Mention an email is spam to some senders and watch them dance around trying to explain all the ways they aren’t spammers. At some point, calling an email spam seems to have gone from a statement of fact into some sort of moral judgement on the sender. But calling an email spam is not a moral judgement. It’s just a statement of what a particular recipient thinks of an email. There are...
Last week at M3AAWG representatives from AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook spoke about their anti-spam technologies and what the organizations were looking for in email. This session was question and answers, with the moderator asking the majority of the questions. These answers are paraphrased from my notes or the MAAWG twitter stream from the session. What are your biggest frustrations? AOL: When...
There are two extreme opinions I see among marketing agencies and email senders when it comes to volume. One group seems to think that volume alone triggers blocks. Another group thinks volume never affects delivery. As with many things in delivery reality is at neither extreme. Sending lots of mail isn’t the problem. Sending lots of mail your recipients aren’t interested in getting is the...
I’ve seen lots of opinions over the last few weeks about whether or not the new ads in the Gmail promotions tab are email or not. Google is using its latest inbox redesign to stick ads in the holiest of places: Right inside your Gmail inbox. Under the promotions tab — one of three sections in the new tabbed version of Gmail — Google has started sticking ads disguised as emails, as first...
Getting to the inbox is becoming a greater and greater challenge for many marketers. According to Return Path, 22% of opt in mail doesn’t make it to the inbox. The challenge to marketers is that a lot of opt in mail isn’t important to the recipient. Sure, they’re happy enough to get it if they notice it, but if it’s not there then they don’t care. They’ll buy...
Earlier this week Return Path released their quarterly inbox placement benchmark study, and the results aren’t good. According to this data, 22% of opt-in emails are not making it to the inbox. An interesting note is that 25% of email from social networks never makes it to the inbox. This is a challenge for social networks, but I’m not sure many individuals care. For a lot of people...
Yesterday Gmail announced a change to their UI. This new UI lets users configure tabs in their inbox for different sorts of email. This change has greatly upset some marketers. Yesterday I heard it described as war on marketers, as a conspiracy to stop all email marketing and as a horrible injustice to legitimate marketers. I even saw a few people call for an organized boycott of Google AdWords...
Microsoft has a new TV ad showing how trivial it is to remove unwanted email from the inbox. Various busy people use the “sweep” and “delete” functions to clean up mail. The commercial even have a segment counting up the hundreds of emails deleted. This tells me a few things. Email isn’t dead. Major companies are still investing in email products and creating tools...
A lot of my sales inquiries recently are about getting good inbox delivery at Gmail. I’ve mentioned before, I can usually tell when an ISP changes things because they suddenly become the subject of a great many phone calls. In this case, Gmail seems to have turned up their engagement filters and is sending a lot more mail to the bulk folder. I have also noticed other people are blogging...
Today’s question comes from Leslie J. Just how difficult is it for a small business that runs a highly compliant mailing system to find their way onto whitelists at the big freemail/spam filter providers? It seems utterly impossible meaning man hours are completely wasted messing around with subjects and content when if the same business sends the very same message through any number of...
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