Marketing reports

Two marketing reports were reviewed today in other blogs.
Stefan Pollard writes at the Merkle report showing that recipients really will add a sender’s address to their address book, but that they are picky about which senders they do this for. His article also provides a number of suggestions for how to be a sender that is added to the address book.
Meanwhile, Matt Vernhout discusses the Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study published by Smith Harmon. Unsurprisingly, the study found that welcome emails were very important to future deliverability.
Happy Friday!

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Links to check out

Things are going well, if busy, here at the conference. I am attending lots of sessions and continuing to edit my talk for tomorrow. I thought I would list some random links that have come up here recently.
Lashback is advertising a joint webinar with Habeas, Publishers Clearinghouse and Lashback on how to protect brands and increase revenues with reputation management.
Terry Zink explains the new Microsoft advertising campaign. There are actually quite a few Microsoft people here at the conference, including the brain behind SNDS. We ran into each other yesterday evening, his room is right next to mine.
Ken Magill has an ongoing series of articles investigating Email Appenders, and all their various incarnations. This is an example of the confused jumble of connections that some companies use in order to hide.
Speaking of companies with bad reputations, the NY Times reports on Intercage’s loss of hosting. Atrivo/Intercage are notorious amongst the folks who fight malware and bots and have been called the American version of the Russian Business Network.

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Getting whitelisted by endusers

One of the best ways to ensure mail is delivered to a recipients inbox is to encourage the recipient to add the senders from: address to their address book. In cases where an ISP might otherwise bulk folder the email, they will instead put the email into the inbox.
Senders are changing their practices to get recipients to add from addresses to address books. There are a number of companies reminding users to add addresses on the webpage at the time of signup. Most emails have recommendations in each email. Recently, there have been multiple reports of companies who send specific email campaigns to encourage recipients to whitelist the sender.
Cool Email Idea: Customized Whitelisting Instructions from ReturnPath.
How & Why You Need to be Added to Your Recipient’s Address Book from VerticalResponse.
In addition to the direct benefit to the recipient that whitelists the individual sender, there are some hints that ISPs are looking at individual whitelisting as part of their internal sender reputation scoring.

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Link Roundup

Why email marketers are hated. A group of Ontario spammers finds Ken Magill’s email address and spams him. Repeatedly.
New docs in e360 v. Spamhaus. The judge threw out the after-the-fact affidavit from e360, but did not grant Spamhaus’ motion for summary judgment. Looks like this might end up at trial after all.
Oral arguments in Zango v. Kaspersky. I have been following this a little because SamSpade for Windows was classified as malware by one vendor a long time ago.
New books on email marketing.
Anything interesting people have seen that I missed?

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