ArchiveOctober 2011

The Social Side of Advertising

Most of the time when you’re sending bulk email you’re sending to a fairly anonymous list of email addresses. If you’re a good email marketer you’ve got a fairly good idea of their demographics, where the email addresses came from and maybe that they’ve purchased things from you in the past. But they’re still strangers – a “pre-existing business...

Where do subscribers come from?

Do you know all the ways subscribers can get on your lists? Are you sure? I recently used the contact form belonging to a marketing company to inform them that someone had stolen my email address from their database and I was receiving spam to the address only they had. They had an opt-out link on the form, allowing me to opt-out of personal contact and a demo of their product. But that opt-out...

Email in 2030

As predicted by Mark Brownlow. My favorite? You can still buy 1 million email addresses for $99. It’s still a bad idea.

Too much? Too little?

Mark Brownlow (who I haven’t linked to nearly enough lately) has insightful commentary on the frequency question. I really don’t think marketers should be afraid of sending email frequently. There are people who appreciate a lot of email. But I do think marketers should be careful when sending frequently. Good delivery is all about your audience and what you have to offer them. As...

Social media to improve email delivery

Mail delivered to the bulk folder is likely to continue landing in the bulk folder without intervention. Sometimes a sender can talk to the ISP involved and get mail moved back to the inbox. Sometimes a sender can make hygiene changes and get mail moved back to the inbox. The most effective way to get mail delivered to the inbox, however, is for recipients to go into the bulk folder and mark the...

Is there really one way to email successfully?

I’ve been watching a bunch of folks discuss someone’s mailing practices. The discussion has been fascinating to me.  I’m hearing from the conversation is that there are very specific rules regarding how every company should mail. And that anyone who deviates from those practices is heading down the path to failure. Doing it wrong. This theme has come up before, when I’ve...

Expectations

One of the themes I harp on with clients is setting recipient expectations. Senders that give recipients the information they need to make an informed subscription decision have much higher inbox and response rates than senders that try to mislead their recipients. Despite the evidence that correctly setting expectations results in better delivery and higher ROI on lists some senders go out of...

Persistence of unsubscribes

It’s really, really frustrating when an unsubscribe request doesn’t take. And it happens a lot more than many people expect. Most of the culprits are marketing companies. United Business Media is a huge problem, for instance. I never even signed up for their mail, but they bought an address I’d used to register for a conference. I unsubscribed at least a dozen times, but the...

Where do you accept reports?

One of the things that is most frustrating to me about sending in spam reports is that many ESPs and senders don’t actively monitor their abuse address. A few months ago I talked about getting spam from Dell to multiple email addresses of mine. What I didn’t talk about was how badly broken the ESP was in handling my complaint. The ESP was, like many ESPs, an organization that grew...

Not lazy, just annoyed

I don’t usually send in spam reports, but I submitted a couple in the last few weeks. Somehow an address of mine is on a bunch of rave / club lists in London. You want to know what is happening at London clubs this week? It’s all there in my spam folder. This mail finally hit my annoyance threshold, so I’ve been submitting reports and complaints to the senders the last few weeks...

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