The key to email marketing, at least if you read blogs and talk to experts who blog about such things, is to segment your lists. But what does segmenting your lists really mean? Ken touches on it in a recent article about engagement and segmenting. Segmenting your list means, quite simply, knowing your audience. It means tailoring your message to them, in order to extract as much money from them...
As often as I talk about how badly companies send mail, I think it’s always a good idea to highlight when I find companies doing good things. Today’s example of a company making me happy is Sur la Table. I’ve been on their mailing list for quite a while and do enjoy the offers and information they send. With the advent of the holiday cooking season, though, they’ve...
MarketingSherpa has a case study up today about a company that took an aggressive stance on re-engagement that reduced their house list size by over 95%. While the size of the list went down, online sales doubled. The whole article is a lesson in how to do email right. They are sending relevant and engaging mail to their subscribers. They kept the addresses of people who wanted the mail, but...
One thing I repeat over and over again is to not send mail that looks like spam. Over at the Mailchimp Blog they report some hard data on what looks like spam. The design is simple, they took examples of mail sent by their customers and forwarded them over to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project to be reviewed by humans. In a number of cases they discovered that certain kinds of templates kept...
I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem. This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing...
I occasionally consult for activists using email. Their needs and requirements are a little different from email marketers. Sure, the requirements for email delivery are the same: relevant and engaging mail to people who requested it. But there are complicating issues that most marketers don’t necessarily have to deal with. Activist groups are attractive targets for forged signups. Think...
Marketers often treat recipient inboxes with a certain level of ownership. They talk about getting mail to the inbox with the underlying implication that inboxes are for use by marketers and they tend to forget that recipients use email for a lot of things, not just being marketing targets. This was crystallized for me a few years ago when I was running a conference session. The session had a...
Senders with delivery problems ask about “the rules.” “Just tell us what the rules are!” “If the ISPs would just tell us what to do we’d do it!” There is only one rule anyone needs to pay attention to for good mail delivery: Respect the recipient. Not good enough for you? Want more specific rules? OK. The two rules everyone must follow for good mail...
IP based reputation is a measure of the quality of the mail coming from a particular IP address. Because of how reputation data is collected and evaluated it is difficult for third parties to provide a reputation score for a particular IP address. The data has to be collected in real time, or as close to real time as possible. Reputation is also very specific to the source of the data. I have...
There is a persistent belief among some senders that the technical part of sending email is the most important part of delivery. They think that by tweaking things around the edges, like changing their rate limiting and refining bounce handling, their email will magically end up in the inbox. This is a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for bulk foldering and blocking by the ISPs. Yes...
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