Recent email marketing news

Apparently mentioning “affiliate” in a blog post brings out the blog spammers. I’ve had dozens of trackbacks on yesterday’s how to avoid affiliate spam. Oh, the irony.
A bucket of announcements came out over the last week.
The uber smart folks at Mailchimp have a new iPad app called Chimpadeedoo. This app lets merchants collect email addresses at the point of sale, on an iPad sitting next to the register. Given the troubles my clients have run into when trying to collect addresses in their brick and mortars, this is definitely a product whose time has come.
Venkat talks about a few anti-spam cases making their way through California courts and how the courts seem to be siding with the plaintiffs recently.
On the lawsuit front, John Levine posts about peacefire.org losing an anti-spam case due to the Gordon v. Virtumundo case.
ReturnPath and Liveclicker have partnered to bring video to email. I know marketers are all for video in email, but I can’t get excited about it. I read fast and videos always seem to take to long to watch. I don’t have a feel, though, for how much the average email recipient wants video in their mailbox.
Stephanie Miller from ReturnPath has a summary of a talk given by representatives from Hotmail and Yahoo at the Email Insider’s Summit sponsored by Mediapost. Both ISPs emphasized the need for senders to engage their recipients.

priority number one is to make sure that only messages that are welcome and valued by end user subscribers reach the inbox.

The secret to email marketing: send mail people want to receive.

Related Posts

News and announcements: March 1, 2010

Some news stories and links today.
Spamhaus has announced their new domain block list (DBL). The DBL is a list of domains that have been found in spam.

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A series of warnings

Over the last month there have been a number of people sounding warnings about coming changes that ESPs are going to have to deal with. There has been mixed reaction from various people, many people who hear these predictions start arguing with the speaker. Some argue that our predictions are wrong, others argue that if our predictions are right then the senders will just start acting more like spammers.
I have put together a collection of links from recent blog posts looking towards the future and how things may be changing.

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More on opt-out for B2B marketing

There is still a bit of discussion going on around the HBR article on how B2B mail should be opt-out not opt in on various delivery blogs. Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog new daddy (congratulations!) DJ writes a post about why he thinks opt-out in any context is a poor marketing decision.
One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when they get unsolicited email from a company they have interacted with.

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