I recently received a spam offering to get one of my personal websites listed in foreign search engines. Harvesting addresses off websites is dumb. Even dumber is sending a followup a week later with a notice at the top. Did you receive the e-mail which I sent to you recently (copied here-below)? Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails intercepted by spam-filters set too high...
Best time to send email: redux
Last week I wrote about a study classifying different types of email users. My point is that senders should be very aware of how their users interact with email, in order to provide the best user experience and the most revenue for the sender. If, for instance, the bulk of recipients are daytime (9 – 5 M-F) users, then the best time to email is different than if the bulk of recipients are...
The Weekend Effect
Sending mail only Monday through Friday can cause reputation and delivery problems at some ISPs, even when senders are doing everything right. This “weekend effect” is a consequence of how ISPs measure reputation over time. Most ISPs calculating complaint rate use a simple calculation. They measure how many “this is spam” clicks a source IP generates in a 24 hour period...
How Spamfilters Work
AllSpammedUp has a post describing the primary techniques anti-spam filters use to identify mail as spam or not spam. While is this not sender or delivery focused knowledge, it is important for people sending mail to have a basic understanding of filtering mechanisms. Without that base knowledge, it’s difficult to troubleshoot problems and resolve issues. Any anti-spam system that is worth...
Confirmed opt-in
I spent the morning in multiple venues correcting mis-understandings of confirmed opt-in. The misunderstandings weren’t so much that people didn’t understand how COI works, but more they didn’t understand all the implications. In one venue, the conversation centered around how small a portion of deliverability the initial subscription process affects. Sure, sending unwanted...
Reputation as measured by the ISPs
Part 3 in an ongoing series on campaign stats and measurements. In this installment, I will look a little closer at what other people are measuring about your email and how that affects your reputation at the ISPs. Part 1: Campaign Stats and Measurements Part 2: Measuring Open Rate Reputation at the ISPs is an overall measure of how responsive recipients are to your email. ISPs also look at how...
TWSD: Lying and Hiding
Another installment in my ongoing series: That’s What Spammers Do. In today’s installment we take a look at a company deceiving recipients and hiding their real identity. One of my disposable addresses has been getting heavily spammed from mylife.com. The subject lines are not just deceptive, they are provably lies. The mail is coming from random domains like urlprotect.com or...
Subscribers notice what marketers do
Stephanie Miller from RP blogs at EEC about a UK consumer survey with the take home message: “consumers notice what email marketers do. When we send something interesting and relevant at a good pace, they are happy to stay active with our programs. When we don’t… well, then we’ve lost them, perhaps for good.”
Measuring open rate
In this part of my series on Campaign Stats and Measurements I will be examining open rates, how they are used, where they fail and how the can be effectively used. There has been an lot written about open rates recently, but there are two posts that stand out to me. One was the EEC’s post on renaming open rate to render rate and Mark Brownlow’s excellent post on what open rate does...
Campaign stats and measurements
Do you know what your campaign stats mean? Do you know what it is that you’re measuring? I think there are a lot of emailers out there who have no idea what they are measuring and what those measurements mean. The most common measurement used is “open rate.” There’s been quite a bit of discussion recently about open rates, how they’re calculated, and is there a...