spam could be really important to another person,” wrote Dick Craddock, group program manager at Windows Live Hotmail, in a blog post about the update.
Ari Osur, principal analyst at Forrester Research, says that this is just Hotmail’s way of responding to the arms race among Webmail providers. “They are trying to maintain their email user base by responding to the overwhelming clutter in inboxes,” says Osur. “This development makes it much easier for a consumer to ignore your message, because now it is not even in the inbox. It is in a special folder, which they can ignore.” Osur recommends that marketers do a great deal of testing with Hotmail users to see how they are responding to marketing messages with these new tools at hand. “Marketers should segment out their Hotmail users and test the language they are using and see what resonates well among this specific segment,” he says.