Dear Laura, We are having a bit of an internal struggle on our end as we launch our new quarterly account summaries. What are your views on including an unsubscribe link in these emails? My personal opinion is that we should. Although the summaries can be classified as “transactional”, they are not tied to a specific recent transaction a customer made and can be viewed as a general...
This morning I got spam from someone selling email addresses. The mail starts: Hi Laura, I am aware of your expertise in the field of marketing and how well you execute your campaigns. We specialize in customized email list services and provide global data. […] “You are receiving this email as you have shown interest in data related solutions. Occasionally you will receive brief messages...
There are so many moving parts to ensure good email deliverability. Email marketers need to know marketing, they need to know email and they need to know design. The technical bits of email can be a challenge to learn, and many folks who write tutorials and How-Tos write them for a different audience than marketers. One of the things I’m trying to do is demystify the technical end of email...
Companies are always trying to find new ways to use and abuse email. My mailbox has been rife with mail from companies trying to sell me stuff for my business. It’s been interesting to watch the new ways they’re trying to get attention, while not honoring the most important rule of email marketing. Marketing Automation The advent of “marketing automation” has added a new...
I’ve written before about how there is some (I’m sure lovely) woman in the UK who has been connected to my email address. I get a lot of mail for her. Mostly spam. She doesn’t seem to be using the address, but I regularly get mail addressed to MRS. LAURA CORBISHLEY (all caps, always). Typically these messages are advertising various UK stores and products. Sometimes...
What really are the best practices for email? A year ago I wrote a post about best practices and how most of my best practices were different from what other people recommend. I don’t talk about rules for frequency or subject line length. I don’t focus on best practices for bounce processing or content length. My best practice recommendations are really about process. Send only opt-in...
Dear Laura, I have a client moving from an external ESP to an internal system. They send approximately eight million messages per year, and these are primarily survey emails on behalf of their clients. We’ve had some conversations about authentication, and I’m trying to help them figure out if they just need DMARC or if they also need DKIM and SPF. It seems some ISPs prefer different methods, and...
This is what my mail client tells me about the latest mail Twitter sent me: Criticism of Twitter’s copywriters? Not exactly, no. Mail.app is looking for some textual content near the top of the mail to display to me as preview text. It can’t find any in this mail, so it’s telling me the message has no content. Looking at the mail it’s a standard multipart mime message...
Germany’s highest court has ruled that Facebook’s practice of harvesting email addresses from their users contact lists in order to send invitations to them constitutes “advertising harassment” and violates German law on data protection and unfair trade practices. This in response to a suit filed by the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV) What the judgment...
Earlier this week I was talking on IRC with some colleagues. There was some kvetching about senders that think transactional emails are the same as triggered emails. This led to discussion about whether transactional and triggered emails are the same. I don’t think they are, but it took a while for me to come up with why I don’t think they’re the same. It took even longer to...
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