I field a lot of delivery questions on various online fora. Often people try and anonymise what they’re asking about by abstracting out the question. The problem is that there are very few answers we can give in the abstract. What are some examples of these types of questions? Should you always remove an address that hard bounces? Well, in general, yes. But there are a small number of cases...
Pete and Repeat were on a boat. Pete fell out, who was left?
I was searching the blog for some resources today and these were the first two posts that showed up on the search results. I often feel like I’m repeating myself, but sometimes I am.
It’s sometimes hard for me to keep up with what other people are saying and discussing about email marketing. I’ve been trying to be more active on LinkedIn, but there are just so many good marketing and delivery blogs out there I can’t keep up with all of them. Here are a couple interesting things I’ve read in the last week. Five Steps to Stay Out of the Spam Folder...
Massimo Arrigoni has a great blog post up summarizing the final session of the EEC conference with representatives from major mailbox providers. This session a number of representatives from major mailbox providers spoke about what it takes to get to the inbox. They discussed what engagement really was, why you need to warmup and what the mailbox providers are measuring. The short version is...
A client asked me earlier this week what SLAs ISPs provided for email delivery. The short answer is that there isn’t a SLA and that the only guarantee is that the email will get there when it gets there. But as I was mentioning this to Steve, he pointed out that there was a recent change in the RFCs for email. In both RFC 821/2 and RFC 2821/2 (the original email related RFCs and the update...
There is a lot of contention between ISPs and senders at the best of times. As we move into the holiday season, retailers are increasing their email marketing, sometimes quite significantly. This causes more delivery issues as recipients and MTAs react to the increased volume. At many non retail companies, however, the pace of work slows down. There are distractions and office parties and people...
Christopher Penn at What Counts did some testing to see what delivery to Facebook.com addresses looks like. It looks pretty grim.
There’s a great post over on CircleID from John Levine and his experience with a marketer sending mail to a spam trap. Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person...
I’ve been thinking lately that sometimes that what works for marketing doesn’t always work for delivery. For instance in many areas of marketing repetition is key. Repeat a slogan and forge an association between the slogan and the product in the mind of the consumer. More repetition is better. Marketers can even go so far as using the same ad to drive consumer action. Television...
I often get clients and potential clients asking me to tell them what the absolute best ESP is. “You’re an expert in the field, which ESP will give me the best inbox delivery?” The thing is, there isn’t an answer to that question. ESPs have expertise in sending large amounts of mail. All have staff that manage and monitor MTAs. Most have staff that provide advice on...
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