CategoryBest Practices

April 21, 2009

Buying lists and other stupid marketing tricks

By laura

3 Min read

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21April

Back in November, I commented on Zoominfo and that they were selling senders very bad lists. At that time, Zoominfo did not have my current information. They have since rectified that problem and are now selling my information to people. This morning, I received an email that said: I wanted to follow up on a previous email I sent out a couple days ago.  At Company, we offer an affordable...

April 3, 2009

I have an email delivery problem. Can you help?

By steve

7 Min read

4 comments

03April

I see a lot of requests for help with some sort of delivery problem, sent to me as an individual, sent to Laura as part of a consulting relationship, sent to ISPs, sent to organizations running blacklists or sent to industry mailing lists, both public and private. Some of them could be done better. OK, most of them could be done better, some of them could be done a lot better. Here’s some...

March 23, 2009

What is an email address? (part three)

By steve

6 Min read

3 comments

23March

As promised last week, here are some actual recommendations for handling email addresses. First some things to check when capturing an email address from a user, or when importing a list. These will exclude some legitimate email addresses, but not any that anyone is likely to actually be using. And they’ll allow in some email addresses that are technically not legal, by erring on the side...

March 20, 2009

What is an email address? (part two)

By steve

3 Min read

2 comments

20March

Yesterday I talked about the technical definitions of an email address. Eventually on Monday I’m going to talk about some useful day-to-day rules about email address acquisition and analysis, but first I’m going to take a detour into tagging or mailboxing email addresses. Tagging an email address is something the owner of an email address can do to make it easier to handle incoming...

March 19, 2009

What is an email address? (part one)

By steve

3 Min read

6 comments

19March

Given we deal with email addresses every day, dozens or thousands or millions of them, it seems a bit strange to ask what an email address is – but given some of the problems people have with the grubbier corners of address syntax it’s actually an interesting question. There are two real standards that define what is a valid email address and what isn’t. The most complex is RFC...

March 17, 2009

How to devalue your mailing lists

By steve

5 Min read

2 comments

17March

This morning I got spam about college basketball – Subject: Inside: your ESPN Tourney Guide. That’s anything but unusual, but this spam got through my spam filters and into my inbox. That’s a rare enough event that I’m already annoyed before I click on the mail in order to mark it as spam. Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged...

March 12, 2009

Asking the right question

By laura

3 Min read

3 comments

12March

My job as a consultant does involve answering questions and solving problems. Often the most important, and most overlooked, thing that I do is change the question that clients are asking. It is not that this changes the problem or even, really, changes the solution. It does change how people think of the problem, and changing how they think of the problem drives better solutions. This can be...

March 4, 2009

Email frequency vs. Response

By laura

1 Min read

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04March

Mark Brownlow has a great post today detailing how response to a marketing campaign changes with the frequency of a campaign and the value of the campaign.

February 5, 2009

Who is Julia and why won't she leave me alone?

By laura

2 Min read

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05February

There seems to be some new spam software in use. Julia <random last name> keeps telling me about her new webcam, how much she wants to date me and wants to know when I want to visit. These spams started February 1. I’ve had 179 caught by my MUA filters, and 152 caught by spamassassin (SA score >7 are filtered to a special account). This is exactly the type of pattern that causes...

February 2, 2009

Negative brand building with email

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

02February

Seth Godin compares and contrasts two different email campaigns he’s received. One is a opt-in campaign that is highly relevant to him. The other is spam, sent to two “discovered” email addresses. The whole post is very good, but there are a couple things he said that bear repeating. There are a hundred ways to skulk around, to collect email addresses, to write clever privacy...