Listen to the experts

Two blog posts came out today interviewing big players in the email and delivery arena.
Over on the Unica blog, Len Shnyeder interviews Annalivia Ford who is a new member of their email operations team. She has had many years of experience in dealing with senders from the receiver position. She summarizes successful delivery as follows:

the bottom line really is simple, if not easy: to succeed, marketers must send timely, relevant and desired email to an engaged audience. I promise that spammers are not doing that.

Scott Cohen continues his email snob interview series by interviewing Al Iverson. The whole interview is worth a read, as Al has been around a long time and has been deep in the trenches on both sides of the delivery equation. Al sums up the essentials of email delivery in two short paragraphs.

If you want to stay in the inbox forever, your practices have to keep getting better. The ISPs stack rank everybody sending them marketing email, and knock the bottom senders out. Eventually, you’ll be that bottom sender; don’t wait for them to get to you. Keep improving!
I get upset when people ask me how close to the line they can be before they will be in trouble. If that’s the question they’re asking, they’re thinking about it wrong. Instead, they need to think about how to embody best practices in a way that obviates the need for periodic remediation. Walk the right path and you’re not going to have to pause periodically because you got blocked due to complaints.

Both interviews have good information and are a must read for any email marketers.

Related Posts

Google Buzz

Google Buzz has garnered a lot of attention this week, most of it looking at the privacy implications of requiring users to opt-out of sharing information with anyone who’s ever sent them email.
WARNING: Google Buzz Has a Huge Privacy Flaw
Fugitivus Blog (possibly NSFW due to language)
A dangerous buzz and opt-in isn’t just for email
How Google Buzz just blew your psuedonym
Lifehacker has a number of posts about Google Buzz and how to reset your settings.
I’ve already seen tweets and social media recommending using the networks generated by Google Buzz for marketing purposes.
I’m not very impressed with what I’ve heard about Google Buzz and the total lack of control it gives people over sharing information. I used to be very open with my information online, down to identifying the lab I worked in. I then said something on Usenet that upset someone. That person spent the next 4 months harassing me by phone at work and at home, and even went so far as to dig up my boss’ home number and harass her at home. I’ll be honest it was a scary experience. Even though I knew my stalker was 1500 miles away and extremely unlikely to actually show up on my doorstep, I was still worried for my safety.
That experience made me a lot more cautious about what I share online and how much information I give to people. Google Buzz seems to take a lot of the control of my information away from me. Which is why you won’t find me participating in the Google social network.
UPDATE: And here we go: Win a free laptop by following Hubspot on Google Buzz

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State of the Industry

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a series of posts on the blog from various authors who are active in the email space.
I posted A very young industry commenting on the lack of experience among email marketers. I think that some of the conflict between ISPs and ESPs and receivers and marketers can be traced back to this lack of longevity and experience. Often there is only a single delivery expert at a company. These people often have delivery responsibilities dropped on them without any real training or warning. They have to rely on outside resources to figure out how to do their job and often that means leaning on ISPs for training.
JD Falk described how many at ISPs feel about this in his post With great wisdom…

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News and links 12/31/09

We’re iced in here in DC so I’ve been catching up with some industry news while camped in front of a heater and the TV.
Best of the ESPs by Forrester Research. Congrats to ET and Responsys for coming out on top. The results, as reported by MediaPost, match reasonably well with my overall impressions of the industry (so they must be right!)
Return Path is rolling out a new version of SenderScore. A welcome change for those of us who regularly refer to an IP’s sender score and find it doesn’t match other data.
CAUCE has done a series of posts looking back at significant events in spam over the last decade.
Al has a retrospective on various data breaches affecting email addresses over the last few years.
Happy New Year, everyone!

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