Truths and myths about email

Seven myths and two truths about email
My favorite:

[myth] Engagement is the new reputation. Actually, reputation metrics have always been about engagement, which is what complaint data and sender reputation reflect.

Yes. This.
Reputation, permission, all of those things are a way to quantify one simple fact: Do recipients want this mail from this sender?
Send mail people want and generally it will get into the inbox. Send stuff they don’t want (or don’t care if it shows up or not) and suffer delivery problems.

News from MAAWG
A sure fire business model for senders and ESPs

Related Posts

It doesn't matter what you say

“What should we tell the ISP?” is a frequent question from my customers. The answer is pretty simple. It doesn’t usually matter what you tell the ISP. What matters are your actions.
If a sender is having delivery problems then the solution is not to call the ISP and talk to them about why the sender’s mail should not be delivered to the bulk folder. Instead, the solution is to evaluate the email and the address acquisition process and the list hygiene process. Identify where potential problems are and then resolve those problems.
Typically, the ISPs won’t need to be contacted. The changes to the email will register and delivery will improve. In some cases, particularly when there’s been some major mistake, contacting the ISP and explaining the mistake and what steps have been taken to stop the mistake from happening in the future may help resolve the issue faster. But if nothing has changed, then there’s no reason for the ISP to expect anything to change.
It doesn’t matter what you say. It matters what you do.

Read More

Bad year coming for sloppy marketers

MediaPost had an article written by George Bilbrey talking about how 2010 could be a difficult year for marketers with marginal practices. George starts off the article by noticing that his contact at ISPs are talking up how legitimate companies with bad practices are causing them problems and are showing up on the radar.
This is something I talked about a few weeks ago, in a series of blog posts looking at the changes in 2010. The signs are out there, and companies with marginal practices are going to see delivery get a lot more difficult. George lists some practices that he sees as problems.

Read More

Project Omnivore

Ben at Mailchimp has posted some information about Project Omnivore. This is a predictive system that not only predicts potential abuse, but can also be used to predict poor campaigns. Steve and I had a chance to see Omnivore in action when we were in Atlanta last fall, and were impressed by the accuracy for bad stuff. It seems, however, that Omnivore is useful to predict good behaviour as well.

Read More