Listen to the experts

Two blog posts came out today interviewing big players in the email and delivery arena.
Over on the Unica blog, Len Shnyeder interviews Annalivia Ford who is a new member of their email operations team. She has had many years of experience in dealing with senders from the receiver position. She summarizes successful delivery as follows:

the bottom line really is simple, if not easy: to succeed, marketers must send timely, relevant and desired email to an engaged audience. I promise that spammers are not doing that.

Scott Cohen continues his email snob interview series by interviewing Al Iverson. The whole interview is worth a read, as Al has been around a long time and has been deep in the trenches on both sides of the delivery equation. Al sums up the essentials of email delivery in two short paragraphs.

If you want to stay in the inbox forever, your practices have to keep getting better. The ISPs stack rank everybody sending them marketing email, and knock the bottom senders out. Eventually, you’ll be that bottom sender; don’t wait for them to get to you. Keep improving!
I get upset when people ask me how close to the line they can be before they will be in trouble. If that’s the question they’re asking, they’re thinking about it wrong. Instead, they need to think about how to embody best practices in a way that obviates the need for periodic remediation. Walk the right path and you’re not going to have to pause periodically because you got blocked due to complaints.

Both interviews have good information and are a must read for any email marketers.

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State of the Industry

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a series of posts on the blog from various authors who are active in the email space.
I posted A very young industry commenting on the lack of experience among email marketers. I think that some of the conflict between ISPs and ESPs and receivers and marketers can be traced back to this lack of longevity and experience. Often there is only a single delivery expert at a company. These people often have delivery responsibilities dropped on them without any real training or warning. They have to rely on outside resources to figure out how to do their job and often that means leaning on ISPs for training.
JD Falk described how many at ISPs feel about this in his post With great wisdom…

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Links for 1/15/10

A lot has happened this week.
Spammers and scammers are attempting to steal money from people attempting to donate money to those in earthquake devastated Haiti. A number of places, including CNN and CAUCE, are warning people who want to donate online to do so through trustworthy links. Don’t click on links in unsolicited emails nor on random websites.
AOL laid off most of their postmaster team. This is going to have a significant impact on sender support provided by AOL. The background chatter I’m hearing indicates that there is likely to be response delays of days to weeks for support tickets.
Pivotal Veracity was acquired by Unica, a marketing software company. Industry buzz says that PV will be run as a subsidiary and maintain their independent customer base.
Spamhaus launched a new website, which includes a link for a domain based URI blocklist. There’s not much information available about this new blocklist, but it’s likely to function similar to SURBL and URIBL.
The lethic botnet was penetrated and disabled. Dark Market, one of the large credit card number trading sites, was taken down and the proprietor arrested.

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A very young industry

Last week I saw a tweet that quoted Joel Book, Director of eMarketing Education at Exacttarget as saying

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