Seth Godin has a post up today talking about how friction, that is the cost of sending marketing, is good for marketing. With more friction, marketers make choices about sending instead of sending to everyone. The post touches on a point I’ve certainly tried to explain to clients and senders in general. Email, of course, is free. Except it’s not. The friction that slows down sending...
I do a lot of negotiating with blocklists and ISPs on behalf of my clients and recently was dealing with two incidents. What made this so interesting to me was how differently the clients approached the negotiations. In one case, a client had a spammer slip onto their system. As a result the client was added to the SBL. The client disconnected the customer, got their IP delisted from the SBL and...
I spent the morning in multiple venues correcting mis-understandings of confirmed opt-in. The misunderstandings weren’t so much that people didn’t understand how COI works, but more they didn’t understand all the implications. In one venue, the conversation centered around how small a portion of deliverability the initial subscription process affects. Sure, sending unwanted...
Part 3 in an ongoing series on campaign stats and measurements. In this installment, I will look a little closer at what other people are measuring about your email and how that affects your reputation at the ISPs. Part 1: Campaign Stats and Measurements Part 2: Measuring Open Rate Reputation at the ISPs is an overall measure of how responsive recipients are to your email. ISPs also look at how...
Another installment in my ongoing series: That’s What Spammers Do. In today’s installment we take a look at a company deceiving recipients and hiding their real identity. One of my disposable addresses has been getting heavily spammed from mylife.com. The subject lines are not just deceptive, they are provably lies. The mail is coming from random domains like urlprotect.com or...
In the past I’ve talked about vetting clients, and what best effort encompasses when ESPS try to keep bad actors out of their systems. But what does an ESP do to monitor clients ongoing? Al Iverson from ExactTarget says that they: Look at what clients are doing constantly. If too much of a client’s list is filtered out at import, If too much of their mail bounces, If they receive too...
Over at the AOL postmaster blog, Christine posts about reputation and AOL.
Yesterday, I posted about reputation as a combination of measurable statistics, like bounce rates and complaint rates and spamtrap hits. But some mailers who meet those reputation numbers are still seeing some delivery problems. When they ask places, like AOL, why their mail is being put into the bulk folder or blocked they are told that the issue is their reputation. This leads to confusion on...
Reputation is the buzzword in delivery these days. Everyone talks about building a good reputation and how to do it. Makes sense, the ISPs are always hammering on reputation and how critical reputation is. The more I talk with delivery folks on the ESP side of thing, the move I realize that there is a fundamental disconnect between what the ESPs mean when they say reputation and what the ISPs...
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...
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