There’s still quite a bit of concern and worry about how the Facebook messaging platform is going to affect marketing. One thing that may help is the Facebook postmaster page. There’s all sorts of good information on those pages, reflecting the years of experience that their messaging team has in running large platforms. Some points worth mentioning. Facebook is giving detailed...
TWSD: SEO Spamming
It’s no secret that I get a lot of spam. It’s no secret that some catches my eye enough to actually write about it here. Today’s spam is an email that actually made me laugh, though. Somewhere, some gardening site paid a lot of money for search engine optimization and got ripped off. We own the site samspade.org. It’s down now, victim of a major hardware crash, but this...
Another take on the emailpocalypse
One of the strengths of email that instant messaging lacks is asynchronous communication. With email, you send someone a message and they may or may not respond right away. Sending somebody an email means that you are not necessarily expecting an instantaneous reply. In fact, that’s the whole point of not using the phone or instant messaging. You are not expecting your target recipient to be...
Attention is a limited resource
Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time. In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes...
Relevance or Permission
One of the discussions that surrounds email marketing is whether relevance trumps permission or permission trumps relevance. I believe this entire discussion is built on a false dichotomy. Sending relevant email is important. Not only do recipients expect mail to be relevant, but the ISPs often make delivery decisions on how relevant their users find your mail. Marketers that send too much...
FBox: The sky isn't falling
Having listened to the Facebook announcement this morning, I am even more convinced that emailpocalypse isn’t happening. Look, despite the fact that companies like Blue Sky Factory think that this means marketers are NEVER EVER going see the inside of an inbox again this isn’t the end of email marketing. Yes, Facebook email is a messaging platform that marketers are not going to have...
Going to MAAWG
Following on from last weeks post about MAAWG, I thought I’d write a bit about actually going to MAAWG. You’re an ESP and you’ve been accepted into the organization. Now you have some decisions to make. Who should go to MAAWG from your company? Send at least one person from your compliance or abuse desk. At the very, very least send someone who sets your policies. Don’t...
Emailpocalypse
Apparently emailpocalypse is coming on Monday. That’s when Facebook is going to release their email platform (the one no one knows anything about) and it’s going to DESTROY EMAIL MARKETING AS WE KNOW IT. Are you ready? I think my favorite doom and gloom scenario is: Facebook will throw out the book on email deliverability because it will likely be the first mass-user email platform...
MAAWG: Not a Marketing Conference
There seems to be this great misunderstanding among a huge number of email marketers and delivery professionals that MAAWG is some sort of marketing or marketing related conference. They’re wrong. MAAWG is the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. The intention of the group is to provide a setting where companies providing internet services can work together to stop abuse. Email is one of the...
Best practices: a meaningless term
Chad White wrote an article for MediaPost about best practices which parallels a lot of thinking I’ve been doing about how the email marketing industry treats best practices. After several conversations recently about “best practices,” I’m convinced that the term is now meaningless. It’s been bastardized in the same way that the definition of “spam” has...