🔎 All about the massive Facebook outage

Essence of Email Weekly‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌ Essence of Email Weekly Read in Browser Essence of Email Weekly October 8, 2021 Hey everyone! 👋 We’re happy to announce that we released the latest version of our Essence of Email Quarterly report last Friday! Full of actionable tips on how to prepare and execute during the holiday period, we’re sure it will help you spruce up your email channel and head into November ready. In case you missed it, you can download your copy here . Happy reading! DIGITAL MARKETING The Facebook controversy Source: Tenor Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram all crashed at about 4 p.m. GMT on Monday, October 4. The scramble to bring them back online succeeded at around 10 p.m. As Facebook’s shares plummeted because of the incident, Zuckerberg is thought to have lost an estimated $7bn. What happened? Facebook explained that during a routine maintenance job, its engineers had issued a command that unintentionally took down all the connections in its network, "effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally.’’ Sheera Frenkel, a tech reporter for the New York Times, told the BBC part of the reason it took so long to fix the issue — it was because "the people trying to figure out what this problem was couldn't even physically get into the building" to check what had gone wrong. In the meantime, news broke that the private data of over 1.5 billion Facebook users was being sold on a hacking forum. The data included names, emails, gender, location, phone numbers, and user IDs. If this is true, it could be the biggest data breach to date. But the information is “largely unverified and possibly fake’’ , according to The New York Times . It is said that someone claimed to have paid for the supposedly hacked information and found out that it was a scam. “We’re investigating this claim and have sent a takedown request to the forum that’s advertising the alleged data,” said Facebook spokesperson, Joe Osborne. The bigger picture: The Facebook crash and data breach rumors come shortly after Frances Haugen, an American data engineer and Facebook’s former product manager, accused the company of putting profit before public good. She compiled and shared thousands of documents that show Facebook was lying to the public that it was making significant progress against hate, violence, and misinformation. Haugen spent more than a decade working for tech industry giants like Pinterest and Google. She joined Facebook in 2019 as a product manager on its civic integrity team which focused on issues related to elections worldwide. Her aim was to help the company combat the spreading of misinformation. But she soon began to feel that Facebook was unwilling to take the action needed to address these issues, even though it had the means and tools. She left the company in May 2021. “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimise for its own interests, like making more money. The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” she said. In a written statement to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said: “To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.” To sum up: Whether or not the incidents are connected remains to be seen. For now, experts advise disconnecting all third-party apps connected to Facebook and changing Facebook and Instagram passwords as soon as possible. Dave Gerhardt, Chief Brand Officer at Drift and founder of DGMG , said on Tuesday on his LinkedIn profile: ‘’There is still no better marketing channel than an email list. 100k followers on LinkedIn is cool but I wouldn't trade it for my email list of 6k people. And yesterday's Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp outage was a good reminder of the importance of owning your audience vs. renting the attention on social.” EMAIL AND SMS MARKETING Email and SMS captures simplified Source: Tenor Klaviyo recently announced an update to its Shopify integration: Klaviyo customers who use Shopify and Shopify Plus will now be able to grow their SMS list with their most engaged customers at checkout. In other words, users will no longer have to go to the website, look for the SMS signup form or a pop-up, and submit their details. They can now do it straight from the checkout process while fulfilling an order. This feature was previously only available for Shopify Plus users — requiring Shopify customers who wanted to use a similar one to build custom integrations or use methods outside of Shopify . In their blog post , Klaviyo says that even though other tactics such as signup forms , multi-step forms , click-to-text options , and similar are important to implement, collecting consent when someone’s checking out is a great first step towards turning one-time purchasers into lifelong customers. In addition, it’s a great way to eliminate friction for customers to opt in, as consent at checkout allows customers to sign up for SMS marketing messages in just one click. And as capturing someone’s permission to text them is a legal requirement in the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia, collecting SMS consent at checkout is one of the easiest ways to ensure a brand is growing its list in a legal and compliant way. What else is new? Similarly, Remarkety , an email service provider, launched the Email Capture Booster to help brands collect emails at the “crucial trigger point within a buyer’s shopping experience” — as soon as they add a product to the cart. This new solution is supposed to make sure shoppers have enough time to interact with a brand and show interest. Plus, it should mitigate the risk of having the user experience come off as intrusive and thus failing to drive 1:1 engagement and nurture the relationship altogether. “Our customers had been asking us for a new way of addressing cart abandonment, one that wasn’t so intruding like email capture triggers can often feel. The Email Capture Booster feature was built with the customer experience in mind and finding the right balance for engagement to maximize brand performance. We have seen up to 30% improvement of cart abandonment recovery with our early users,” said Joel Presman, General Manager and Co-founder of Remarkety. We’re always glad to see new user-centric solutions and updates! Email and SMS service providers: keep it up! 👏 EMAIL MARKETING Mailchimp launches Content Optimizer Source: Tenor Mailchimp, one of the biggest email service providers, launched a new feature called Content Optimizer on October 5. This tool will allow small and medium-sized businesses to compare their content against email best practices based on billions of marketing data sets on the Mailchimp platform. The Content Optimizer will recommend adjustments to readability, typography, CTA placements, and compliance with brand standards. The launch represents the first leveraging of Mailchimp’s acquisition of AI platform Inspector 6 in July of this year. The platform analyzes brand content and makes optimization recommendations. In addition, it will provide text and visual analytics extracted from Mailchimp’s extensive data. The context: “Most platforms provide some level of reporting to show what happened with a campaign, but marketers of all skill levels want to know why it happened and what they can do to improve their email performance in the future,” said John Wolf, principal product manager, Smart Content at Mailchimp. Small to medium-sized businesses are said to often lack time, expertise, or tools for creating quality content. Analyzing the results the content brings is often difficult, too. Content Optimizer will therefore help achieve the level of intelligence usually reserved for enterprise-level companies. The initial release of Content Optimizer is focused on email, but it is planned to roll it out to additional channels in the future. EMAIL DESIGN INSPO This Black Friday, you do you Source: Omnisend Chances are you’ve noticed a lot of BFCM emails looking similar each holiday season. Many brands are switching to dark visuals with glaring CTA buttons and aggressive headlines in an attempt to increase urgency and drive sales. News flash: There’s just no need to do this. Keeping your brand identity during the BFCM season with only slight visual updates won’t make you boring. On the contrary, it might actually help you stand out from the crowd. It shows that you are consistent, dedicated to your audience, and easily identifiable, which will make your customers feel at home. Instead of going all out with black and red colors, use images, gifs, illustrations, countdown timers, and banners that reflect your brand identity and apply a dark touch only in certain elements. The email below is a perfect example of how you can create urgency without the threatening, aggressive colors. Get creative, you can do it! Source: Omnisend You are welcome to forward this email. If you were forwarded this email, click here to subscribe. 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