One of the fascinating parts of my job is seeing how different groups in email have radically disparate points of view. A current example is how much value senders put on spamtraps compared to ISPs and filtering companies. I understand why this is. In all too many cases, when a sender asks why they’re mail is going to bulk or being blocked, the answer is “you’re hitting...
A bit of a refresh of a post from 2011: Six best practices for every mailer. I still think best practices are primarily technical and that how senders present themselves to recipients is more about messaging and branding than best practices. These 6 best practices from 2011 are no longer best, these days, they’re the absolute minimum practices for senders. If you can’t manage to do...
Any ESP that supports multiple mailing lists per customer lets you name your mailing lists. That’s useful for keeping track of where a list was from , but sometimes those list names are visible to the recipient: Here the list name is visible on the opt-out / email preferences form, but you’ll also see them in (hidden) email headers or (visible) email footers. “Last 10000”...
In the email delivery space there are a lot of numbers we talk about including bounce rates, complaint rates, acceptance rates and inbox delivery rates. These are all good numbers to tell us about a particular campaign or mailing list. Usually these metrics all track together. Low bounce rates and low complaint rates correlate with high delivery rates and high inbox placement. But sometimes the...
Often clients come to me looking for help “removing spamtraps from their list.” They approach me because they’ve found my blog posts, or because they’ve been recommended by their ISP or ESP or because they found my name on Spamhaus’ website. Generally, their first question is: can you tell us the spamtrap addresses on our lists so we can remove them? My answer is...
There are a number of folks who tell me there can be no zombie addresses on their lists, they aggressively remove any address that bounces. The problem is that zombie addresses don’t bounce, at least not always. And even when ISPs say they have a policy to bounce email after a certain period of time with no access, that’s not always put into practice. How do I know that ISPs...
I can’t add much more to Steve Denner’s article about building list size.
People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices. I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail...
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...
Not just secure from outside forces, but also secure from employees? In a recent survey published by Help Net Security, approximately half of all employees said they would take data, including customer data, when leaving a job. This has major implications for ESPs, where employees have access to customer data and mailing lists. There are at least 2 cases that I am aware of where employees have...
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