Tagemail

Put a fork in it

When FB messaging was announced email marketers had a total conniption. There were blog posts written about how FB Messaging was going to kill email as we know it. Now, slightly more than a year later marketers have declared FB Messaging dead. Sometimes I think people spend way to much time believing their own press. FB messaging was never designed as a marketing platform. I said as much back in...

Think before you mail

I get quite a bit of unsolicited mail. I mean, sure, we all get a lot of spam, but that’s not the unsolicited mail I’m talking about. I’m talking about from people and companies in the email space. They want to make sure I’ve seen their new whitepaper or article about delivery. Or they have a question about something I’ve written here. Or they are looking to hire me...

Is there really one way to email successfully?

I’ve been watching a bunch of folks discuss someone’s mailing practices. The discussion has been fascinating to me.  I’m hearing from the conversation is that there are very specific rules regarding how every company should mail. And that anyone who deviates from those practices is heading down the path to failure. Doing it wrong. This theme has come up before, when I’ve...

Spam lawsuit guide

Mailchimp has released a guide to spam lawsuits with advice on how to not be a target.
I had the pleasure of meeting some of the Mailchimp legal staff last year when I was down there to do on-site training for their abuse desk employees. I was quite impressed with them and their understanding of privacy and email issues.

Email filters

What makes the best email filter? There isn’t really a single answer to that question. Different people and different organizations have different tolerances for how false positives versus false negatives. For instance, we’re quite sensitive to false positives here, so we run extremely conservative filtering and don’t block very much at the MTA level. Other people I know are...

The answer is 42

I continually run into companies that don’t really have a goal or understanding of their email marketing program. They’ve never really asked questions about how they’re using email or even why email is the right answer. Lots of companies are also diving head first into email marketing or the social media craze without having thought about what their goals are and what they want...

Attention is a limited resource

Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time. In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes...

Broken Policies

As an email policy wonk, I think a lot about how specific policy implementations can go wrong. Sure, every policy can go wrong, or not fit a common case. A lot of people only write polices that address common cases and don’t worry about the rarer cases. The problem is there are some rare cases that may cause significant harm and those cases should be addressed. Consumerist has a case up...

Zombie Apocalypse

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...

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