I do a lot of negotiating with blocklists and ISPs on behalf of my clients and recently was dealing with two incidents. What made this so interesting to me was how differently the clients approached the negotiations. In one case, a client had a spammer slip onto their system. As a result the client was added to the SBL. The client disconnected the customer, got their IP delisted from the SBL and...
Update on Canadian Law
Neil Schwartzman has an update on the status of the Canadian anti-spam law currently working its way through the legislature.
Best time to send marketing email
Pages and pages have been written about the best time to send email. Marketers spend significant amounts of energy discussing and researching the best time of the day and the best day of the week to send email. I have long thought that these discussions do not put enough attention on individual end users and how the recipients interact with email. Researchers recently developed a model for email...
Sending mail from unread email addresses
Some marketers, even large marketing companies, send mail from email addresses that are unread. Justin Premick posted a list of reasons this is a very, very bad idea. Be sure to read the comments, too.
Good email design
DJ at Bronto has another example of great email design.
Walking the Walk
Last week I mentioned a Smith-Harmon report about how to handle email when going out of business. I mentioned at the end of the post that I was pleasantly surprised at how well done their email program was. Let’s walk through the process. 1) The download process. Clicking on the “download report” page popped up a signup window. They ask for first name, last name, company and and email address...
TWSD: Run, hide and obfuscate
Spammers and spamming companies have elevated obfuscating their corporate identities to an artform. Some of the more dedicated, but just this side of legal, spammers set up 3 or 4 different front companies: one to sell advertising, one or more to actually send mail, one to get connectivity and one as a backup for when the first three fail. Because they use rotating domain names and IP addresses...
The Weekend Effect
Sending mail only Monday through Friday can cause reputation and delivery problems at some ISPs, even when senders are doing everything right. This “weekend effect” is a consequence of how ISPs measure reputation over time. Most ISPs calculating complaint rate use a simple calculation. They measure how many “this is spam” clicks a source IP generates in a 24 hour period...
Going out of business email strategies
Chad White of Smith-Harmon posted a report today on shutting down email marketing programs when going out of business. He looks in detail at how a number of companies handled their email marketing during the going-out-of-business process. There is a very solid mix of examples of how companies handle things. Some companies do things very badly, like never mention over email that they’re...