Return Path recently announced changes to their certification program. They will no longer be certifying 3rd party mailers. We will no longer certify mail streams which are strictly comprised of “third-party marketing” email (e.g., email-based advertising that is not accompanied by content and is sent on behalf of a different company than the one to which the end user subscribed in...
Seven myths and two truths about email My favorite: [myth] Engagement is the new reputation. Actually, reputation metrics have always been about engagement, which is what complaint data and sender reputation reflect. Yes. This. Reputation, permission, all of those things are a way to quantify one simple fact: Do recipients want this mail from this sender? Send mail people want and generally it...
Stephanie at Return Path has a great blog post on permission and how permission is an ongoing process not a one time thing. There were a couple statements that really grabbed my attention.
What really matters is not that permission was granted, but that it is earned, every time a message is sent […]
Permission requires a strong value proposition.
Mickey has a good summary of what’s going on in Maine where the courts forced the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to sell the email addresses of license purchasers to a commercial company. There isn’t permission associated with this and the commercial company has no pretense that the recipients want to receive mail from them. This is a bad idea and a bad way to get email...
Ben at Mailchimp has posted some information about Project Omnivore. This is a predictive system that not only predicts potential abuse, but can also be used to predict poor campaigns. Steve and I had a chance to see Omnivore in action when we were in Atlanta last fall, and were impressed by the accuracy for bad stuff. It seems, however, that Omnivore is useful to predict good behaviour as well...
“What should we tell the ISP?” is a frequent question from my customers. The answer is pretty simple. It doesn’t usually matter what you tell the ISP. What matters are your actions. If a sender is having delivery problems then the solution is not to call the ISP and talk to them about why the sender’s mail should not be delivered to the bulk folder. Instead, the solution...
MediaPost had an article written by George Bilbrey talking about how 2010 could be a difficult year for marketers with marginal practices. George starts off the article by noticing that his contact at ISPs are talking up how legitimate companies with bad practices are causing them problems and are showing up on the radar. This is something I talked about a few weeks ago, in a series of blog posts...
In the comments Ulrik asks: “How can unengaged recipients hurt delivery if they aren’t complaining? What feedback mechanism is there to hurt the the delivery rate besides that?” There are a number of things that ISPs are monitoring besides complaint rates, although they are being cautious about revealing what and how they are measuring things. I expect that ISPs are measuring things...
Mark Brownlow writes about engagement. “…the people we really need to keep happy are the subscribers.” Go read the whole thing.
As my recent series of posts has indicated, I am seeing a lot of future changes in the email industry. What do I think we can look forward to in email in 2010? Authentication In the realm of real authentication, the protocol most are using is is DKIM. While people will probably continue to publish SPF records (and Microsoft will continue to cling to the hope it becomes widespread) its relevance...
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