A fellow delivery specialist sent me a question this morning. What is your opinion on putting CAN SPAM compliance information (postal address, unsubscribe link, etc) in an image? The short answer is this is something spammers do and something that legitimate mailers should never want to do. The longer answer needs to look at why spammers do this, why legitimate marketers may think about doing...
I tend not to blog too much on subject lines as they are really a marketing issue and a subscriber relationship issue. The subject lines a particular mailer uses should be directed and developed with an eye towards making the mail relevant and useful to the recipient. What subject lines shouldn’t be is deceptive, either intentionally or inadvertantly. How can a subject line be inadvertantly...
Last week, Chief Marketer ran an article listing the Top 10 E-mail Appending Mistakes to Avoid. While the article has some good information, I think it missed the mark. In most cases the first mistake companies make when deciding to do an appending run on a customer list is: to append the list. There is no permission with an appended list. None. Theoretically, senders can kinda get around the...
Yesterday, I talked about the delivery advice that could be gleaned from the Politico article The best e-mail lists in politics. While there are some good practices and attitudes expressed in the article, there are problems with how some of the political lists are being handled. For instance, Ken Magill signed up for any number of political lists during the last election cycle and has been...
I do a lot of negotiating with blocklists and ISPs on behalf of my clients and recently was dealing with two incidents. What made this so interesting to me was how differently the clients approached the negotiations. In one case, a client had a spammer slip onto their system. As a result the client was added to the SBL. The client disconnected the customer, got their IP delisted from the SBL and...
Some marketers, even large marketing companies, send mail from email addresses that are unread. Justin Premick posted a list of reasons this is a very, very bad idea. Be sure to read the comments, too.
DJ at Bronto has another example of great email design.
Last week I mentioned a Smith-Harmon report about how to handle email when going out of business. I mentioned at the end of the post that I was pleasantly surprised at how well done their email program was. Let’s walk through the process. 1) The download process. Clicking on the “download report” page popped up a signup window. They ask for first name, last name, company and and email address...
Spammers and spamming companies have elevated obfuscating their corporate identities to an artform. Some of the more dedicated, but just this side of legal, spammers set up 3 or 4 different front companies: one to sell advertising, one or more to actually send mail, one to get connectivity and one as a backup for when the first three fail. Because they use rotating domain names and IP addresses...
Chad White of Smith-Harmon posted a report today on shutting down email marketing programs when going out of business. He looks in detail at how a number of companies handled their email marketing during the going-out-of-business process. There is a very solid mix of examples of how companies handle things. Some companies do things very badly, like never mention over email that they’re...
RSS - Posts