Next Tuesday, September 23, I’ll be speaking about deliverability at a webinar sponsored by Message Systems and presented by the American Marketing Association.
Registration is open to all, so if you’re interested in hearing some of my opinions about deliverability past, present and future, sign up.
Images at Yahoo
For a while, Yahoo was giving preferential “images always on” treatment to Return Path Certified senders. The tricky part of this was the senders had to register a DKIM selector key with Yahoo. I had a lot of (somewhat rude) things to say about this particular design decision. Over the last few months, a number of senders have complained about being unable to update their selector...
It's Wednesday – do you know where your sales staff are?
I received an email yesterday with the subject “Please confirm your lunch reservation”. It didn’t look like a typical spam subject line, but wasn’t from anywhere I recognized. I take a look. I’ve reserved a seat for you (and up to 2 guests from Word) at your choice of upcoming, complimentary lunch seminars that I will be hosting around the Bay Area … Sure...
Permission-ish based marketing
My Mum flew in to visit last week, and over dinner one evening the talk turned to email. We don’t get much spam on Yahoo, mostly because we don’t give our email address out much. The only spam we really get is from <stockbroker website>, and that all goes to the spam folder. We use the site for checking stock quotes – it’s free, and we never see any of the spam they...
Email marketing is hard
I’ve watched a couple discussions around the email and anti-spam community recently with a bit of awe. It seems many email marketers are admitting they are powerless to actually implement all the good advice they give to others. They are admitting they can’t persuade, cajole, influence or pressure their companies to actually follow best practices. Some of the comments public and...
Delivery consulting: it's all about the credibility
A few months ago I found a great blog post written by an ER doctor about how to convince other doctors to come in and deal with a patient in the middle of the night. There are quite few similarities between his advice and the advice I would give delivery experts, ISP relations folks and ESP representatives when dealing with ISPs and spam filtering companies. Credibility is the sole currency you...
Monitoring Email Deliverability
I did an interview with Direct Mag recently about what I recommend mailers do to monitor email deliverability.
Who can you trust?
I’ve been recently dealing with a client who is looking at implementing authentication on their domains. He’s done a lot of background research into the schemes and has a relatively firm grasp on the issue. At this point we’re working out what policies he wants to set and how to correctly implement those policies. His questions were well informed for the most part. A few of them...
Delivery Monitor Closing Down
Delivery Monitor by Aweber is one of the inbox monitoring services available for senders. Aweber has been in the process of winding down Delivery Monitor for the last few months and they will be turning the service off completely tomorrow. A lot of folks have asked me about replacements for Delivery Monitor. There are, of course, Return Path and Pivotal Veracity, but many of the smaller mailers I...
20% of email doesn't make it to the inbox
Return Path released their global delivery report for the second half of 2009. To put together the report, they look at mail delivery to the Mailbox Monitor accounts at 131 different ISPs for 600,000+ sends. In the US, 20% of the email sent by Mailbox Monitor customers to Return Path seed accounts doesn’t make it to the inbox. In fact, 16% of the email just disappears. I’ve blogged in...