Word to the Wise

We make email better.

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We make email better.

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.

Latest stories

Creating emails

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Email is, still, primarily a written medium. This means that good copywriting is crucial. Today I opened up an email and the pre-header says: Laura, should have get your Naturals Sample Bag.*Web Version Wait. What? Maybe they mean “should have got”? But that’s implying they’re sending out free sample bags to everyone. That can’t be right. But I can’t tell...

May 2016: The Month in Email

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Summer, already? Happy June! Here’s a look at our busy month of May. I had a wonderful time in Atlanta at the Salesforce Connections 2016 conference, where I spoke on a panel about deliverability. While in Atlanta, I also visited our friends at Mailchimp, and later spoke at the Email Innovations conference in Las Vegas, where I did my best to avoid “explaining all the things”. Since my speaking...

Memories of Spam in May

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This morning on Facebook a friend posted a picture saying that 15 years ago was the very first anti-spam conference (Spamcon*). All we have are some blurry scans of pictures and coffee mugs. . That 550 sign belonged to the bar where the night out was held. It got bought by K & P and lived in their garden until it rotted away a few years ago. So many folks who are still active in the space...

Can we put the FREE!!! Myth to bed?

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Really. Single words in the subject line don’t hurt your delivery, despite many, many, many blog posts out there saying they do. Filters just don’t work that way. They maybe, sorta, kinda used to, but we’ve gotten way past that now.In fact, I can prove it. Recently I received an email from Blizzard. The subject line:Laura — Last Chance to Claim Your FREE Copy of Warlords...

Necessary but not sufficient

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With all the emphasis on getting the technical right, there seem to be people who think their mail will be delivered as long as the technical is right. Getting the technical right is necessary for good inbox delivery, but it’s not sufficient. The most important part of getting mail to the inbox is sending mail users want. In fact, if you’re sending mail folks want, interact with and...

More on ARC

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ARC – Authenticated Received Chain – is a way for email forwarders to mitigate the problems caused by users sending mail from domains with DMARC p=reject. It allows a forwarder to record the DKIM authentication as they receive a mail, then “tunnel” that authentication on to the final recipient. If the final recipient trusts the forwarder, then they can also trust the...

Why care about email?

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I got my first email address in the very late 80s. I was an intern at a government agency. I learned a lot there: how to sequence DNA, how to handle radioactive material, how to handle human pathogens, and how to send email. I got my first non-work non-school address in the mid-90s. One of the first things I did was join some mailing lists. One of them was a list for folks who had pet rabbits. I...

I cannot feel the Bern.

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On a lark (and to do my best to stay as informed as possible via primary sources) I decided to sign up for the official mailing lists of the Trump, Clinton, and Sanders campaigns. Both Trump and Clinton were happy to take my email address and add it to their distribution lists, no confirmation required. Not terribly surprising, since they need to make it as easy as possible to get their messages...

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