Seth Godin lists the 38 things you should do before you send an email.
June 5, 2008
Before you send email
05June
June 4, 2008
Suppression lists
04June
Mickey has a post up about how long senders must hold on to that suppression list.
May 29, 2008
Those addresses are costing you
29May
Mark Brownlow has a post up about the hidden costs of bad email marketing. These center around brand damage, but there are other costs to poor email marketing strategies. Previously, having old and non-responsive email addresses on a mailing list did not hurt and may have helped a reputation at an ISP. In some cases, these addresses may have even helped a reputation by increasing the number of...
May 20, 2008
Disposable or Temporary Addresses
20May
Mark Brownlow has a really good post up today about disposable and temporary addresses and how they affect marketers trying to build an opt-in list. I use tagged addresses for all my signups, and have for more than 10 years now. It lets me track who I gave an address to and if this mail is contrary to what I signed up for or the address has leaked, I can shut down mail to that address entirely...
May 19, 2008
Verifying email addresses
19May
Over at CircleID Aviram Jenik posts about using email addresses as identification and how that can go horribly wrong if the website does no verification. In his case, the problem is a user who has made a purchase using Aviram’s gmail address and Aviram now has access to the other users personal information. As he explains it: Most of this misguided email ranges from boring to funny, but...
May 13, 2008
Email non-viable for acquisition
13May
Chris Marriott over at iMediaConnection talks about all the reasons email is a non-starter as a replacement for direct mail. This is something I have been telling clients for a while now. Chris mentions a number of reasons for why email is not an acquisition tool. Today, banks can flood your mailbox with all the credit card offers they want, but they can’t flood your email box with the same...
April 30, 2008
AOL publishes sender recommendations
30April
In a blog post on April 28, AOL pointed to their new Sender Best Practices document. These are not things a sender must do in order to get mail delivered to AOL, but rather things that will help improve your reputation at AOL. The recommendations are what I have been recommending for a while and there is nothing overly surprising in the recommendations. Send mail users want and expect Separate...
April 23, 2008
Forgery and spamware
23April
Recently there has been a massive uptick in forgeries. I have been seeing hundreds of bounce back messages, peaking at more than 1000 in an hour. I have been talking about this with people who monitor large spamtrap feeds, large MTAs and spamfilters and it seems this is not an isolated experience. The consensus seems to be that there is new spamware out there which is using email addresses on the...
April 21, 2008
That's spammer speak
21April
I’ve been hearing stories from other deliverability consultants and some ISP reps about what people are telling them. Some of them are jaw dropping examples of senders who are indistinguishable from spammers. Some of them are just examples of sender ignorance. “We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer...
April 16, 2008
Signup forms and bad data
16April
One thing I frequently mention, both here on the blog and with my clients, is the importance of setting recipient expectations during the signup process. Mark Brownlow posted yesterday about signup forms, and linked to a number of resources and blog posts discussing how to create user friendly and usable signup forms. As a consumer, a signup process for an online-only experience that requires a...
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