Yesterday law enforcement officials arrested 6 people and charged them with running a massive internet fraud ring. Over 4 million PCs were part of the botnet. According to the FBI the cyber ring used a class of malware called DNSChanger to infect approximately 4 million computers in more than 100 countries. There were about 500,000 infections in the U.S., including computers belonging to...
There are lots of terribly complicated rules in email marketing and retention. “Only send email to people who opted-in”, “Never use a pink background”[1], “Have a working unsubscription link”, “Don’t put FREE in the subject line”[1]. Another one should be “How does what you’re doing look to a typical recipient?”. I’ve...
One of the comments on my Spamtraps post claims that audit trails should be maintained by recipients, not senders. If people are using legitimate email addresses that legitimately opted in and verified details, they should be required to have a log of which lists they opted in to. You are just asking to hurt legit mailers. The underlying reasoning appears to be that no sender ever spams, and...
I believe that spamtraps – for the professional marketer – are scare tactics that are no longer relevant. a professional marketer I’ve talked about spamtraps in the past. I’ve described a number of different types of spamtraps and what they tell the trap maintainer about a sender’s practices. One thing I think the professional marketer above is missing is that...
There are a number of reasons I know that mail coming into my mailbox is spam. I get 15 copies. There are a lot of spammers out there who buy and scrape addresses and don’t do even the simplest of de-duping. Send multiple copies to a single address, you’re probably spamming. I get mail to a non-tagged address. I use tags for every signup, and have done since mid-1999 or so. If I get...
People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices. I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail...
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...
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...
As predicted by Mark Brownlow. My favorite? You can still buy 1 million email addresses for $99. It’s still a bad idea.
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...
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