April 2015: The Month in Email

We started the month with some conversations about best practices, both generally looking at the sort of best practices people follow (or don’t) as well as some specific practices we wanted to look at in more depth. Three for this month:

  • Be gracious with opt-out requests. Email marketing is hard. Even when it’s successful, response rates can be very low. It is surely frustrating to hear from people who don’t want your email, but it can help you refine your marketing program.

  • Put bounce policies in place before your important email bounces. If you’re sending legitimate, requested, and wanted email (which of course you are, right?), it’s important to think about the implications of delivery failure not only on your business but on your customers’ lives.

  • Examine the real value of an old list. Just because you can buy addresses doesn’t mean you should. Here are some things to think about if you’re considering it.

We also noted that even with the very best practices, mistakes happen and trusted senders can recover from them.

At the intersection of best practices and industry news, we looked at the political realm and where politics, fraud, and spam overlap. We also talked about how important it is to make sure our politicians understand internet and email technologies.

In other industry news, Josh continued the exploration he started last month of Salesforce’s DKIM implementation and created a tutorial on how to use it. He also outlined the authentication changes Microsoft has made as part of their Office365/Exchange Online Protection over IPv6 implementation. Steve briefly clarified the different methods for email authentication and email repudiation, and I wrote a bit about email verification services.

I also mentioned that AOL hasn’t come up for me with clients lately, but several of our readers commented that they are still having active AOL-related discussions with their customers. I also wrote about the compromised employee account at Sendgrid, and the security implications for the email industry. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this sort of thing going forward.

Related Posts

Thoughts on bounce handling

This week’s Wednesday question comes from D.

What are your thoughts on bounce handling

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July 2014: The month in email

We continue to be busy with really interesting client work. Look for some new posts and white papers to come out of this research over the next few months, but for now blogging has been a bit light while we’re working hard. In parallel with our busy times, we have also been pondering the ways in which the email world illustrates the classic bon mot  “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, and we’ve been revisiting some posts from a few years ago to examine this.
We started July with a nod to a good subscription experience just as CASL, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation went into effect on Canada Day. While companies have another 17 months to put these provisions into practice, it’s a good reminder that periodic re-engagement with customers can be very effective in helping you maintain high-quality subscriber lists. We talked a bit more about CASL here and what protections the law intends.
In stark contrast, we posted about an organization that is doing a less-than-stellar job making sure they’re only sending wanted email. The Direct Marketing Association is a terrific resource and member organization for marketers across industries and channels, but their email marketing practices don’t always live up to their mission of “Advancing and Protecting Responsible Data-Driven Marketing”, and we explored some ways in which they might improve this.
Those of you who have been reading this blog for any time at all know that we tend to talk about wanted mail and unwanted mail rather than the more general category of spam. Marketers tend to think their mail can’t possibly be spam if it’s not offering Viagra or phishing for credit card information, but that’s not really the point — if a customer doesn’t want to read your email about new mountain bikes, even if they bought a mountain bike from you three years ago, that’s unwanted email. Here’s a post we revisited about why customers might not want your mail, and a new post about engagement.
One risk of sending unwanted email, of course, is that customers complain, and that will affect your delivery going forward. We revisited a post about feedback loops, and also talked a bit about addressing delivery problems as they come up rather than waiting for them to resolve on their own (mostly, they won’t!)
I also proposed a bit of a thought experiment around monetizing the complaint stream, and followed up with a second post. There are some good points in the comments of those posts, but mostly I think it’s an interesting solution to addressing risk and abuse at ESPs.
Finally, Steve wrote a short post about our new mail servers and how quickly spammers descended as we set those up. It’s a constant battle!

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March 2015: The month in email

Happy March! We started the month with some more movement around CASL enforcement from our spam-fighting friends to the north. We noted a $1.1 million fine levied against Compu-Finder for CASL violations, as well as a $48,000 fine to Plentyoffish Media for failing to provide unsubscribe links. We noted a few interesting things: the fines are not being imposed at the maximum limits, violations are not just on B2C marketing, but also on B2B senders, and finally, that it really just makes sense — both from a delivery perspective and a financial perspective — to comply with the very reasonable best practices outlined in CASL.

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