One of the things our bank does that I really like is send ATM receipts directly to the email address associated with the ATM card. No more random pieces of paper I have to track down, it’s all there in my mailbox. This week I noticed that the bank is leveraging the transactional mail to tell me about new services they provide. I think this is awesome. I get my receipt and I get to learn...
The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts. I’m...
There’s been a lot of discussion about Spamhaus, spam traps, and blocking. Today, Spamhaus rep Denny Watson posted on the Spamhaus blog about some of the recent large retailer listings. He provides us with some very useful information about how Spamhaus works, and gives 3 case studies of recent listings specifically for transactional messages to traps. The whole thing is well worth a read...
A colleague was asking about confirming transactional mail today. It seems a couple of big retailers got SBLed today for sending receipts to spamtraps. I talked a few weeks ago about why it’s important to let people unsubscribe from transactional email, and many of those same things apply to confirming receipts. First, let’s look at what Spamhaus has to say. Initially they listed the...
Never let it be said that marketers can’t take advantage of anything. In this case, there was a lot of commercial email mentioning Hurricane Sandy sent over the last few days. The emails themselves mapped into a number of broad categories. Informational: Emails from hotels, airlines and east coast businesses keeping customers updated about their current status. Emails from many banks also...
The question of putting unsub links on transactional messages came up on multiple lists recently. As with any question that has to do with email and controlling it, there were a lot of different opinions. A number of people believed that transactional mail should never, ever have an unsubscribe. Their argument was that transactional mail is too valuable to allow recipients to unsubscribe from it...
I mentioned a few weeks ago about a conversation I’d had at MAAWG about transactional email and opened up the conversation to readers here. Mike proposed a definition. [Transactional mail is] an automated message, sent on a per-user basis, usually as the result of a direct action by the user or strongly associated with the user. In Mike’s decision were things like sales receipts, opt...
I was talking with some people at the conference yesterday and we started discussing what makes an email transactional. I am reluctant to say the best definition we came up with was “I know it when I see it” but it was close. The interesting thing was that most of the participants agreed that we all used the term the same. I thought I’d ask readers here: How do you define...
Tamara has an excellent collection of musts related to transactional email. I would add a few more, specific to traveling (hotel and plane reservations) that occurred to me recently as I was bombing through airports trying to read hotel and airline confirmations on my iPhone. If this is a hotel confirmation, link directly to your hotel website. My confirmation from Best Western listed the name of...
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