Derek Harding has an article over at ClickZ, discussing the importance of letting subscribers go. Many marketers are embracing the concept of a list exit strategy. That is, developing and managing a process to identify and gracefully remove recipients for whom a list is no longer valuable. Many lists have a long tail of recipients who have been on the list for a very long time but who also have...
I have spent quite a bit of time over the last few days working with new clients who are asking a lot of basic, but insightful questions about delivery problems. I have been trying to come up with a model of how spam filtering works, to help them visualize the issue and understand how the different choices they make change, either for better or worse, their delivery. One model that I have been...
Mark Brownlow has an interview with Simms Jenkins the author of The Truth about Email Marketing. Well worth a read for anyone who is sending email.
One of the issues I have touched on repeatedly is the changing face of blocking and filtering at ISPs. Over the last 12 – 18 months, large, end-user ISPs have started rolling out more and more sophisticated filters. These filters look at a lot of things about an email, not just the content or the sending IP reputation or URLs in the message but also the recipient profile. Yes, ISPs really...
Mark Brownlow has a great article up about how senders can stop subscribers from regretting they signed up for mail. He starts off saying So how to avoid subscriber’s remorse? The obvious one – and stop me if you’re heard this before – is sending relevant, timely, useful emails. Unfortunately, remorse can set in long before you have the chance to establish your value...
MailChimp is using microformats technology to allow recipients to add senders to their address book from the subscription page. All senders should tell recipients what address mail is coming from at the point of subscription and encourage recipients to add the senders to their address books. This new technology simplifies that for the recipient. Denise Cox posts about a recent conference she...
There have been a number of blog posts recently discussing designing emails that look good and inspire clicks even when images are suppressed. Much of this is related to the EEC whitepaper showing that the majority of email users suppress images in emails and the 2008 email design guidelines published by Campaign Monitor. I happen to be one of those cranky users who suppresses images by default...
On Friday I talked about using clicks and opens as a way to monitor recipient engagement and dropping recipients who do not interact after a certain period of time. One of the critical parts of this is that a sender must send mail that encourages recipients to click and then actually tracks clicks. If a sender does not send mail that encourages recipients to interact, then using interactions as a...
JD posed a question in my post about Postini and trying to sort out a customer getting marked as spam by their filtering mechanism and I think it bears more discussion than can be done in comments. And sure, it’s a best practice for filtering companies to respond politely to requests from filterees. But is it a requirement? Do senders have a right to demand explanations? There is not really an...
Mail from one of my clients is being filtered at Postini and they asked me to look into this. Not that there is anything that can be done, of course. Even before they were bought out by Google, they were the poster child for a spam filtering company that believed they could do no wrong. It was difficult, if not impossible to get a straight answer from Postini about filtering, and the only...
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