A lot of marketers tell me “no sender confirms addresses” or “confirming addresses is too hard for the average subscriber.” I find both these arguments difficult to accept. Just today I subscribed to a mailing list that had a confirmation step. The subscription form was pretty simple. I entered my email address into a webform, hit submit and was taken to another page. Once...
For people who are on many discussion mailing lists, the first of every month is “Mailman Day”, and has been for nearly a decade. Mailman is the most widely used mailing list manager for discussion lists and, by default, it sends email to all subscribers on the first of the month reminding them that they’re still subscribed to the list and how to unsubscribe. This is really...
Ever trawl through your logs and notice that there is a delivery problem somewhere? I’m sure everyone sending email in any volume has. What’s the first thing you do when you discover a block? A: Decide that something broke on your end and set about trying to figure out what you did to trigger the block. B: Decide that something broke on the ISP end and set about trying to find a human...
Most email marketers want to see their open rates go up. This particular marketer has come up with a new way to force recipients to load their mail. I’m not sure how successful this approach is going to be. I can see how this might increase open rate, as people who are interested in registering but may not load images by default actually load images. On the other hand, how common is it to...
Spamtraps on a list are a symptom, not the disease itself. They’re (usually) a sign of some serious underlying problem, whether it be with address capture, bounce management, list purchase or epending. We’ve talked about this a lot in the past, but sometimes you need a short summary to refer someone to. Spamtrap Mythology A brief guide to spamtraps Spamtraps: should you care? Badly...
YMMV. One of those abbreviations us old folks used ages ago before email had pictures and the closest we had to social networking was USENET and social gaming was in the form of MUDs. I rarely see it used any more. In a lot of ways that’s a sad thing. It was a very useful abbreviation. Using it at the end of a post full of advice was a sign that the author was providing information but knew...
Vertical Response talks about email metrics that are useful on a dashboard. Metrics are an ongoing challenge for all marketers. The underlying need for metrics is to evaluate how effective a particular marketing program is. Picking metrics involves understanding what the goal is for a particular program. If your goal is brand recognition then perhaps sales and click-through figures aren’t a...
Earlier this week Gmail announced they were providing reasons for why they delivered a particular mail to the bulk folder. I’m sure a lot of senders are rejoicing over the clear feedback. After all this is exactly what they’ve been asking for “tell us why you’re filtering our mail and we’ll fix it.” I am not sure, however, that this is going to help the...
Return Path has an interesting post on the lasting effects of aggressive holiday marketing.
You’re setting up a company (or a new division or maybe even a new brand) and you’d like to use email to communicate with your customers. In this series of posts I’m going to touch on some of the things you can do today to make email life easier for you in the future. Today’s final post is on DNS hosting and setup. 5. DNS hosting DNS is what lets you actually use the domain you’ve...
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