Unfortunately, this fact doesn’t stop anyone from spamming as part of their marketing outreach. And it’s not just email spam. I get quite a bit of blog spam, most of which is caught by Akismet. Occasionally, though, there’s spam which isn’t caught by the filter and ends up coming to me for approval. Many of these are explanations of why email marketing is so awesome. Some...
If you use redirection links in the emails you send out, where a click on the link goes to your server – so you can record that someone clicked – before redirecting to the real destination, then you’ve probably already thought about how they can be abused. Redirection links are simple in concept – you include a link that points to your webserver in email that you send out...
Sending frequency is an important part of any email campaign. Too little mail and recipients forget about the mail and don’t open it when it does arrive. Too much mail and folks start complaining, like John Cole over at Balloon Juice. Take the dogs to the park for a half hour, come back, and there are 30 new messages from advocacy groups and campaigns in my email box. […] Seriously...
… and the device they’re probably going to read your email on.
@lauter from MailChimp points and laughs at an advertising email from Blackberry-the-company that’s completely unreadable when read on Blackberry-the-device.
That’s really bad marketing on a bunch of different levels.
When consulting with clients, I spend a lot of time trying to help them better understand the concept of sender reputation. Spam reports, feedback loops, and other data that comes from a collection of positive and negative reputational feedback about a company sending email. Certainly, the “This is not spam” action – moving an email from the spam folder to the inbox, or clicking...
I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices. Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have...
I often get a chuckle out of watching some people, who are normally on the blocking end of the delivery equation, struggle through their own blocking issues. A recent situation came up on a mailing list where someone who has very vehement opinions about how to approach her particular blocklist for delisting and that the lists policies are immutable. The company she works for is having some...
The nice folks at Box of Meat pointed me at an article about SHOUTING in ALL CAPITALS. There’s something about text in all caps that turns people off. Using it in a social context is often seen as yelling. But using it in a design context is often seen as bad read ability. People use text in all caps thinking they are emphasizing their message. However, what they are actually doing is de...
A spam filter looks at many things when it’s deciding whether or not to deliver a message to the recipients inbox, usually divided into two broad categories – the behaviour of the sender and the content of the message. When we talk about sender behaviour we’ll often dive headfirst into the technical details of how that’s monitored and tracked – history of mail from...
I’ve watched a couple discussions around the email and anti-spam community recently with a bit of awe. It seems many email marketers are admitting they are powerless to actually implement all the good advice they give to others. They are admitting they can’t persuade, cajole, influence or pressure their companies to actually follow best practices. Some of the comments public and...
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