HubSpot recently posted an blog article comparing which was better for engagement, plain text emails or HTML emails. In a survey they sent out in 2014, 64% of the responses said they preferred the HTML and image-based emails. It seems pretty straight forward, recipients say they want HTML emails over text based emails but through their A/B testing, the text versions had a higher open rate. They...
A few years ago I subscribed to a financial website that emails out articles about investing as well as a recap of your investments. For the first few months I enjoyed reading these emails but as time went on, I found them less valuable and receiving them every other day they turned into a burden to clean up and deal with. My options were to either unsubscribe or I could create a rule in Outlook...
Yesterday I talked about how data collection, management, and maintenance play a crucial role in deliverability. I mentioned, briefly, the idea that bad data can accumulate on a list that isn’t well managed. Today I’d like to dig into that a little more and talk about the non-permanence of email addresses. A common statistic used to describe list churn is that 30% of addresses become...
Occasionally when we meet longtime readers of the blog at conferences and industry events, they are surprised to learn that we are not just bloggers. We actually spend most of our time consulting with companies and service providers to optimize their email delivery. Though we try to avoid using the blog as a WttW sales pitch, we thought it might be useful to devote a short post to explaining a...
Can a bad SPF record ruin your delivery, even though all your mail still passes SPF? Yes, it can. One of our clients had issues with poor delivery rates to the inbox at gmail and came to us with the theory that it was due to other people using their domain to send spam to gmail. This theory was based on ReturnPath instrumentation showing mail “from” their domain coming from other IP...
Today Direct Marketing News hosted a webinar: ISP Mythbusters: How to Send Better Emails. The speakers were Matt Moleski, the Executive Director of Compliance Operations from Comcast and Autumn Tyr-Salvia, the Director Of Standards And Best Practices from Message Systems. The webinar went through a series of myths. After Autumn introduced the myth, Matt commented on it and explained why the...
Massimo Arrigoni has a great blog post up summarizing the final session of the EEC conference with representatives from major mailbox providers. This session a number of representatives from major mailbox providers spoke about what it takes to get to the inbox. They discussed what engagement really was, why you need to warmup and what the mailbox providers are measuring. The short version is...
Mention an email is spam to some senders and watch them dance around trying to explain all the ways they aren’t spammers. At some point, calling an email spam seems to have gone from a statement of fact into some sort of moral judgement on the sender. But calling an email spam is not a moral judgement. It’s just a statement of what a particular recipient thinks of an email. There are...
Campaign Monitor has an interview with Gmail looking at how to get mail to the Gmail inbox. It’s a great article and I think everyone should go read it. One of the most important things it talks about is how complex filters are. On Gmail’s end, Sri revealed that there are literally hundreds of signals to decide whether an email should go to the Inbox or the Spam folder. The importance...
Volume in an of itself is not a problem. Companies sending mail people want can send multiple emails a day to every user. The volume isn’t a problem because the mail is wanted. Many senders are confused and think volume is a filtering criteria. It’s not. Send all you want; just send it to people who actually want the mail. A lot of companies in their growth phase find they do have...
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