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.
We can help you with your email strategy, deliverability challenges and many other email issues.
There are times when I hesitate to call what marketers do “spam.” I can use the euphemisms with the best of ’em. “Cold emails” “Targeted Marketing” “B2B marketing.” I’ll say it here and now: cold emails are spam. Sales people who are sending enough email that they require automation to actually send the mail are spamming. Look at this...
A comment came in on Engagement and Deliverability and I thought it was a good question and deserved a discussion. Good article. My question about Gmail engagement is how would I reach someone who has not been opening my emails? Say I want to do a re-engagement campaign. If I temporarily suppress a contact from my list for a period of time and only send to my engaged contacts, will that contact...
Many companies have the occasional “oops” where they send email they probably shouldn’t have. This can often cause a decrease in reputation and subsequent delivery problems. Some companies rush to fix things by changing domains. Getting a new domain does not fix the problem! Brand new domains, those registered less than 30 days, have really bad reputations. Blame the spammers...
I’m sure by now readers have seen the article from Gmail “Spam does not bring us joy — ridding Gmail of 100 million more spam messages with TensorFlow.” If you haven’t seen it, go read it. It’s not often companies write about their filtering philosophy and what tools they’re using to manage incoming bad mail. There were a few parts of the article that...
This is pretty clear evidence that AOL accounts are being transferred to the Oath / Verizon Media / Yahoo backend. AOL has been slowly disabling their postmaster pages and I don’t trust them to provide accurate info any longer. I am also way of using the contact forms at AOL these days. It’s possible that no one is monitoring them. Looks like the last of the AOL mail infrastructure is...
When asking a for assistance with email delivery, there are some pieces of information that are required before anyone can help. Be prepared with the information so you can get timely assistance. This advice is true whether you’re looking for help from peers or working with paid deliverability consultants. What is the problem? Be very specific about the problem you see. The fix for mail...
The question came up on slack this morning about bounce rate benchmarks. What are the normal / average bounces that different ESPs see? Does region matter? What’s acceptable for bounce rates? Bounce rate is an overall measure of address quality Here’s your the chance for ESPs share the data from your customers. We’re interested in anything you care to share. But more detail is...
When I checked in on Facebook this morning there was a discussion from a couple people frustrated by cousin domains. I share their frustration. Kitten running through field with text “every time a marketing department registers a cousin domain, god kills a kitten” Cousin domains are a major problem for ISPs trying to protect their users from phishing and other fraud. Because so many companies use...
When it comes to SPF records there seems to be a lot of confusion. I mean, a decade after I posted it Authenticating SPF is still the most frequently visited post on the site. And, of course, there are hundreds of other pages out there that discuss SPF and what to publish. Still, there are common questions. Most recently I’ve been addressing questions about what SPF records need to be...
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post focusing on one small part of bounce handling. Today I want to talk about delivery failures that aren’t bounces. This is really the biggest issue for companies who have written their own bulk sending servers. Modern bulk MTA appliances and ESPs correctly handle these types of bounces. However, when you’re troubleshooting it’s important to know...
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