Word to the Wise helps email marketers create more effective email messages, programs and infrastructures. We advise you how to skillfully navigate the constant business, technology, and policy challenges so your messages reach your customers.
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There’s a lot of my education in the sciences that focused on how to get a statistically accurate sample. There’s a lot of math involved to pick the right sample size. Then there’s an equal amount of math involved to figure out the right statistical tests to analyse the data. One of the lessons of grad school was: the university has statistics experts, use them when designing...
In my post earlier this week, katie asks: what do you do next when the problem statement is as non-specific as “open rates are falling”? how would you go about getting from there to that next level of marketing email from our ESP goes to bulk? That’s a great question, and will help me explain pieces I didn’t in the initial post. The observation here is: “open rates are falling...
At the end of last year, Steve wrote a post about the different types of authentication. I thought I’d build on that and write about the costs associated with each type. While I know a lot of my readers are actually on the sending side, I’m also going to talk about the costs associated with the receiving side and a little bit about the costs for intermediaries such as CRM systems or...
Everyone has their own way of troubleshooting problems. I thought I would list out the steps I take when I’m trying to troubleshoot them. Clarify the problem. As a consultant, folks come to me asking me to help them solve their delivery problems. My first step is to get them to clarify what symptoms they’re seeing. Something happened to make them contact me, and that’s where we...
Well, it’s 2020. The start of a new year and a new decade, or not depending on what number theory you use to count decades. Personally, I think we, as pattern loving humans, just happen to love numbers that end with 0 and we’re going to consider it special whether or not it’s the actual end or start of a decade. This is the point in time where many blogs are doing year end (or...
Some notes on some of the different protocols used for authentication and authentication-adjacent things in email. Some of this is oral history, and some of it may be contradicted by later or more public historical revision. SPF Associates an email with a domain that takes responsibility for it. Originally Sender Permitted From, now Sender Policy Framework. It allows a domain owner to announce...
This morning hundreds of delivery folks logged into their Google Postmaster Tools account to see their IP reputation was bad.
Even one of my client’s that is using a major ESP shared pools is seeing bad IP reputation on December 10, 2019.
The good news is this doesn’t seem to be affecting delivery. Most folks are reporting no delivery issues at Gmail and no change in open rates.
Many years ago, we bought a VMWare license to manage the various virtual machines running our business infrastructure. As part of our move to Dublin, we decommissioned our cabinet and moved all of services into various bits of the cloud. This meant that when our VMWare support contract came up for renewal we declined the renewal. Despite no longer being customers and unsubscribing from email...
Sendgrid announced their volumes for Black Friday and Cyber Monday: To provide a clearer understanding of our scalable systems, on Black Friday 2019 we processed 4.1 billion emails and this Cyber Monday we processed 4.2 billion emails (46% more than 2018) and processed up to 315 million emails/hour (burst rate) into inboxes all around the world! To give you a better understanding of this scale...
I’m basically waiting for the various ESPs to announce Just How Much Mail they’ve sent over the last 4 days. Early information from one ESP shows a hefty percentage over the amount they sent last year, and that amount had many, many, many zeros in it.
In terms of best practices and ongoing advice: you can never put too many lights on a Christmas tree.
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