One of the discussions that surrounds email marketing is whether relevance trumps permission or permission trumps relevance. I believe this entire discussion is built on a false dichotomy. Sending relevant email is important. Not only do recipients expect mail to be relevant, but the ISPs often make delivery decisions on how relevant their users find your mail. Marketers that send too much...
I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices. Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have...
I saw a nicely done example of integrating email into other marketing channels over the weekend. I was helping a friend pick out a receiver and speakers for their home theatre system on Saturday afternoon. As we were chatting over IRC there was a lot of pasting URLs back and forth, as we tried to juggle speaker components to get a nice, balanced setup on a budget that was fairly tight for a...
A new study published by the Chief Marketing Officer Council and and InfoPrint shows that nearly 50% of all unsubscribes were driven by a lack of relevancy. A study conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and InfoPrint reveals that of the 91 per cent of consumers who opt out or unsubscribe to emails, 46 per cent do so because the messages they receive are simply not relevant. How...
The cyber monday inundation of mail has hit my mailbox. There’s been a clear increase in marketing mail over the last week. Unfortunately for those marketers, it’s too much and I am just scanning subject lines and marking as read. I don’t have the time to read all this mail.
How much control over delivery do senders have? I have repeatedly said that senders control their delivery. This is mostly true. Senders control their side of the delivery chain, but there is a point where the recipient takes over and controls things. As a recipient I can report your email as spam forward your email to another account on another mail system file your email in a mailbox I never...
Having just returned home from another conference, my head is full of new ideas, new thoughts and new projects. I enjoy seeing old friends, making new contacts and sharing ideas. One thing I don’t enjoy, though, is listening to senders and marketers complaining about how hard it is to be a sender because the ISPs will not tell them what standards they need to meet. If the ISPs would just tell us...
I’ve mentioned here before that I use tagged addresses whenever I sign up for. This does help me mentally sort out what’s real spam and what’s just mail I’ve forgotten I’ve signed up for. Yesterday, I received and email from e-fense.com thanking me for my interest in their new product. The mail came to a tagged address, but not a tag that I would have given to e...
It’s always interesting to look at what other email marketers are doing and how closely their practices align with what I am recommending to clients. Today’s example is a welcome message I received from Marriott. During my recent trip to visit a client, I gave Marriott my email address. They sent me a welcome message, primarily text that looked good even with images turned off. The...
I tend not to blog too much on subject lines as they are really a marketing issue and a subscriber relationship issue. The subject lines a particular mailer uses should be directed and developed with an eye towards making the mail relevant and useful to the recipient. What subject lines shouldn’t be is deceptive, either intentionally or inadvertantly. How can a subject line be inadvertantly...
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