One thing anyone collecting email addresses anywhere has to think about is address validation. How do you prevent users from typing bad addresses into your forms? I ran into this yesterday attempting to take an online quiz. Before I was allowed to take the quiz, I had to provide my name, phone number and email address. Initially I attempted to use a tagged email address. This is one that delivers...
A little bit of link sharing today. Mark Brownlow posts about how critical clicks are to conversion. He also looks at successful techniques that various marketers have used to engage customers. Chris Wheeler has an insightful post at SpamResource discussing reputation, engagement and what the ISPs are looking at when making delivery decisions. J.D. Falk touches on some of the same themes in his...
What is the secret to dealing with ISPs? The short answer is: Don’t do it if at all possible. Talking to ISP reps generally isn’t going to magically improve your reptuation. There is no place in the reputation systems where delivery can be modified because the delivery specialist knows or is liked by the postmaster at an ISP. With my clients, I work through delivery issues and can...
An ESP twittered this past week about their new DKIM implementation going live. They were quite happy with themselves. Unfortunately, in their blog post, they mentioned 3 things that DKIM would provide for their customers, and got it wrong on all 3 points. Their confusion is something that a lot of people seem to get wrong about DKIM so I thought I would explain what was wrong. “[M]essages...
Recently, one of my clients had a new employee make a mistake and ended up sending newsletters to people in their database that had not subscribed to those particular newsletters. This resulted in their recipients getting 3 extra emails from them. These things happen, people fat-finger database queries or aren’t as careful with segmentation as they should be. My clients were predictably...
There is no such thing as a delivery emergency. They just do not happen. Delivery is fluid, delivery is changing, delivery is complex. But when delivery goes bad it is not an emergency. There is no need to call up an ISP person at home on a Saturday afternoon and ask them to remove the filters. (And, BTW, experience indicates if you do this that you may have future delivery issues at that ISP.)...
Recently Ken Magill wrote an article looking at how an ESP was attempting to sell him services based on the ESPs ‘high deliverability rates.’ I commented that Ken was right, and I still think he is. Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article...
Late last week RPost sued Goodmail for infringing two patents. One patent authenticates content and delivery of documents. The second verifies the message was received by the recipient. Patent #6,182,219: Apparatus and method for authenticating the dispatch and contents of documents. Apparatus and method for authenticating that a sender has sent certain information via a dispatcher to a recipient...
Most people I know handling delivery issues for senders have some version of delivery or deliverability in their job title. But as I talk to them about what they do on a daily basis, their role is as much policy enforcement and compliance as it is delivery. Sure, what they’re telling customers and clients is how to improve delivery, but that is often in the context of making customers...
Seth Godin has a post up today talking about how friction, that is the cost of sending marketing, is good for marketing. With more friction, marketers make choices about sending instead of sending to everyone. The post touches on a point I’ve certainly tried to explain to clients and senders in general. Email, of course, is free. Except it’s not. The friction that slows down sending...
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