One of the primary ways to collect email addresses is from website visitors, and it’s actually a pretty good way to collect addresses. One of the more popular, and effective, techniques is through a pop-up window, asking for an address. Users need to provide an address or click a “no thanks” link or close the window. I’ve noticed, though, that many companies drop something...
Social media connections are not opt-ins
It seems silly to have to say this, but connecting on social media is not permission to add an address to your newsletter or mailing list or prospecting list or spam list. Back in 2016, I wrote: [Scraping addresses from LinkedIn] is really rude. Just because someone accepted your contact request on LinkedIn, doesn’t mean they want to be added to any mailing lists you may have. Let’s be honest...
Still with the Microsoft problems
We took a quick trip to Dublin last week. I had every intention of blogging while on the trip, but… oops. I did get to meet with some clients, and had a great dinner while discussing email and delivery. Coming back, I see a lot of folks still reporting delivery problems to Microsoft properties. I’ve been operating under the assumption this was temporary as kinks were worked out after...
Filters evolving
I started writing this blog post while sitting on a conference call with a bunch of senders discussing some industry wide problems folks are having with delivery. Of course the issue of Microsoft comes up. A lot of senders are struggling with reaching the inbox there and no one has any real, clear guidance on how to resolve it. And the MS employees who regularly answer questions and help folks...
That's not how you do it…
Got an email this morning from a company advertising their newest webinar “The Two Pillars of Effective Large-Scale Email: Security and Deliverability.” The message came to a tagged address, so clearly I’d given them one at some point. But I didn’t recognize the name or company or anything. I did a search to seen when I may have interacted with this company in the past...
Oh, Microsoft
Things have been a little unsettled at Microsoft webmail properties over the last few months. A number of ESPs reported significantly increased deferrals from Microsoft properties starting sometime late in November. Others saw reduced open rates across their customer base starting in late October. More recently, people are noticing higher complaint rates as well as an increase in mail being...
Google makes connections
One of the client projects I’m working on includes doing a lot of research on MXs, including some classification work. Part of the work involves identifying the company running the MX. Many of the times this is obvious; mail.protection.outlook.com is office365, for instance. There are other cases where the connection between the MX and the host company is not as obvious. That’s where...
Happy 2018
This is the time of year when everyone starts posting their predictions for the coming year. Despite over a decade of blogging and close to 2500 blog posts, I have’t consistently written prediction articles here. Many years I don’t see big changes on the horizon, so there’s not a lot to comment on. Incremental changes are status quo, nothing earth shattering there. But...
November 2017: The Month in Email
We’re in the thick of the busiest time of the year for email. It’s been so busy, in fact, that we’ve seen some slowdowns and delivery issues across the email universe. It may be worth thinking about alternate strategies for end of year promotions beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I was delighted to chat with Julia Angwin for her ProPublica piece on subscription bombing and abuse prevention...
Email Marketing Trends from Freshmail
[#INFOGRAPHIC] Email marketing trends 2018
It’s always an honor to be asked to provide quotes and thoughts with experts in the field. Sometimes the day to day gives me tunnel vision, but things like this give me the opportunity to think more globally. Hands down, though, the best part is seeing the final product and hearing what other folks have to say.
Go check out the full infographic.