One of the themes I harp on with clients is setting recipient expectations. Senders that give recipients the information they need to make an informed subscription decision have much higher inbox and response rates than senders that try to mislead their recipients. Despite the evidence that correctly setting expectations results in better delivery and higher ROI on lists some senders go out of...
It’s really, really frustrating when an unsubscribe request doesn’t take. And it happens a lot more than many people expect. Most of the culprits are marketing companies. United Business Media is a huge problem, for instance. I never even signed up for their mail, but they bought an address I’d used to register for a conference. I unsubscribed at least a dozen times, but the...
A few months ago, I got spammed by a major brand. I know their ESP takes abuse seriously, so I sent a note into their abuse desk. It bounced with a 550 user unknown. I sent another note into a different abuse address, it bounced. I sent mail into their corporate HQ, it disappeared into a black hole. I eventually connected with their delivery person and he’d not seen hide nor hair of any...
There has been a plethora of big brand companies doing stupid stuff with marketing recently. I can only figure it’s end of quarter and everyone is looking to pump up their numbers as fast as possible. I talked about Millenium hotels sending me with an utterly irrelevant ad earlier this week. @Yahoomail direct message spammed all their twitter followers with an ad for something related to...
I stumbled across an interesting problem today. A company I bought something from a while back added me to their newsletter. They seem to be having trouble making sales this quarter, as they’ve gone from an occasional email every few weeks to bombarding me with increasingly desperate offers in the past week or two. So I do what most recipients do in that situation (well, the ones who...
Virgin Blue has been fined $110,000 by the Australian government for not honoring unsubscribes.
If you use redirection links in the emails you send out, where a click on the link goes to your server – so you can record that someone clicked – before redirecting to the real destination, then you’ve probably already thought about how they can be abused. Redirection links are simple in concept – you include a link that points to your webserver in email that you send out...
Want an improved email interface? Then build it. There’s been an ongoing discussion about adding thumbs up / thumbs down style buttons to email clients. While I am dubious this is a useful feature or something that recipients will use, if there are others in the industry that think it would be useful then I strongly suggest they go ahead and create it. In fact, there are a couple things...
My ISP information page occasionally gets trackback pings from various blog posts. This week one of the trackbacks was from a blog post titled “One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch.” The theme of the blog post was that email marketers are poor, put upon business people that have to contend with all sorts of horrible responses from recipients, spam filtering companies and...
Every sender, big or small, should have the ability to suppress sending to any particular email address. They must, absolutely, be able to stop sending mail to anyone for any reason. Not only is this a legal requirement in every jursidiction that has laws about email marketing, it’s just good business sense. What happens when marketers fail to be able to suppress email addresses? At some...
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