CategoryBest Practices

January 10, 2013

Frequency and Relevance: Insight from Actual Recipients

By steve

4 Min read

5 comments

10January

Last night, the email practices of Facebook, Verizon and LinkedIn sparked something of a discussion on IRC. Rather than trying to summarize into a business language friendly post I thought I’d share the whole thing. Warning: Includes strong language and graphic descriptions of human on salesman violence.   Huey: I may have just arrived at a Laura guest blog post. Huey: About...

January 4, 2013

Increasing engagement for delivery?

By laura

4 Min read

3 comments

04January

I’ve talked a lot about engagement here over the years and how increasing engagement can increase inbox delivery. But does driving engagement always improve delivery? Take LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn has started to pop-up a link when users log in. This popup suggests that the user endorse a connection for a particular skill. When the user clicks on the popup, an email is sent to the...

December 27, 2012

Meaningless metrics

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

27December

I’ve been having some conversations with fellow delivery folks about metrics and delivery and bad practices. Sometimes, a sender will have what appear to be good metrics, but really aren’t getting them through any good practices. They’re managing to avoid the clear indicators of bad practices (complaints, SBL listings, blocks, etc), but only because the metrics aren’t good...

December 4, 2012

Confirmation Fails

By laura

6 Min read

1 comment

04December

Yesterday I talked about registration confirmations. Today I’m going to talk about a couple recent experiences with websites and their registration failures. The first experience was with Yelp. One of my readers decided I needed a Yelp account and created one using my laura-questions email address. Yelp understands that people will be jerks and so sent me an email to confirm the account. Hi...

December 4, 2012

An interesting look at best practices

By laura

1 Min read

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Which best practice is ruining your business?

November 28, 2012

DKIM and Gmail

By steve

3 Min read

4 comments

28November

After they were a a little embarrassed by their own DKIM keys being poorly managed a few months ago, Google seem to have been going through their inbound DKIM handling and tightening up on their validation so that badly signed mail that really shouldn’t be treated as DKIM signed, won’t be treated as signed by Gmail. This is a good thing, especially as things like DMARC start to be...

November 27, 2012

Spammers are funny

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

27November

Dear Spammer, If you are going to send me an email that claims it complies with the Federal CAN SPAM act of 2003, it would be helpful if the mail actually complies with CAN SPAM. In this case, however, you are sending to an address you’ve harvested off my website. The mail you are sending does not contain a physical postal email address. You’re also forging headers. Both of those...

October 9, 2012

Subject lines

By laura

2 Min read

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09October

There has been a lot of discussion in various places recently about subject line length and how it affects email marketing. There have been multiple studies done on how the subject line affects opens and clicks. (Mailchimp, Alchemy Worx, Mailer Mailer, Adestra). The discussion has even spilled over into Ken Magill’s newsletter today. I’ve had a couple people ask me my opinion on...

September 25, 2012

The naming of lists

By steve

1 Min read

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25September

Any ESP that supports multiple mailing lists per customer lets you name your mailing lists. That’s useful for keeping track of where a list was from , but sometimes those list names are visible to the recipient: Here the list name is visible on the opt-out / email preferences form, but you’ll also see them in (hidden) email headers or (visible) email footers. “Last 10000”...

September 20, 2012

Driving customers away

By steve

3 Min read

4 comments

20September

I have a frequent flyer account with Virgin America. They want me to sign up for some new thing, and they’ve sent me two emails about it so far, with lots of good call-to-action language, and a big “Join Now” button. But this is the start of the form that clicking on that button leads to: (It goes on further, finally ending up with a captcha and a submit button.) Virgin America...