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.
August 6, 2008
Strategic email marketing
06August
August 4, 2008
Engaging recipients critical for delivery
04August
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...
July 30, 2008
Preventing subscriber remorse
30July
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...
June 23, 2008
Information you should know
23June
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...
June 9, 2008
Images in email
09June
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...
June 2, 2008
Engaging subscribers
02June
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...
May 1, 2008
Sender complaints about spamfiltering
01May
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...
April 28, 2008
Troubleshooting a Postini block
28April
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...
April 24, 2008
Categories of email
24April
The question came up on a mailing list about how senders classify email. Steve came up with the following list of email types from the recipient (not sender) perspective Transactional & Alerts Marketing Duplicates Duplicates Apologies for the preceding duplicate Just sending mail so you don’t forget us Opt-in confirmations Welcome messages COI challenges Opt-out confirmations Apologies...
March 31, 2008
More about FBLs and unsubscribes
31March
In the comments of the last post, Gary DJ asked an insightful questions and I think my answer probably deserves a broader audience. How can ESPs honor unsubscribe requests from ISPs without FBL programs (read: Yahoo!) if senders are not aware that subscribers are asking to be removed (via “Mark as Spam” links)? Yes, we can tell which clients are “good” and which are...
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