Information you should know

MailChimp is using microformats technology to allow recipients to add senders to their address book from the subscription page. All senders should tell recipients what address mail is coming from at the point of subscription and encourage recipients to add the senders to their address books. This new technology simplifies that for the recipient.
Denise Cox posts about a recent conference she attended in London looking at what makes email valuable. She has many good suggestions on how to improve your ROI, but captures the essence of getting a good ROI on mail in 3 sentences.

The points made during this event drove home the fact that it has to be an email newsletter of value to the recipient. While email marketing has a zillion benefits for marketers – in the end all efforts and time spent are about delivering value to the recipient. This is the only way marketers will see ROI in their email marketing.

On that theme, I had a discussion with someone handling abuse@ a very large ISPs. He was commenting on the request from a member of sales to mark a specific customer “not a spam problem.” After looking at the complaint rates, abuse@ said there was no way they were not a spam problem. He pointed out to sales that the problem is not that the ISP is seeing the mail as spam, but that the recipients are seeing the mail as spam. Yet another reminder that if senders want to change the perception of mail the place to change it is directly with recipients. When senders send mail that is valuable to the recipients spam problems fade away, whether those problems be blocked emails or mail from their ISP.
The EEC has published 2 email checklists to help you design your emails correctly. They are free this week, so go download them. (I tried to access with Safari and was stuck in broken form hell. Their form does work with Firefox, though.

Related Posts

Verifying email addresses

Over at CircleID Aviram Jenik posts about using email addresses as identification and how that can go horribly wrong if the website does no verification. In his case, the problem is a user who has made a purchase using Aviram’s gmail address and Aviram now has access to the other users personal information. As he explains it:

Read More

Those addresses are costing you

Mark Brownlow has a post up about the hidden costs of bad email marketing. These center around brand damage, but there are other costs to poor email marketing strategies.
Previously, having old and non-responsive email addresses on a mailing list did not hurt and may have helped a reputation at an ISP. In some cases, these addresses may have even helped a reputation by increasing the number of emails delivered thus lowering the overall percentage of complaints.
More recently, some ISPs have started looking at the characteristics of recipients as part of the reputation score of a sender. If a sender is mailing a lot of abandoned email addresses, these ISPs can detect that fact. This counts against a senders reputation and may result in email ending up in the bulk folder or being blocked at the transaction.
Many senders are extremely resistant to removing old addresses from their lists. Some of the more numbers driven ones have even followed the statistics and can tell me exactly how many people ignore their email for 12 months or 18 months, and then come back and make a large purchase. This is true, sometimes people will ignore email for a long time and then come back. Keeping these people on a list may be beneficial.
However, in those recipients who ignore email (no opens, no clicks) for a long time are some addresses that have been abandoned. While these addresses are not spamtraps, repeatedly sending email to large numbers of abandoned addresses will lower the sender’s reputation over time.
All senders should have a process for dealing with non-active addresses. Allowing cruft to accumulate on a list does negatively affect reputation.

Read More

FTC Rulemaking on CAN SPAM

The FTC announced today they will be publishing clarifications to CAN SPAM in the near future. According to the FTC

Read More