Everyone I talk to when dealing with issues inevitably has to tell me they are legitimate email marketers. They’re not spammers, they’re just business people. I often find it difficult to fathom why they need to tell me this. It’s not like email marketers are criminals or anything. Two recent stories reminded me how evil some folks are. While I’ve not had any direct...
The too many.
The stupid.
The spammers.
The blog spammers are still actively attempting to get their claws into my blog. Today the comments included:
marketing is my specialty becuse i like to promote new products”‘:
lead generation is the key to becoming a very successful internet marketer,~~
The only sensible thing to do is refer the commenter to today’s XKCD:
There are dozens of people and companies standing up and offering suggestions on best practices in email marketing. Unfortunately, many of those companies don’t actually practice what they preach in managing their own email accounts. I got email today to an old work email address of mine from Strongmail. To be fair it was a technically correct email. Everything one would expect from a...
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...
Al posted a clip from the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar on SpamResource (slightly NSFW) that resonated with me this week. If you meet me on the street and ask me what my job is I’ll tell you that I work with companies who send bulk email to make sure that they’re not sending spam. I do this by educating clients into good practices and teaching them how to send mail people want to receive...
One thing I repeat over and over again is to not send mail that looks like spam. Over at the Mailchimp Blog they report some hard data on what looks like spam. The design is simple, they took examples of mail sent by their customers and forwarded them over to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project to be reviewed by humans. In a number of cases they discovered that certain kinds of templates kept...
Ken Magill, dad extraordinaire, describes how he went above and beyond the call to get his son a DVD while battling hard sell marketing techniques.
Sending frequency is an important part of any email campaign. Too little mail and recipients forget about the mail and don’t open it when it does arrive. Too much mail and folks start complaining, like John Cole over at Balloon Juice. Take the dogs to the park for a half hour, come back, and there are 30 new messages from advocacy groups and campaigns in my email box. […] Seriously...
When consulting with clients, I spend a lot of time trying to help them better understand the concept of sender reputation. Spam reports, feedback loops, and other data that comes from a collection of positive and negative reputational feedback about a company sending email. Certainly, the “This is not spam” action – moving an email from the spam folder to the inbox, or clicking...
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...
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