Today will be my last day at Word to the Wise. I joined WttW in December of 2014, and it has been a wonderful journey. I have enjoyed working with Laura, Meri, and Steve, and I’ve enjoyed working with all of our clients helping solve their deliverability challenges. Laura has such a deep understanding and knowledge of deliverability that every day I would find myself learning from her and...
Email marketing continues to be a great way to reach out to prospects and customers and many companies utilize multiple mail streams. Companies often have the following systems sending mail: Welcome Messages for new subscribers Transactional Messages such as password resets or receipts from purchases Drip programs from a marketing automation system Direct to customers via CRM Depending on your...
HubSpot recently posted an blog article comparing which was better for engagement, plain text emails or HTML emails. In a survey they sent out in 2014, 64% of the responses said they preferred the HTML and image-based emails. It seems pretty straight forward, recipients say they want HTML emails over text based emails but through their A/B testing, the text versions had a higher open rate. They...
A few years ago I subscribed to a financial website that emails out articles about investing as well as a recap of your investments. For the first few months I enjoyed reading these emails but as time went on, I found them less valuable and receiving them every other day they turned into a burden to clean up and deal with. My options were to either unsubscribe or I could create a rule in Outlook...
Microsoft Send is a new mail client by Microsoft for iPhones and soon Windows Phone and Android phones. Send is designed to send quick, short messages to contacts. Instead of building a chat application build on a proprietary protocol, Send sends and receives its messages over email and uses your existing mailbox to handle the messages. What makes Send neat is that I can start a conversation...
Google announced new postmaster tools for senders sending to Gmail. The Gmail Postmaster Tools are to help “qualified high-volume senders analyze their email, including data on delivery errors, spam reports, and reputation.” The updated postmaster pages also include Gmail’s best practices for bulk senders. Postmaster Tools by Gmail Update: ReturnPath has a blog post that...
A common way to build your email address list is to provide a free resource such as an eBook or PDF in return for contact information from the reader. While this is a good way to be mutually beneficial to the reader and the company, often the reader is providing their information only for the free resource and does not want to receive the emails. This leads to sending to an unengaged recipient...
AOL has updated their Postmaster pages with a new design and new resources for senders who are sending to AOL. If you are sending to AOL, use the updated site to sign up for the feedback loop, request whitelisting, open a trouble ticket, or learn about the AOL error codes and bulk sending best practices.
One of the requirements to be CAN-SPAM compliant is to include a physical address within every promotional email that is sent. If your company hires a third party to send email on your behalf, your physical address should be clearly visible within the message when the message is selling your products and services. There is a stipulation that if your message is transactional or a relationship...
When was the last time you tested your opt-out process? Did you just click the unsubscribe link to see if the page loaded? How did you confirm the email address was unsubscribed? If you have a Gmail account, Gmail allows you to use unlimited aliases. For example, if your Gmail email address is josh@gmail.com, you can add the + symbol to your email address to create an alias. An example of an...
RSS - Posts