Strategy

July 2017: The month in email

August is here, and as usual, we’re discussing spam, permissions, bots, filters, delivery challenges, and best practices.

One of the things we see over and over again, both with marketers and with companies that send us email, is that permission is rarely binary — companies want a fair amount of wiggle room, or “implied permission” to send. There are plenty of examples of how companies try to dance around clear permissions, such as this opt form from a company we used to do business with. But there are lots of questions here: can you legitimately mail to addresses you haven’t interacted with in 5 years? 10 years? What’s the best way to re-engage, if at all?
We frequently get questions about how to address deliverability challenges, and I wrote up a post about some of the steps we take as we help our clients with this. These are short-term fixes; for long-term success, the most effective strategy is sending email that people want and expect. Engagement is always at the core of a sustainable email program.
We’ve also discussed the rise of B2B spam, and the ways in which marketing technologies contribute to the problem. B2B marketers struggle to use social and email channels appropriately to reach customers and prospects, but still need to be thoughtful about how they do it. I also wrote about some of the ways that marketing automation plugins facilitate spam and how companies should step up to address the problem. Here’s an example of what happens when the automation plugins go awry.
I wrote a few posts about domain management and the implications for security and fraud. The first was about how cousin domain names can set users up for phishing and fraud, and the second was a useful checklist for looking at your company’s domain management. We also looked at abuse across online communities, which is an increasing problem and one we’re very committed to fighting.
I also highlighted a few best practices this month: guidelines for choosing a new ESP and active buttons in the subject line for Gmail.
And finally, we celebrated the 80th birthday of the original SPAM. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know why unwanted email is called SPAM, but just in case, here’s a refresher….

Read More

November 2016: The Month In Email

Happy December! Between #blackfriday, #cybermonday & #givingtuesday, pretty much everyone in the US has just survived a week of email from every brand and organization they’ve ever interacted with. Phew.
TurkeysforBlog
Is this still the best strategy for most senders? Maybe. But it’s always important to be adaptable and continue to evaluate and evolve your strategy as you move through the year.
As always, I continue to think about evolving our own strategies, and how we might best support senders and ESPs. One of the challenges we face when we talk to senders with deliverability questions is that so many of our answers fall into a nebulous “it depends” zone. We’re trying to articulate new ways to explain that to people, and to help them understand that the choices and details they specify at each point of their strategic planning and tactical execution have ramifications on their delivery. While “it depends” is still a correct answer, I’m going to try to avoid it going forward, and instead focus on exploring those choices and details with senders to help them improve deliverability.
In our community of deliverability and anti-abuse professionals, we are — as you’d expect — quite sensitive to unsolicited email that targets our industry. When an email circulates, even what seems like a reasonably well-thought-out email, it occasionally does not land well. Worse still are the various email-related product and service providers who try to legitimize B2B sales messaging as if it is something other than spam.
The takeaway from these discussions for senders is, as always: know your audience. This post about research from Litmus on millennials and spam is a great example of the kinds of things you might consider as you get to know your audience and how they prefer to communicate.
We also had a presidential election this month, one that made much of issues related to email, and it will be interesting to see how the candidates and parties use the email data they collected going forward.
In industry and security news, we saw over a million Google accounts breached by Android malware. We also saw some of the ramifications of a wildcard DNS entry from a domain name expiration — it’s an interesting “how things work” post if you’re curious. In other “how things work” news, we noted some of the recent changes AOL made to its FBL.
I answered an Ask Laura question about dedicated IP pools, and I have a few more queued up as well. As always, we want to know what questions are on the minds of our readers, so please feel free to send them over!

Read More

Don't forget the strategy

We’re two days out from the beginning of the Holiday Shopping Season here in the US. Three days out from one of the biggest retail shopping days of the year in the US. 5 days out from one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.
I’m sure everyone has their mail campaigns planned. Most of the messages are finished, just waiting for a tweak or the exact right image.
The challenge, during this time of year, is to actually think strategically about marketing. The challenge is to pay attention to what subscribers and ISPs are telling you. The challenge is to adapt to conditions on the ground, rather than just executing a strategy planned months ago.
I often joke that my job gets quiet around this time of the year. Most of my clients and customers are busy executing their strategy, not planning it. So much mail is being slung around that no one really has time to do any thinking about it. That is, of course, a gross exaggeration, smart email marketers are always considering strategy even as they’re in the middle of the holiday mailing season.  They still pay attention, they adapt to the conditions, they get the mail through.
Just remember, 2016 is almost over. But we still have a lot of email to send first.

Read More

Changing deliverability thinking

Almost every email marketing program, at least those sending millions of emails per campaign, have delivery problems at one time or another. The problems seem random and unpredictable. Thus most marketers think that they can only address delivery problems, they can’t prepare or prevent them.
On the delivery side, though, we know deliverability problems are predictable. There are situations and events in a company’s marketing program that increase deliverability risks.
I talked a little bit about this with Derek Harding at a recent conference. I started talking about my ideas that deliverability is not random and that companies need to stop treating it as unpredictable.  He pulled together a great article from our discussions. Head over to ClickZ to read about it: Take control of your email deliverability.
1540530
The predictability of deliverability is something I’m going to be writing more about in the coming months. This is, I think, the next challenge for email marketers. Figuring out how to incorporate deliverability into their overall marketing strategy. Successful programs need to take ownership of getting to the inbox. Deliverability isn’t an emergency, because it’s been planned for and managed throughout a program.

Read More

Tell me about your business model

talkingforblogI posted Friday about how most deliverability folks roll their eyes when a sender starts talking about their business model.
The irony is that one of the first things I do with a client is ask them to tell me about their business model and how email fits into their business plan. Once I know that, I can help them improve their email sending to meet the requirements of ISPs, blocklists and recipients.
While most deliverability people don’t care about your business model, for me it’s essential that I understand it. I want to hear about it, all the details. Tell me about what you’re doing and together we’ll craft a strategy to make email work for you in your unique situation.
We have one goal for every client: their email gets to the inbox. But no two clients have the same problems so we tailor our advice specifically for their unique situation. We don’t have a 3-ring binder that we read a standard answer from when clients ask for recommendations for their email strategy. We use our own knowledge of email and our history in the industry to craft unique solutions to deliverability problems.
Your business model is disruptive? Great! We can help you get those disruptive emails into their inbox.
You have a niche social platform that uses email as part of your growth strategy? We’ll make sure users and future users see your email in their inboxes.
You have a SaaS platform and you want customers to be able to use email to communicate with their customers? We’ll help you craft the right policy for your business.
You’re a retail company and struggle to reach the inbox consistently? We’ve helped dozens of companies navigate email challenges. We’ve helped clients figure out how to effectively capture addresses at point of sale in brick and mortars. We’ve helped clients restructure their entire data flow.
We can help you too.
You bring us your business model and we’ll create a comprehensive strategy that gets your email into the inbox. What’s more, we’ll help you understand what factors relate to inbox delivery and train you how to handle most issues on your own. Once we’ve got you set up, a process that takes 3 – 6 months, you have everything you need to run an email program. Even better, when those rare, complicated issues come up we’ve got your back and can get your emails delivering to the inbox again.
 

Read More

Deliverability advice to the DNC

I was working on another post for this afternoon, but when I checked Facebook Autumn Tyr-Salvia had posted a link that’s much more interesting to talk about.
It seems the Democratic National Committee has acquired President Obama’s email list from the 2012 campaign.

Read More