Last week the Only Influencers email discussion group tackled this question posed by Ken Magill. How do you gently educate one’s customers or employer to use permission-based marketing? Ken published the responses in his Tuesday newsletter. For a number of reasons I didn’t participate in the conversation, but I’ve been thinking about the question a lot. How do I evangelize...
I get a lot of calls from senders who tell me that they have not changed what they were doing, but all of a sudden their mail isn’t performing the way it used to. Sometimes it’s simply less effective marketing, but more often than not the issue is mail being blocked or filtered to the bulk folder. What worked today won’t work tomorrow. Spammers are forever evolving new...
Many online retailers assume that anyone making a purchase from them is a prime target for email marketing. THEY ARE OUR CUSTOMERS! Of course they want to get mail from us! Well. Maybe. But not always. Think about the person who shops online during the holidays. I visit a lot of places looking for gifts for other people. These aren’t places I’d normally shop for myself, and are not...
Yesterday I talked about how important it was to send welcome messages when you discover old email addresses. Today on the Return Path Blog, Tami Monahan Foreman shares an example email that does just that, but not as well as one might hope. You are receiving this email because sometime during the past 20+ years you have registered with PACE, or one of our affiliated companies, to receive free...
A lot of email marketing best practices center around getting permission to send email to recipients. A lot of anti-spammers argue that the issue is consent not content. Both groups seem to agree that permission is important, but more often than not they disagree about what constitutes permission. For some the only acceptable permission is round trip confirmation, also known as confirmed opt-in...
DJ Waldow wrote a post on explicit permission over on Mediapost. I think he hit on some interesting bits and wanted to comment on them. In order to comment on a Mediapost blog, you have to register. I’ve thought about it before, but every time I start the process I get to the page asking for detailed demographic information and decide no. This time, I was inspired enough by DJ to get to the...
Apparently emailpocalypse is coming on Monday. That’s when Facebook is going to release their email platform (the one no one knows anything about) and it’s going to DESTROY EMAIL MARKETING AS WE KNOW IT. Are you ready? I think my favorite doom and gloom scenario is: Facebook will throw out the book on email deliverability because it will likely be the first mass-user email platform...
Unfortunately, this fact doesn’t stop anyone from spamming as part of their marketing outreach. And it’s not just email spam. I get quite a bit of blog spam, most of which is caught by Akismet. Occasionally, though, there’s spam which isn’t caught by the filter and ends up coming to me for approval. Many of these are explanations of why email marketing is so awesome. Some...
There is still a bit of discussion going on around the HBR article on how B2B mail should be opt-out not opt in on various delivery blogs. Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog new daddy (congratulations!) DJ writes a post about why he thinks opt-out in any context is a poor marketing decision. One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when...
I get a lot of calls from clients who can’t understand why they have spamtraps on their lists. Most of them tell me that they never purchase or rent lists, and they only mail to people who sign up on their website. I believe them, but not all of the data that people input into webforms is correct. While I don’t have any actual numbers for how many people lie in forms, there was a...
RSS - Posts