If you distill marketing down to its very essence what you find is everyone battling for a targets attention. Everything marketers do is to get “mindshare” or, in normal people terms, attention. The goal is to get people to remember your product over all the other products out there. Many email marketers seem to think that increasing the frequency of mail is the most successful way to...
Everyone I talk to when dealing with issues inevitably has to tell me they are legitimate email marketers. They’re not spammers, they’re just business people. I often find it difficult to fathom why they need to tell me this. It’s not like email marketers are criminals or anything. Two recent stories reminded me how evil some folks are. While I’ve not had any direct...
Content based filters are incredibly complex and entire books could be written about how they work and what they look at. Of course, by the time the book was written it would be entirely obsolete. Because of their complexity, though, I am always looking for new ways to explain them to folks. Content based filters look at a whole range of things, from the actual text in the message, to the...
Our tomcat, Grover, wants to go outside. He wants to go out the side door, so he’s been sitting in front of it, looking at me, then staring at the door. He’s been doing this for about half an hour, intermixed with occasional sad yowling. The back door is open, and he can get from outside the back door to outside the side door in a minute, tops. But he wants to go out the side door...
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...
Mark Brownlow has a great roundup of how statistics and data can mislead marketers if they’re not really paying attention.
A week ago you signed up for your mailing list using a virgin email address. (You didn’t? Maybe you should do that today – there’s no time like Thursday for a quick sanity check!) Check the mailbox for the account you signed up Is the mail you signed up for in the inbox? In the bulk folder? If it’s in the bulk folder, that’s something to look at – all the...
… if your company runs any sort of email marketing, anyway. Right now is the best time to do a mini-audit of your mail campaign. It’ll just take ten minutes, and if you put off doing it until tomorrow it’ll probably never get done. Go to your public-facing company home page. Does it have a link to your privacy policy? Does it have a link to where you can sign up for mailing...
I’ve seen some mentions recently of ESPs suggesting that if you use your own domain in the From: of mail you send through an ESP then that ESP can’t “do email authentication” properly unless they require you to edit your domains DNS settings. That’s not really so, but there is a kernel of truth in there. The real situation is, unsurprisingly, a bit more complicated...
Whenever we’re working with someone to diagnose some obscure delivery issue one of the things we usually have them try is to “run a transaction by hand”. Being able to do that is a trick that everyone working with email should be able to do. I was drafting a blog post today and wanted to refer to running a transaction by hand and I realized that we hadn’t actually...
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