Ask the Expert: How Can Email Marketers Stay Out of Gmail Jail and in the Inbox? The expert in question is an old friend of mine, Andrew Barrett. I met Andrew online in the late 90s, and we worked together (briefly) at MAPS. He was out of email for a while, but I’m pleased he came back to share his talents with us. The information in the article is valuable for anyone who struggles with...
January 2016: The Month in Email
Happy 2016! We started off the year with a few different “predictions” posts. As always, I don’t expect to be right about everything, but it’s a useful exercise for us to look forward and think about where things are headed. I joined nine other email experts for a Sparkpost webinar on 2016 predictions, which was a lot of fun (see my wrap up post here), and then I wrote a long post about security...
Enter clickbait here
Yesterday I talked about how the truth matters in email marketing. But that’s not the only place the truth matters. Today I found myself in a bit of a … discussion on Facebook. It ended up being a lesson in why you should never trust the clickbait headline. I also realized there are parallels with email best practices and how we share them with people. The Facebook discussion One of...
The truth matters.
Call within the next 10 minutes… Consumers with last names starting with O – Z can call tomorrow… Only 5 seats left at this price! All of these are common marketing techniques designed to prompt consumers to buy. It’s not a new idea, create a sense of urgency and people are more likely to buy. I think some marketers are so used to making outrageous claims to support...
Purchased lists and ESPs: 9 months later
It was about 8 months ago I published a list of ESPs that prohibit the use of purchased lists. There have been a number of interesting responses to that post. ESPs wanted to be added to the list The first iteration of the list was crowdsourced from different ESP representatives. They shared the info they had with each other. With their permission, I put it together into a post and published it...
More 2016 predictions
Gerald Marshall of Email Industries looked at over a hundred different 2016 predictions and organized them for us. Most predictions went into the segmentation and personalization and automation buckets. Only a few predictions were security related, which either means I’m ahead of the curve or on a different planet. Time will tell.
More predictions for 2016
This morning I had the pleasure of participating in the SparkPost 10 experts in 50 minutes webinar. I am honored to be included with such a smart group of forward thinking leaders in the email space. The webinar was also live tweeted using #emailpros. I’ve put together some of my favorite tweets from today. What was fun for me was listening to the similarities and differences in our views...
Things you need to read
The email solicitation that made me vow to never work with this company again. When sending unsolicited email, you never know how the recipient is going to respond. Writing a public blog post calling you out can happen. The 2016 Sparkies. Sparkpost is looking for nominations for their email marketing awards. Win a trip to Insight 2016! 5 CAN SPAM myths. Send Grid’s General Counsel speaks...
What to expect in 2016
I don’t always do predictions posts, even though they’re popular. Most years I skip them because I don’t see major changes in the email space. And, I’m not the type to just write a prediction post just to post a prediction. This year, though, I do see changes for everyone in the email space. Most of them center on finally having to deal with the technical debt that’s been accumulating over the...
CBL issues
I started seeing some folks complain about false CBL listings a few hours ago. I’m now seeing the same folks saying the listings are being removed.
The symptoms look similar to what happened in November (mentioned here), but it appears the CBL team are on top of things and are working to rectify things quickly.