It’s that time of the year – marketers send more email than usual, recipients unsubscribe from their lists. Clicking on the unsubscription link in the email I just received took me to an unsubscription landing page. The box for my email address was prepopulated based on the cookie in the unsubscription link, the default setting is to unsubscribe me from all mail from the sender and...
But my purchased list is TARGETED!!!
I hear this all the time. But, y’know what? It’s BS. Total BS. In the last month, I’ve gotten “targeted” messages (that escaped my filters) from the following companies who purchased lists. A company offering Agile and Scrum classroom workshops… in Australia. (they know they’re spamming: they are hiding behind domain privacy) Laura Ashley offering me in...
Buying lists costs more than just money
I’ve been talking to a lot of companies recently who are dealing with some major delivery challenges probably related to their practice of purchasing lists and then sending advertising to every address on the list. They assure me that their businesses would be non-viable if they didn’t purchase lists and it has to be that way. Maybe that’s true, maybe it is more cost effective...
Transactional mail
There are a lot of myths in the email space. Things that someone, somewhere said and another person repeated and then another person repeated and all of a sudden it is TRUTH. One of those things is the idea that there is a law defining what can be in a transactional email. Supposedly this law says that 80% of the message must be transactional content while 20% of the mail can be promotional...
Two factor authentication
The drumbeat of “secure your accounts; help your customers secure their accounts with you” advice has faded away a bit, probably because we’ve not had a major ESP account compromise hit the media in the past few months. The costs – customer support, security, reputation, executive focus – of customer account compromises are still significant, anything you can easily...
Outrunning the Bear
You’ve started to notice that your campaigns aren’t working as well as they used to. Your metrics suggest fewer people are clicking through, perhaps because more of your mail is ending up in junk folders. Maybe your outbound queues are bigger than they used to be. You’ve not changed anything – you’re doing what’s worked well for years – and it’s not...
Organizational security and doxxing
The security risks of organizational doxxing. These are risks every email marketer needs to understand. As collectors of data they are a major target for hackers and other bad people. Even worse, many marketers don’t collect valid data and risk implicating the wrong people if their data is ever stolen. I have repeatedly talked about incidents where people get mail not intended for them...
It's not about the spamtraps
I’ve talked about spamtraps in the past but they keep coming up in so many different discussions I have with people about delivery that I feel the need to write another blog post about them. 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...
Deliverability advice to the DNC
I was working on another post for this afternoon, but when I checked Facebook Autumn Tyr-Salvia had posted a link that’s much more interesting to talk about. It seems the Democratic National Committee has acquired President Obama’s email list from the 2012 campaign. The […] list […] includes details about the amount donors gave and how they prefer to be contacted, will be...
Check your tech
One of the things we do for just about every new client coming into WttW is have them send us an email from their bulk mail system. We then check it for technical correctness. This includes things like reviewing all the different From headers, rDNS of the connecting IP, List-Unsubscribe headers and authentication. This is always useful, IMO, because we often find things that were right when they...