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.
I talked last week about how incentivizing people to sign up for your mailing list could be effective when it’s done well. This week I’m staying at a Large International Hotel Chain and I’ve got a great example of what happens when it’s done poorly. The “free” wifi requires you to join the hotel’s loyalty programme. I’ve done that in the past, so I...
We’ll be in New Orleans next week for the EEC conference. Steve will be on the closing keynote panel taking about subscription bombing. Say hi! while you’re there!
Happy Friday!
“I can’t believe you are wearing one of those,” they said while sneering at the Pebble watch I was wearing. Yes, that’s how someone introduced themselves to me at a conference last year. Apparently, I’m not allowed to wear smartwatches, or something. It wasn’t clear what their problem was or why they thought that was a good opening line. Best I can figure, it...
We often talk about confirmed opt-in (aka “closed-loop opt-in” or “double opt-in”) as the gold standard for address acquisition for permission-based mail. It’s not the only way to gather permission, and in some ways it’s a rather blunt tool that can discourage people from completing a sign-up process if it’s done badly – the confirmation email...
I just added a DMARC validation tool over on tools.wordtothewise.com. You can give it a domain – such as ebay.com – and it will fetch the DMARC record, then explain and validate it. Or you can paste the DMARC record you’re planning to publish into it, to validate it before you go live. If you’ve not seen our tools page before, take a look. As well as DMARC we have a DKIM...
On Sunday the NYTimes published an article about Uber’s CEO. One of the pieces of information that came out of that article is services like unroll.me sell information they scrape out of emails sent to their users. Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll...
I had a number of very good talks with folks at the Email Innovations Summit earlier this week. I’m still digesting it all. It’s clear that getting to the inbox isn’t a solved problem. Around a decade ago I figured that the explosion of complaint feedback loops would make my job obsolete. That more data would mean anyone could manage delivery. That’s not the case for a...
Made it back from Vegas late last night. It was a great trip, even though I wasn’t officially attending the conference. I did get a chance to see old friends and meet some new people. The Women of Email board had our first in person meeting and we’re working on some exciting things over the next few months. Our mentor program is well underway and we have been placing speakers at...
A “/8” is a block of 16,777,214 usable IP addresses. That’s a big fraction of the entire IPv4 address space – about 1/224, in fact. Each one is all the addresses that begin with a given number: 10.0.0.0/8 is all the IP addresses that begin with “10.”, “184.0.0.0/8” (or “184/8” for short) is all the IP addresses that begin with “184...
due diligence noun. research and analysis of a company or organization done in preparation for a business transaction It’s a term that’s been around for five centuries or so. Originally it meant the effort that was necessary for something, but it evolved into a legal term for “the care that a reasonable person takes to avoid harm to other persons or their property“. More...
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