Tagengagement

Use all the channels

One of the hardest deliverability situations to address is when all mail from a certain sender is going to the bulk folder. I’ve had numerous clients come to me to address this situation over the years. Ideally, clients come to me before all their mail is going to bulk. Then we can make some tweaks and changes to their mail program, repair the reputation and then recover other addresses. We...

The perfect email

More and more I’m moving away from consulting on technical setup issues as the solution to delivery problems. Delivery is not about the technical perfection of a message. Spammers get the technical right all the time. No, instead, delivery is about sending messages the user wants. While looking for something on the blog I found an old post from 2011 that’s still relevant today. In...

Who owns the inbox

One of the questions asked of my panel during Connections 16 last month was who owns the inbox. My point of view is that the end user owns the inbox, with a few minor exceptions. For instance, in the case of a business, the business owns the inbox. With email marketing, the marketing is entering a personal space as an invited guest. Senders need to be cognizant of this to continue having access...

Pete and Repeat

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.
 

Insight into Gmail filtering

Last week I posted a link to an article discussing how Gmail builds defenses to protect their users from malicious mail. One of the things I found very interesting in that article was the discussion about how Gmail deploys many changes at once, to prevent people from figuring out what the change was. Let’s take a look at what Gmail said. Make it hard for attackers to understand your...

Ask Laura: Will our ESP kick us off for mailing purchasers?

Dear Laura, We’re a small online retailer and email is a very important sales and communication channel for us. We do marketing and newsletters with Mailchimp, transaction confirmations with Bigcommerce, and a few other messages via Salesforce. Our volumes are relatively low, but we’re in an industry that can be a bit of a red flag for spam. We have a few different lists in Mailchimp. The...

Ask Laura

An Advice Column on Email Delivery When we work with brands and senders to improve email delivery, there are many questions that come up again and again. For 2016, we thought it might be interesting to answer some of those questions here on the blog so others can benefit from the information. Confused about delivery in general? Trying to keep up on changing policies and terminology? Need some...

Tumblr Confirming Usernames

Today I received an email from Tumblr asking to confirm I still wanted the username I have there. I’ve not really been using Tumblr, I contributed a few things to the now-defunct Box of Meat, but I don’t really post there much. I think this kind of engagement is great. Confirming user names will do a whole lot to allow Tumblr to release some claimed but unused names back into the pool...

March 2015: The month in email

Happy March! We started the month with some more movement around CASL enforcement from our spam-fighting friends to the north. We noted a $1.1 million fine levied against Compu-Finder for CASL violations, as well as a $48,000 fine to Plentyoffish Media for failing to provide unsubscribe links. We noted a few interesting things: the fines are not being imposed at the maximum limits, violations are...

Thoughts on Hotmail filtering

One of the new bits of information to come out of the EEC15 deliverability discussions is how Hotmail is looking at engagement differently than other webmail providers. Many webmail providers really do look at overall engagement with a mail when making delivery decisions. And this really impacts new subscribers the most. If there is a mailing where a lot of subscribers are engaged, then new...

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