Dear Laura, I sometimes get in arguments with clients where I say, “your open rate is 3%, you need to do some list pruning” and they say, “my recipient list is 100% b2b, and b2b filters don’t care about engagement, so it doesn’t matter if my list is really old and unengaged.” This is wrong in cases where the business is using Outlook or Gsuite, both of which are going to care if they see...
Hi Laura, Merry Xmas and wishing you a Happy New Year! I recently looked at a popular ESP’s IPv4 space and I was astounded. How does an ESP get an IP allocation of 20,480 IPs? ARIN guidelines do not allow “MX/Mailing” IPs to count towards a valid justification especially in the case when each and every IP is being used for this purpose. That’s 80 /24’s…and at a time when we are out of IPv4 space…...
Dear Laura, Your blog is the best. Nothing else compares for solid deliverability discussion. I’ve frequently read these two articles: I need IP addresses to avoid throttling I need to deliver my mail fast They are incredibly helpful. But I don’t think you’ve ever answered this question directly: “Is it detrimental to use an IP pool instead of a single, static IP? For...
With my travel / vacation in October, blogging has been light the last few weeks, including a brief hiatus of our Ask Laura series. I’m working hard for the next few editions of Ask Laura and will get those posts out soon. We’ve been getting questions from readers for a while, but I want to encourage folks to contact us with more. What are your questions about email? Got a problem...
Hi Laura, First of all, I’d like to thank you for the amazing blog. It helps me a lot and I have much fun to read it. Now I have a question to the google alias addresses. As you must have known, Google offers alias addresses and you can put any thing between the local part and @gmail.com with a “+” sign What do you think, what should the onlineshops deal with such address for...
Dear Laura, Our company has been shopping around for ESPs and most of them want to put us on a shared IP address. I have always heard that senders should get dedicated IPs. Will this hurt our deliverability? Regards, Sharing is Hard Dear Sharing, For a long time, IP reputation was the major factor in identifying good mail from bad mail. Good IPs helped mail get into the inbox. Poor IPs were...
Dear Laura, I’ve been having a discussion with a colleague who is particularly frustrated by unwanted email he gets from retailers. Specifically, these are retailers who he’s never given an email address, but whose sites he’s browsed recently. He understands how retargeting works with web ads, but questions if it’s really acceptable to retarget in the email channel or if that violates CAN-SPAM or...
Dear Laura, We are trying to evaluate the success of our email programs, and I don’t have a good sense of what metrics we should be monitoring. We have a lot of data, but I don’t have a good sense of what matters and what doesn’t. Can you advise us what we should look at and why? Thanks, Metrics Are Hard Dear Metrically-Challenged, You’re not going to like this answer, but here goes. It depends...
Dear Laura, We have a real estate client who has asked us to include short video previews of houses in their weekly newsletters to prospective buyers. The videos are great — informative, well-produced, and they definitely meet your definition of wanted email, as subscribers have been asking for this content for a long time. Unfortunately, we are learning that many email service providers...
Dear Laura, We are having a bit of an internal struggle on our end as we launch our new quarterly account summaries. What are your views on including an unsubscribe link in these emails? My personal opinion is that we should. Although the summaries can be classified as “transactional”, they are not tied to a specific recent transaction a customer made and can be viewed as a general...
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