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.
Everyone ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns? I know many retailers are already mailing, my inbox is exploding with offers. For me, this is often a quiet time of the year. As a strategist, most of my worked happened months ago. Now, it’s time for execution. I wish everyone a successful week of mailing. May your deliverability be high. May your subject lines be correct. May...
Catchall domains accept any mail to any email address at that domain. They were quite common, particularly at smaller domains, a long time ago. For various reasons, most of them having to do with spammers, they’re less common now. Most folks think catchall domains are only used for spamtraps. As a consequence, many of the address verification tools will filter out, or recommend filtering...
Congrats to the folks at SendGrid for raising over 130 million in their IPO yesterday. Also, cool stock symbol, bro.
A number of people have mentioned over the last couple weeks that they’re seeing a spike in Yahoo rejecting mail with
554 delivery error: dd Requested mail action aborted
Discussions on various mailing lists indicate these messages are related to inactive accounts. Addresses that bounce at Yahoo with these codes should be handled as inactive addresses and removed from future mailings.
Two of the very first posts I wrote on the blog were about permission (part 1, part 2). Re-reading those posts is interesting. Experience has taught me that recipients are much more forgiving of implicit opt-in than that post implies. The chance in recipient expectations doesn’t mean, however, that permission isn’t important or required. In fact, The Verge reported on a chatbot that...
Today is one of those days I just want to argue with all the subject headers of the marketing email I get.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) November 10, 2017
A few weeks ago ProPublica was the victim of a subscription bomb attack. Julia Angwin found my blog post on the subject and contacted me to talk about the post. We spent an hour or so on the phone and I shared some of the information we had on the problem. Julie told me she was interested in investigating this further problem further. Today, ProPublica published Cheap Tricks: the Low Cost of...
There are a bunch of online communities – mailing lists, Slack channels, etc. – where “people who do email” interact. Some of them are open to anyone to subscribe, some of them are semi-private and require an invitation, others are closed and only available by invitation and yet others are associated with trade associations and only open to their members. Many of them...
Major industry news today as Proofpoint and Cloudmark announced a major acquisition deal. Proofpoint agreed to pay $110 million in cash to acquire Cloudmark. Prior to this acquisition, Proofpoint focused on business filters. Cloudmark’s focus was selling into large ISPs, including large cable providers, and mobile carriers. Proofpoint assured investors they will continue to supporting and...
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