The frequency of emails from the Obama campaign ended up being a talking point for pundits and late night talk show hosts. Jon Stewart of The Daily show even asked President Obama about email directly during his October 18th interview. (Video, email question at the 5:56 mark) Jon Stewart: “We have been talking here for 12 – 14 minutes. I am curious. How many emails, in that time, do...
In an effort to get a blog post out yesterday before yet another doctor’s appointment I did not do nearly enough research on the company I mentioned selling list cleansing data. As Al correctly pointed out in the comments they are currently listed on the SBL. And when I actually did the research I should have done it was clear this company has a long term history of sending unsolicited...
According to Ken, Outward Media has productized a database of 300,000,000 email addresses that should never be mailed. OMI’s Clean-Send Suppression Database can help to protect your email sender reputation and save you valuable marketing dollars. In a nutshell, OMI Clean-Send is a database consisting of approximately 300 million negative email records (spam traps, foreign IP’s, hard bounces, and...
Mickey Chandler has a great post up about Triage vs. Planning. Where he talks about the decisions you make differ depending on the context. It’s a good read, and I strongly encourage everyone to go give it a look. But his post led me to a post by Andrew Kordek at Trendline where he claims that there is an industry rule of thumb that says 6 months is the rule of thumb to define an inactive...
James asked the question on twitter: If you haven’t mailed an address in 5-10 yrs, would you include it in a re-engagement mail? A number of people responded that addresses that old should not be mailed. I think the answer is more complex than can be handled in 140 characters. Five to ten years is a very long time. Think about what you were doing 10 years ago. It’s easy right now, 10...
There are dozens of people and companies standing up and offering suggestions on best practices in email marketing. Unfortunately, many of those companies don’t actually practice what they preach in managing their own email accounts. I got email today to an old work email address of mine from Strongmail. To be fair it was a technically correct email. Everything one would expect from a...
I hope my series on zombie addresses has convinced you that there are zombie addresses on your list and that you should be concerned about the effect they have on delivery and metrics. Today I’d like to talk about what you can do to get rid of zombie addresses without affecting too many actual subscribers. One thing that many companies struggle with while dealing with zombie addresses is...
Last week, in Zombie email: part 1 and part 2 I talked a little about the history of email addresses and how changes in the ISP industry in the early to mid 2000’s brought about the rise of zombie email addresses. Today we’ll look at the effect zombie addresses have on email stats and why ISPs are starting to monitor zombie addresses. A zombie address, despite the fervent belief of...
In zombie email: part 1 I talked about how email addresses were tightly tied to internet access in the very early years of the internet. We didn’t have to worry about zombie email addresses because when an account was shut down, or ignored for a long time then mail would start bouncing and a sender could stop sending to that account. There were two major changes to email accounts in the...
Zombie email addresses: those email addresses that never really die, eat your brains and destroy your email delivery. To understand zombie addresses and why they’re just now becoming a problem, we really need to understand some of the history of email addresses. In the early days of the net, people got an email address usually associated directly with their access to the Internet. Many of...
RSS - Posts