A friendly reader sent me this example of the notice Coldwater Creek sent out to subscribers this week. Coldwater Creek was a major retailer that recently filed for bankruptcy. As part of that, they’re transferring assets, including customer lists, to a holding company for potential use when the company is re-launched. That holding company is also the parent company of Talbots, another...
A new game! Spot the unsub! Our first challenge is the footer from a major software company. How long does it take for you to to find the unsub link? What’s even more annoying is that I never actually subscribed to mail from this company. A few years ago I was doing some work for them and they required I set up an account on their cloud service so they could share docs with me. Last...
This seems like an attempt to create the next big viral marketing campaign. It’s just spam, though, and not even good spam. There’s nothing about a random “click here” that will entice me to click on it. Scammers? Spammers? Whoever Ryann Rasmussen at HighSpeedInternet is, she might want to rethink her marketing strategy. It looks more like an infection attempt than...
IP address warmup is a big issue for anyone moving to a new IP address for sending. I’m constantly being asked how to warm up an IP. My answer is always the same. There’s no right way to warm up an IP nor is there a specific formula that everyone should follow. What warming up is about is introducing mail traffic to receiving spam filters in a way that lets the filter know this is a...
This morning I received a great example of a 3rd party email that I thought I’d share with all of you. What’s so great about it? It’s sent from the company I actually gave my email address to: Macheist. It tells me why I’m getting this email: I purchased Fantastical back in 2013 It introduces me to Fantastical’s new product: Fantastical 2 for iPad and iPhone...
One of the marketing solutions to the spam problem is just to have recipients opt out. We think that commercial e-mail should always — and I emphasize always — provide for a way for the consumer to say: “I don’t want to hear from you again. One bite of the apple is enough. Having heard from you, I don’t want you to send me email again.” So we think that the approach of...
Social engineering is a long standing way to compromise security. Chunkhost reports today that they discovered accounts being compromised through social engineering of Sendgrid support. While the compromise did not work it was a close call. The only thing that saved the targeted customers was their implementation of 2 factor authentication. We know many of our customers individually and...
Neil has a post up about the “opt-in” form that we were all confronted with when logging into the hotel wifi at M3AAWG last week. They aren’t the only hotel asking for email addresses, I’ve seen other folks comment about how they were required to provide an email address AND opt-in to receive email offers before they were allowed onto the hotel network. Mind you...
As most folks now know hackers broke into Target systems last December and stole financial and other data from 110 million customers. Target has been responding to this breach reasonably well. They’ve been notifying customers that were affected and they’re providing credit monitoring for affected individuals. They seem to be totally on top of protecting their customer’s data and...
It’s a new year, but an old problem. Email with unloaded images. Sure, you should be including critical content as text, and/or including alt-text as a normal part of your creative design process, but at the bare minimum you should look at what your mail looks like without images. The last thing you want to do is send out email with just one strong call to action – the unsubscribe...
RSS - Posts