I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices. Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have...
I mentioned a few weeks ago about a conversation I’d had at MAAWG about transactional email and opened up the conversation to readers here. Mike proposed a definition. [Transactional mail is] an automated message, sent on a per-user basis, usually as the result of a direct action by the user or strongly associated with the user. In Mike’s decision were things like sales receipts, opt...
I was talking with some people at the conference yesterday and we started discussing what makes an email transactional. I am reluctant to say the best definition we came up with was “I know it when I see it” but it was close. The interesting thing was that most of the participants agreed that we all used the term the same. I thought I’d ask readers here: How do you define...
Over on Deliverability.com Krzysztof posts about discussions going on over on the URIBL list about using “confirmed opt-in” to describe a subscription process versus using “double opt-in” to describe the same subscription process. I do not even need to read the list to know what is being said. This is a disagreement that has been going on since the first usage of “double opt-in” over 10 years ago...
On my followup EEC post Tamara comments The eec made a really bad and ugly mistake but you can take my word for it that they have learned from it and that it will not happen again. I am not going to blog about this because I really do believe in the value of the EEC and what it brings to the industry. It’s okay to call out a mistake, but do you really need to destroy an organization that is so...
I’ve been hearing stories from other deliverability consultants and some ISP reps about what people are telling them. Some of them are jaw dropping examples of senders who are indistinguishable from spammers. Some of them are just examples of sender ignorance. “We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer...
Over on the ET blog, Al posted about how CAN SPAM compliance is not sufficient for you to not be spamming. It’s a bit different perspective, but very complimentary to my post yesterday about what is and is not spam. He and I have both heard from ISP people about how many requests for whitelisting or unblocking are prefaced with, “We comply with CAN SPAM” and how meaningless that...
A few days ago I was reading the attempt by e360 and Dave Linhardt to force Comcast to accept his mail and to stop people posting in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email from claiming he is a spammer. The bit that pops out at me in this complaint of his, is the fact that he believes that by complying with the minimal standards of the CAN-SPAM act, he is not spamming. The problem with this...
Ken Magill over at DirectMag has an article deriding the reliance on ‘open rates’ as a metric for the success (or failure!) of marketing campaigns. E-mail delivers a return on investment so high, it’s practically embarrassing. It doesn’t require getting fuzzy with the metrics. But as long as we continue to call the percentage of graphics displayed in a given campaign its “open rate,”...
Permission Part 1 I talked about the definition of permission as I use it. Before we can talk about how to get permission we need to clarify the type of email that we’re talking about in this post. Specifically, I’m talking about marketing and newsletter email, not transactional email or other kinds of email a company may send to recipients. Also, when I talk about lists I include segments of a...
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