I’ve talked frequently about permission on this blog, and mentioned over and over again that senders should correctly set expectations at the time they collect permission. Permission isn’t permission if the recipient doesn’t know what they’re agreeing to receive. This is graphically demonstrated in a recent lawsuit filed against Toyota for a marketing program. Toyota sent...
My ISP information page occasionally gets trackback pings from various blog posts. This week one of the trackbacks was from a blog post titled “One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch.” The theme of the blog post was that email marketers are poor, put upon business people that have to contend with all sorts of horrible responses from recipients, spam filtering companies and...
Every sender, big or small, should have the ability to suppress sending to any particular email address. They must, absolutely, be able to stop sending mail to anyone for any reason. Not only is this a legal requirement in every jursidiction that has laws about email marketing, it’s just good business sense. What happens when marketers fail to be able to suppress email addresses? At some...
What do you do when you have a potential customers name and address, but know nothing else about them? You’d really like to be able to send them some targeted marketing, ideally via email. You send them a good old-fashioned letter asking them to volunteer more contact information and answers to a bunch of business classification questions – “What industry are you in?”...
Or so the WSJ technology blog would have us believe. Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we...
Al has a post listing some of the bad things some sender representatives do when approaching ISPs for delisting. One of the things I would add to the list is hiding behind a privacy protected domain registration. No matter how you dice it, having a business domain behind privacy protection makes a company look illegitimate. For any company sending commercial mail, it’s not even an issue as...
This is a post I’ve put off for a while as the definition of spam is a sticky subject. There are online fora where the definition of spam has been debated for more than 10 years, and if there isn’t a working definition after all that time, it’s unlikely there will ever be a definition the participants can agree on. This came up again recently because one of the comments on my...
One of the more challenging things I do is work with companies who have poor reputations that they’re trying to repair. These companies have been getting by with poor practices for a while, but finally the daily delivery falls below their pain threshold and they decide they need to fix things. That’s when they call me in, usually asking me if I can go to the ISPs and tell the ISPs...
I’ve written frequently about personal contacts at ISPs and how the vast majority of delivery problems can be solved without picking up the “Bat Phone” and having someone at the ISP do something. Al touches on the same subject today, blogging about his recent experiences having to contact “Barry” multiple times for many different issues. Al resolves My goal going...
What is arguably an internal dispute at the DMA has spilled over into an email and ad battle. Gary Pike is sending email and publishing ads on websites asking DMA members to sign their proxy votes over to him. I saw one of the ads on Chief Marketer a few days ago, but am now unable to get the same ad to load. The dispute has also generated a lawsuit as the DMA alleges that Mr. Pike has...
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