One of the primary ways to collect email addresses is from website visitors, and it’s actually a pretty good way to collect addresses. One of the more popular, and effective, techniques is through a pop-up window, asking for an address. Users need to provide an address or click a “no thanks” link or close the window. I’ve noticed, though, that many companies drop something...
Conversations with spammers
It’s amazing how many spammers try and fool deliverability into accepting a questionable list. All too often they fall back on a story. The basic points: a company you’ve never heard of collected millions of email addresses on a website hosted on a low end VPS. I’ve never heard of your company. We’re just that much better at marketing. This list is guaranteed 100% opt in...
March 2017: The Month in Email
It’s that time again… here’s a look at our last month of blog posts. We find it useful to recap each month, both to track trends and issues in email delivery and to provide a handy summary for those who aren’t following along breathlessly every single day. Let us know if you find it useful too! As always, I wrote about email filters. It’s so important to recognize that filters aren’t arbitrary...
Do you know where your signups are?
Here at Word to the Wise we sign up for a lot of email from our customers. There are multiple reasons we do this. Engagement starts before the first email These days the key to getting to the inbox is sending mail your users want and expect. We always recommend senders start the engagement process during signup. Why? Because it establishes the relationship even before email happens. People want...
May 2016: The Month in Email
Summer, already? Happy June! Here’s a look at our busy month of May. I had a wonderful time in Atlanta at the Salesforce Connections 2016 conference, where I spoke on a panel about deliverability. While in Atlanta, I also visited our friends at Mailchimp, and later spoke at the Email Innovations conference in Las Vegas, where I did my best to avoid “explaining all the things”. Since my speaking...
GitHub signup
GitHub is a site where developers can share code with one another. It is widely used by open source developers. Their user base is made up of geeks and people who want a lot of control over their mailbox.
Their email signup process reflects the sensibilities of their market, without being difficult to manage or understand.
Driving customers away
I have a frequent flyer account with Virgin America. They want me to sign up for some new thing, and they’ve sent me two emails about it so far, with lots of good call-to-action language, and a big “Join Now” button. But this is the start of the form that clicking on that button leads to: (It goes on further, finally ending up with a captcha and a submit button.) Virgin America...
Customers want to get mail from us!
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...
Broken signup processes
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...
Fake privacy policies
I sign up at a lot of websites and liberally spray email addresses across the net. These signups are on behalf of one customer or another and each webform gets its own tagged and tracked email address. I always have a specific goal with each signup: getting a copy of a customer’s email, checking their signup process, auditing an affiliate on behalf of a customer or identifying where there...