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AOL changes bounce behaviour

A couple other bloggers have commented on the recent AOL blog post talking about changes to the MAILER-DAEMON string on bounce messages. With the changes for inbound mail, ALL bounce messages (mostly due to user-defined spam settings) will have the sender name of MAILER-DAEMON@recipient –domain. For example, a member of yahoo sending to an AIM account with a user-defined block, would receive a...

Bad subject lines

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...

Best time to send email: analysis and discussion

Mark Brownlow (who I don’t think is here in Ams, much to my disappointment) wrote a long assessment of how to determine what is the best time to send email. He walks through the questions and the data that a sender should evaluate when making the decision when to best send email. I have previously posted about my views on the best time to send email. There is no one best time to send email...

Delivery advice from Politico

Politico published an article Sunday looking at the best e-mail lists in politics. Their criteria for choosing the winner focused on list size and recipient engagement, measured by amount of money raised and recipient response to issues. Despite not being a delivery focused article or even mentioning delivery at all, this article is all about delivery. How can an article be about delivery without...

List hygiene

Bronto blog has step by step directions on how to run a successful re-engagement campaign.

The Question

Mark Brownlow has a list of 12 questions every email marketer should ask about their marketing program. Buried in the middle is the most important question for delivery. Do you worry more about what ISPs think about your email than what subscribers think about your email? If you take care of the latter, won’t the former take care of itself? My answer is if a sender is worried more about...

The overlooked secret of marketing

Seth Godin posted recently about the overlooked secret of marketing: time Cherish my time. The second part is closely related. It has to do with respect. You respect my time when you don’t waste it. When you don’t spam me. When you worry about the 100 cars backed up on the road and figure out how to get us moving more quickly. You respect me when you value my time more highly than...

List Attrition

DJ over at Bronto blog has a post up about list churn / list attrition. She quotes a statistic published by Loren from MediaPost (the original post is behind a subscription wall) that a list will lose 30% of their subscribers year over year. This is similar to a statistic that I use, but the context I have seen the published statistic in is slightly different. DJ offers suggestions on how to...

That's spammer speak

I’ve been hearing stories from other deliverability consultants and some ISP reps about what people are telling them. Some of them are jaw dropping examples of senders who are indistinguishable from spammers. Some of them are just examples of sender ignorance. “We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer...

More about FBLs and unsubscribes

In the comments of the last post, Gary DJ asked an insightful questions and I think my answer probably deserves a broader audience. How can ESPs honor unsubscribe requests from ISPs without FBL programs (read: Yahoo!) if senders are not aware that subscribers are asking to be removed (via “Mark as Spam” links)? Yes, we can tell which clients are “good” and which are...

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