When was the last time you actually tried to unsubscribe from one of your mailing lists? Have you ever even checked to see that your process works? For whatever reason, unsubscribe processes don’t always work. Sometimes the problem is on the client end. Sometimes the problem is on the ESP end. But in either case, continuing to mail recipients who have attempted to opt-out from your mail is...
In the US, the law governing the sending of commercial email is CAN SPAM. I’ve seen a number of questions about CAN SPAM recently. One came from twitter, where someone was asking if just having an email address meant permission to send to it. Clearly, just being able to dig up an email address doesn’t imply permission to send marketing or commercial email to it. I can promise you...
There’s an old-school ’90s HTML design trick that dates back to the dim and distant past before we had decent layout control in CSS. That’s “slicing” – chopping a large image up into multiple parts, then reassembling them in an HTML table. If you slice your images in an email and the end user hasn’t loaded images what will they see? They’ll see a...
This summer’s non-work project for me has been training for a 5K run with Fleet Feet in Menlo Park. As part of the training programs we get weekly emails from the store on Monday. As I was reading through today’s email, I found myself smiling and happy. Lisa, who is one of the store owners and writes the emails, is just so happy and bouncy and thrilled to share her love of running and...
The default mail client on OS X is Mail.app. In recent versions it does it’s best to bundle threads of email together to make it easier for you to keep track of conversations via email – they appear in the list of messages as a single entry with a badge showing the number of messages in that thread. There are standard ways to track mail threads, but they sometimes get broken by...
Your mail is being blocked or deferred and you’d like to know why. Before you ask someone “why?” you should have done these things: Read the rejection message If the rejection message contains a URL, read the page it points to Saved a full copy of the message that was sent And you should have some pieces of information ready. If you’re asking via email, put this...
A couple quotes from different folks, who aren’t actually in marketing, but have insightful comments on marketing. Anyway, remember: outsource your marketing, outsource your reputation and ethics. Popehat And 2 posts from a favorite author about self promotion by authors. Her first post is about having other authors excessively promote themselves. There is a difference between promotion in...
A client sent me a shot of a page where they were attempting to change their preferences at a website. This is one of my long time clients, and someone who has been in email marketing for years. He tells me that he spent quite a long time staring at the screen trying to figure out what he was supposed to do to opt out. I hesitate to say that intentionally make it difficult for recipients to opt...
In the email delivery space there are a lot of numbers we talk about including bounce rates, complaint rates, acceptance rates and inbox delivery rates. These are all good numbers to tell us about a particular campaign or mailing list. Usually these metrics all track together. Low bounce rates and low complaint rates correlate with high delivery rates and high inbox placement. But sometimes the...
The question of putting unsub links on transactional messages came up on multiple lists recently. As with any question that has to do with email and controlling it, there were a lot of different opinions. A number of people believed that transactional mail should never, ever have an unsubscribe. Their argument was that transactional mail is too valuable to allow recipients to unsubscribe from it...
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