How can companies avoid paying spammers and having their brand associated with spammers? One of the easiest ways to avoid spam is to not pay for acquisition email. Simply don’t set up an affiliate email marketing program. There are a lot of folks who don’t like me saying that, and who have argued vociferously with me over the years. But email is not a good medium for acquiring new...
There is still a bit of discussion going on around the HBR article on how B2B mail should be opt-out not opt in on various delivery blogs. Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog new daddy (congratulations!) DJ writes a post about why he thinks opt-out in any context is a poor marketing decision. One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when...
Number six of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly. I need multiple IP addresses in different locations to provide redundancy against network outages Why this is right If all your traffic goes out via a single ISP and your connection to that ISP is eaten by a backhoe you’re not going to be sending any email until...
A lot of people, including myself, are using opens as one of the measures of engagement. This, as a general rule, is not a bad measure. However, there are people who will open email not because they’re interested in it, but because they know it is spam. Take, for instance, the email address I acquired in 1993. Yes, I still have this address. I stopped using it to sign up for lists in 1999...
Number five of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly. I need multiple IP addresses per customer so as to manage filtering issues Why this is right If you have, for example, three dedicated IP addresses per customer and one of those IP addresses gets “randomly” blacklisted, then you can divert traffic to the other two...
Someone asked today on a mailing list whether they should be using UTF-8 or “ISO” encoding for sending email. What’s the best choice depends on some of the details of the situation, but here’s the answer I gave: UTF-8 will work for pretty much anything, as it’s just an 8 bit encoding scheme for Unicode (which is supposed to be the one character encoding to rule them...
Last week there was an article published by btobonline promoting the services of a company called Netprospex. Netprospex, as you can probably gather from their company name, is all about the buying and selling of mailing lists. They will sell anyone a list of prospects. The overall theme of the article is that there is nothing wrong with spam and that if a sender follows a few simple rules...
Ben at Mailchimp has a post up explaining what role accounts are and why mailing to them can be a problem. role addresses are built for functions, not people… If you read down in the comments you will see that they talk about how some people do use role accounts for their subscriptions. Small businesses might have a limited number of email accounts with their hosting, so they use info@ or sales@...
I saw a nicely done example of integrating email into other marketing channels over the weekend. I was helping a friend pick out a receiver and speakers for their home theatre system on Saturday afternoon. As we were chatting over IRC there was a lot of pasting URLs back and forth, as we tried to juggle speaker components to get a nice, balanced setup on a budget that was fairly tight for a...
Seven myths and two truths about email My favorite: [myth] Engagement is the new reputation. Actually, reputation metrics have always been about engagement, which is what complaint data and sender reputation reflect. Yes. This. Reputation, permission, all of those things are a way to quantify one simple fact: Do recipients want this mail from this sender? Send mail people want and generally it...
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