Everyone ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns? I know many retailers are already mailing, my inbox is exploding with offers. For me, this is often a quiet time of the year. As a strategist, most of my worked happened months ago. Now, it’s time for execution.
I wish everyone a successful week of mailing.
May your deliverability be high.
May your subject lines be correct.
May your personalization work.
May your strategy rock.
Hello! Hope all are keeping safe through Harvey, Irma, Katia and the aftermath. I know many people that have been affected and are currently out of their homes. I am proud to see so many of my fellow deliverability folks are helping our displaced colleagues with resources, places to stay and money to replace damaged property.
Here’s a mid-month late wrapup of our August blog posts. Our favorite part of August? The total eclipse, which was absolutely amazing. Let me show you some pictures.
Ok, back to email.
We’re proud of the enormous milestone we marked this month: ten years of near-daily posts to our Word to the Wise blog. Thanks for all of your attention and feedback over the past decade!
In other industry news, I pointed to some interesting findings from the Litmus report on the State of Email Deliverability, which is always a terrific resource.
I also wrote about the evolution of filters at web-based email providers, and noted that Gmail’s different approach may well be because it entered the market later than other providers.
In spam, spoofing, and other abuse-related news, I posted about how easy it is for someone to spoof a sender’s identity, even without any technical hacks. This recent incident with several members of the US presidential administration should remind us all to be more careful with making sure we pay attention to where messages come from. How else can you tell that someone might not be wholly legitimate and above-board? I talked about some of what I look at when I get a call from a prospective customer as well as some of the delightful conversations I’ve had with spammers over the years.
In the security arena, Steve noted the ongoing shift to TLS and Google’s announcement that they will label text and email form fields on pages without TLS as “NOT SECURE”. What is TLS, you ask? Steve answers all your questions in a comprehensive post about Transport Layer Security and Certificate Authority Authorization records.
Also worth reading, and not just for the picture of Paddington Bear: Steve’s extremely detailed post about local-part semantics, the chunk of information before the at sign in an email address. How do you choose your email addresses (assuming they are not assigned to you at work or school…)? An email address is an identity, both culturally and for security purposes.
In subscription best practices — or the lack thereof — Steve talked about what happens when someone doesn’t quite complete a user registration. Should you send them a reminder to finish their registration? Of course! Should you keep sending those reminders for 16 months after they’ve stopped engaging with you? THE SURPRISING ANSWER! (Ok, you know us. It wasn’t that surprising.)
Over on the MarketingLand website, Len Shneyder talks about 3 companies (Uber, REI and eBay) that do email right. In there he shows how the companies use email to further their business goals while understanding and meeting the needs of their customers.
Meeting the needs of recipients is the way to get your mail to the inbox. Send email that your users want, and they will tell the ISPs when they don’t get your mail. It’s sometimes hard to convince senders of this. Instead they want to tweak URLs or authentication or IPs or domains. But none of those things are what deliverability is all about. Deliverability is about the recipient. Deliverability is about the relationship between the sender and recipient.
Send to the right people – and the right people are those who have asked for and want your mail – and deliverability problems don’t materialize. Sure, every once in a while something might happen that throws mail into the bulk folder for one reason or another. But fighting to get to the inbox isn’t an every day thing. Instead, senders can focus on knowing their users and sending mail that makes them happy when it shows up in the inbox.
I’ve been slammed the last few days and blogging is that thing that is falling by the wayside most. I don’t expect this to change much in the very short term. But, I do have over 1200 blog posts, some of which are still relevant. So I’ll be pulling some older posts out and sharing them here while I’m slammed and don’t have a lot of time left over to generate new content.
Today’s repost is a 2015 post about spamtraps.
Spamtraps are …
… addresses that did not or could not sign up to receive mail from a sender.
… often mistakenly entered into signup forms (typos or people who don’t know their email addresses).
… often found on older lists.
… sometimes scraped off websites and sold by list brokers.
… sometimes caused by terrible bounce management.
… only a symptom …