While answering a question about how to improve IP reputation at Gmail I realized that I no longer treat Gmail opens as anything about how a user is interacting with email. There are so many cases and ways that a pixel load can be triggered, without the user actually caring about the mail that it’s not a measure of the user at all. That doesn’t mean opens are useless. In fact...
I recently had a challenging travel experience in the Netherlands, trying to get from Schipol airport to a conference I was speaking at. As part of my attempt to get out of the airport, I installed UBER on my phone. There were some challenges with getting UBER to authorise my phone number, so I tried linking it to my Gmail account. I checked Gmail today and noticed there was a message from UBER...
Because that’s what the spam folder is for unsolicited email. Sending cold email, particularly in bulk (and let’s be honest, if it weren’t sent in bulk, no one would know or care about it going to spam) is spamming. This is exactly the kind of mail that the bulk folder is designed to catch. Senders that don’t have permission have no path out of the bulk folder except...
When faced with unexplained deliverability changes one of the first questions many folks ask is “Did the algorithm change.” In many ways this is an meaningless question. Why? Because there are two obvious answers to the question. A1: Of course it didn’t. A2: Of course it did. Both answers are correct, but they’re answering different underlying questions. When we understand...
Over on the MarketingLand website, Len Shneyder talks about 3 companies (Uber, REI and eBay) that do email right. In there he shows how the companies use email to further their business goals while understanding and meeting the needs of their customers. Meeting the needs of recipients is the way to get your mail to the inbox. Send email that your users want, and they will tell the ISPs when they...
In the email space we talk about filters as if they were sentient beings. “The filters decided…” “The filters said…” This is convenient shorthand, but tends to mask that filters aren’t actually deciding or saying anything. Filters are software processes that follow rules dictated by the people who create and maintain them. The rules flow from the goals...
From February 2010, Taking Permission. Permission is always a hot topic in email marketing. Permission is key! the experts tell us. Get permission to send email! the ISPs tell us. Marketers have responded by setting up processes to “get” permission from recipients before adding them to mailing lists. They point to their privacy polices and signup forms and say “Look! the recipient gave us...
One of the hardest deliverability situations to address is when all mail from a certain sender is going to the bulk folder. I’ve had numerous clients come to me to address this situation over the years. Ideally, clients come to me before all their mail is going to bulk. Then we can make some tweaks and changes to their mail program, repair the reputation and then recover other addresses. We...
Starting next January, Google will be modifying its mobile search results to lower the ranking of sites that use interstitials that interfere with the users experience. In a blog post announcing the change they explain: Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices...
Thanks to tips by a couple blog readers and some clients, I have been looking into Yahoo disabling links in the bulk folder. It does appear Yahoo is no longer allowing users to click on links in emails that Yahoo places in the bulk folder. In fact, some of the spam in my Yahoo mailbox even has a notice about this. One of the interesting questions I’ve gotten about this is how it affects...
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