Marketing and Delivery blogs

Mark Brownlow links to a number of marketing and delivery blogs over at his website. Different perspectives and different thoughts will give you the tools to create the best email marketing campaign for your business.

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They’re not blocking you because they hate you.

Really. They’re blocking you because you’re doing something that is triggering their blocking mechanisms.
This has happened over and over and over again. Some political or activist website sends out an email that gets blocked by some large ISP and the political site turns it into a giant crisis that means the ISP hates them or is trying to shut them up or is trying to silence their message.
Except that’s not what is going on. The folks at the large ISPs who handle blocking and incoming mail are incredibly smart and conscientious . They take their jobs seriously. They, both personally and corporately, want their customers (the end recipients) to receive the email they want. Additionally, they do not want to deliver mail that the recipients did not ask to receive.
In almost no cases is the block a particular activist site encounters a result of the ISP not liking the content of the email. If an activist site is being blocked it’s due to complaints or reputation or something that ISPs measure and block on. Some person at the ISP didn’t read your email, decide they didn’t like what you had to say and then block that email. That email was blocked because something related to that email triggered the thresholds for blocking.
Of course, as with everything online, there are caveats. In this case it’s that the above statements really only hold true for large ISPs in free countries. There are some countries in the world that do block email based on content, and that is dictated by the government. Likewise, some small ISPs will block based on the guy in charge not liking the email.
Generally, though, if an activist site is being blocked by a large ISP in the US or other free countries it is because their mailings are somehow not complying with that ISPs standards. Instead of starting an email campaign or blog campaign to shame the ISP for suppressing speech, it is much more productive to actually contact the ISP in question and find out what went wrong.

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419 … over live chat?

MailChimp’s customer service people were contacted by what appears to be a King selling monkeys.
I want to get permission part II up today, but this was just so funny I had to share.

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Solving delivery problems

“The only solution to our delivery problems isn’t double opt-in, is it?” A question I get quite frequently from clients and potential clients. In the vast majority of cases the answer is no, confirmed (double) opt-in [1] is not the only solution to delivery problems. In fact, there are delivery issues that confirmed opt-in will do nothing to solve.
Many other delivery sites and deliverability experts will tell clients that the solution to their deliverability problems is to switch to confirmed opt-in as a method to collect email addresses. This overly simplistic solution only treats one possible source of delivery problems, the collection of addresses. It does not address data hygiene issues, technical delivery issues or complaints.
While address collection is important, the best address collection processes on the planet cannot fix sloppy data handling, failure to unsubscribe recipients, or non-existent bounce handling. All of these factors play a role in delivery. It is critical to identify the underlying source of delivery problems before advising anyone on how to fix it.
Over the course of the next few blog posts, I am going to take a look at the various issues that affect delivery: permission, data hygiene, bounce handling, complaints and authentication. I’ll talk about what is important and what senders need to look for and be aware of when they’re trying to troubleshoot delivery issues.
[1] There is some disagreement between senders and anti-spammers about the correct terminology to use. Senders use double opt-in to describe the process, anti-spammers use confirmed opt-in. I am using both terms here to mean the same process.

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