In all the recent discussions of email address thievery I’ve not seen anyone mention stealing addresses by abusing the legal system. And, yet, there’s at least one ambulance chasing lawyer that’s using email addresses that were never given to him by the recipients. Even worse, when asked about it he said that the courts told him he could use the email address and that we...
It’d be nice to have a tool to uncover the zombie email addys, but until then, read this from @wise_laura: Kelly Lorenz There’s currently not a programmatic way to make those determinations, but this is where the relationship between senders and receivers comes in. All you have to do is ask recipients what they want. I know, I know, most marketers have a low opinion of the ability or...
I got a spam today advertising spamming services that ended with a tagline that can be paraphrased: We managed to spam you, let us spam others on your behalf! OK, so what they actually said was: We have proven that we can get our message through to you….Let us help get your message in front of your ideal audience. The thing is, I’m not an ideal audience for his message. Really. Sending me...
Tom Sather has a good summary of the problems with inactive email addresses and why data hygiene is critical to maintain high deliverability. These recommendations are some of the most difficult to convince people to implement. Some of my clients even show me numbers that show that a recipient that hadn’t opened or read and email in 18 months, suddenly made a multi-hundred dollar purchase...
Yes, the SEC. Really. Apparently the email marketing firm mUrgent, which provides services to the restaurant and hospitality industry also had a side business. According to the complaint filed by the SEC last month, they had an entire boiler room set up to sell shares for their non-existent IPO. I’d never heard of this firm before, so I did a little digging. First step, check out their...
Companies that can’t be bothered to implement good subscription practices will rarely be bothered to send relevant or engaging email.
True or False?
As I’ve said before, I can usually tell when some ISP changes their filtering algorithm because I start getting tons and tons of calls about delivery problems at that ISP. This past month it’s been Gmail. There have been two symptoms I’ve been hearing about. One is an increase in bulk folder delivery for mail that previously was reliably hitting the inbox. The other is a bit...
I continually run into companies that don’t really have a goal or understanding of their email marketing program. They’ve never really asked questions about how they’re using email or even why email is the right answer. Lots of companies are also diving head first into email marketing or the social media craze without having thought about what their goals are and what they want...
I’m hearing more rumors of ESPs seeing customer accounts being compromised, similar to what happened with The Children’s Place. Experian CheetahMail identified an isolated incident in which someone used a valid client user ID and password to gain access to the client’s email account and transmit an unauthorized and unlawful email. To recipients, the email appeared as a solicitation...
I often find myself having to analyze volumes of email, looking for common factors, source addresses, URLs and so on as part of some “forensics” work, analyzing leaked emails or received spam for use as evidence in a case. For large volumes of mail where I might want to dig down in a lot of detail or generate graphical or statistical reports I tend to use Abacus to slurp in and...
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