A frequent question in a number of deliverability spaces is how to tell if a message is transactional or marketing. In most cases the decision is related to whether or not to respect an unsubscribe request. All too often companies decide that their messages are too important to allow someone to opt-out of. The problem […]
Marketers have a thing about transactional mail. In the US, transactional mail is exempt from many of the CAN SPAM regulations. If they label a mail transactional, then they can send it even when the recipient has opted-out! The smart marketer looks for opportunities to send transactional mail so they can bother spam get their brand in […]
The riskiest email to send is that very first email. It’s a blank slate. Even if you’re sending confirmation messages, you don’t really know anything about how this email is going to affect your reputation. It’s Schroedinger’s email. The address is both good and bad, until you send to it. If it’s good, great things […]
But, unfortunately, some senders don’t actually think unsubscribe means stop sending mail. Today, for instance, the nice folks at The Container Store sent me an email with an “important update to my POP! account” Yes, that’s an address I gave them. But I don’t have any record of setting up an account. I was on […]
Dear Laura, We are having a bit of an internal struggle on our end as we launch our new quarterly account summaries. What are your views on including an unsubscribe link in these emails? My personal opinion is that we should. Although the summaries can be classified as “transactional”, they are not tied to a […]
Last week Mandrill announced that they were discontinuing their free services and all customers would be required to have a corresponding paid Mailchimp account. Going forward, all Mandrill users will be required to have a paid monthly MailChimp account and verify ownership of all sending domains. Important changes to Mandrill On March 16th all new […]
Happy 2016! We started off the year with a few different “predictions” posts. As always, I don’t expect to be right about everything, but it’s a useful exercise for us to look forward and think about where things are headed. I joined nine other email experts for a Sparkpost webinar on 2016 predictions, which was […]
Earlier this week I was talking on IRC with some colleagues. There was some kvetching about senders that think transactional emails are the same as triggered emails. This led to discussion about whether transactional and triggered emails are the same. I don’t think they are, but it took a while for me to come up […]
September’s big adventure was our trip to Stockholm, where I gave the keynote address at the APSIS Conference (Look for a wrapup post with beautiful photos of palaces soon!) and had lots of interesting conversations about all things email-related. Now that we’re back, we’re working with clients as they prepare for the holiday mailing season. […]
There are a lot of myths in the email space. Things that someone, somewhere said and another person repeated and then another person repeated and all of a sudden it is TRUTH. One of those things is the idea that there is a law defining what can be in a transactional email. Supposedly this law […]
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