Yahoo is making life a little easier for email marketers. They recently released a visualization tool that makes the flow of email through Yahoo’s servers more transparent, something that should be of interest to anyone who markets through email. With this tool, you can see the volume of email flowing through any area of the world with a few clicks of a mouse – and it’s free.
How Does the Yahoo Visualization Tool Work?
Upon accessing the tool, you’ll see a world map. Click on any spot on the map, and you’ll see how many emails are being delivered per second to that area as well as how many have been targeted as spam. By playing around with the tool, you’ll see that Yahoo labels lots of email as spam. In fact, they block more than 300,000 emails per second worldwide.
Here’s what makes this tool useful for email marketers. If you look on the left-hand side of the map, you’ll see a green bar labeled “trending keyword tools.” This lets you get a sneak peak at the top keywords currently being used in email subject lines and how often they appear in emails from a certain area of the world. Although it appears the information is in real time, it’s actually delayed by about an hour.
How is this helpful? The visualization tool lets you to see which words are safer to use in subject lines and which are more likely to be labeled as spam. If you look at the bottom of the trending keyword tool, you’ll see another green box labeled “show spam keywords.” If you click on this bar, you’ll see words in email subject lines from email that was blocked as spam and how many instances those words were used.
One thing that becomes apparent after using the Yahoo visualization tool for a while is Yahoo uses criteria other than subject line keywords to label an email as spam. Some marketers hesitate to put the word “free” in an email subject line because they believe it will trigger Yahoo’s spam filter.
By using the Yahoo visualization tool, you’ll see that emails with the word “free” do get delivered, although some are blocked as spam. This should be a reassurance that subject lines aren’t the final word on whether your email gets delivered. IP address, links and email content are also factors. Better to spend time writing good email content that will give your customer useful information and make the sale rather than focusing too much on the subject line.
Even if you don’t use this tool to craft your email subject line, you can’t help but be impressed by the fact that Yahoo delivers over 60,000 emails per second and blocks more than five-times that number. Something to think about before sending out your next email campaign.