CategoryBest Practices

ESPs need to step up their compliance game

I don’t send a lot of spam complaints generally. Mostly I block and move on. There are some companies, though, that I offer the professional courtesy of sending a complaint or a report to their abuse@ address. Former clients, friends and colleagues generally get that courtesy. The number of ESPs that completely fail to take any action is disappointing. Too many of them can’t even...

Cleaning old lists

There comes a time in many marketers’ lives where they are faced with and old, stale database and a management chain that wants to mail those addresses. Smart marketers know that delivery problems will arise if they just reactivate all those users. They also know that mailing older addresses can affect current and engaged addresses as well. Still, many executives think there is no downside...

Apple MPP reporting and geolocation

A while back I wrote about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, what it does and how it works. Since MPP was first announced I’d assumed that it would be built on the same infrastructure as iCloud Private Relay, Apple’s VPN product, but hadn’t seen anything from Apple to explicitly connect the two and didn’t have access to enough data to confirm it independently. But the nice...

Terminology

There is a lot more to say here, and I’m working on a longer post to really talk about the underlying racism in tech and how we as an industry have failed. In the deliverability space, specifically, the use of blacklist/whitelist is terminology rooted in racism (black is bad, white is good). Many DNSBLs use the block terminology and have done for a while. But there are still too many places...

Advice on coronavirus emails

Gartner has some really good recommendations for companies considering mailing about the coronavirus pandemic. Launch your COVID-19-themed marketing email campaign only if you can answer yes to four questions: Am I telling customers something different from other brands versus saying the same thing as everyone else? Am I telling customers something they don’t already expect of my company or brand...

The key to improving deliverability

According to the UK DMA, marketers report improvements in deliverability after GDPR went into effect. I mean, thank you UK DMA for doing the research. Of course deliverability is going to improve when you send mail to those people who have expressly opted into your mail. 76% report an increase in open rates in the past 12 months; 75% say click- throughs are higher; 51% say ROI has risen. Opt-out...

Stop obsessing about open rates

In 2020: 250OK says open rates were much lower than ESPs report. The Only Influencers list hosts a discussion about the value and use of open rates. A potential client contacts me asking if I can get their open rates to a certain percentage.A client shows me evidence of 100% inboxing but wants to improve their open rate.An industry group runs sessions at multiple meetings discussing how...

Using Reply-To:

Yesterday I learned that some ESPs don’t support the reply to: address. I asked around to discover which ESPs did. Here’s what I learned. ESPs that support reply-to: ActiveCampaignAmazonSESConstantContactCampaign MonitorCordialDelivraDoListEloquaEmmaEpsilonGetResponseHubSpotiContactListrakMailkitMailUpMarketoN6PardotwordResponsysSailthruSFMCSharpspringTwilio / SendGridZeta Global...

The variables are not independent

In my previous career I was a molecular biologist. Much of my work was done on bacteria but after I left grad school, I ended up working in a developmental biology lab. Bacteria were (mostly) simple: just about every trait was controlled by a single gene. We could study what that gene did by removing it from the bacteria or adding it to a well characterised bacteria. When I moved to developmental...

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