Best practices or required practices

What really are the best practices for email?

A year ago I wrote a post about best practices and how most of my best practices were different from what other people recommend. I don’t talk about rules for frequency or subject line length. I don’t focus on best practices for bounce processing or content length.
BestPracticesBallMy best practice recommendations are really about process.

  • Send only opt-in mail.
  • Send mail correctly.
  • Identify yourself in email.
  • Honor unsubscribe requests.

The rest is all about the relationship between senders and their recipients.

But what does that mean?

It means that every sender should know who their audience is. Send mail that audience wants. If they want mail daily? Send daily. If they want mail weekly, send weekly. You’re the expert on who your audience is. Without knowing more about that audience no one should be giving you advice on anything like content or cadence or call to action or subject line length or whatever. Those are really specific to each program.

That sounds complicated.

Well, it’s not intro level deliverability that’s for sure.
Really knowing your audience isn’t something every company can, or even should, do. For many companies email is a part of their business, but isn’t really what they do. Email is a tool, and as long as that tool is working and deliverability is good there doesn’t need to be a commitment to really figuring out how to use it. Other companies, though, are built around email. Email is vital to their sales process or their customer communication process. In these cases, it is a good idea to commit the resources to improving delivery and email processes to get the best results.

Does it work?

It does! Look at what Louis C.K. did with his marketing. He broke all the rules, but made his audience happy. He knows his audience and he knows his brand and he carries that into his email campaigns. Other folks who “broke the rules” include Groupon and other daily deal sites. They broke the “rule” of no daily email except those users want the daily emails. Do daily emails work for everyone? Nope. But they work for some.
Lately I’ve been working with clients who start out with good deliverability, but are looking for some assistance with tweaking their strategy. It’s a challenge to think about what tweaks we can do to make a good program better. I’ve also been talking with other experts in the field and realizing that there is a place for advanced deliverability recommendations. What works in one vertical may not work in another. In some cases, other restrictions (privacy laws in some jurisdictions) may make common best practices not work or a worst practice.

How are you going to help?

We’ve always had a lot of plans for sharing more information. The blog is a big part of that, but we’re looking at other channels and things. I think some good things are going to come out of this and am excited to share them with you over the coming year.
 

Related Posts

Authentication Cheat Sheet

There are a several approaches to authenticating email, and the different authentication methods have a lot of different settings to choose from (sometimes because they’re useful, other times just because they were designed by committee). It’s nice that they have that flexibility for the complex situations that might benefit from them, but almost all the time you just want to choose a good, default authentication approach.
So here’s some short prescriptive advice in no particular order for “how to do email authentication at an ESP well” without the long discussions of alternative approaches and justification of each piece of advice.

Read More

An interesting look at best practices

Which best practice is ruining your business?

Read More

End of quarter spam

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 the new Yahoo mail product.
Anyone watching my twitter feed yesterday probably noticed me complaining about spam from Dell.
All of these things are just examples of sloppy marketing. In Dell’s case it’s even worse because they sent me multiple copies of the spam to different addresses. Two copies of the same “SHOP NOW!” email to different addresses, one of which has never been given to Dell.
Mail to the first address is unquestionably spam and I did send in a complaint to Dell’s ESP. That address is never used to sign up for anything. I did try clicking on the “update your subscription” link in the footer and Dell’s website helpfully told me that address was not on their mailing lists. Looks like Dell bought a list.
The second address is one that was involved with the purchase of software from Dell last July. This is the first non-transactional mail sent to that address. I can’t necessarily call the email spam as I did give it to Dell during the course of a transaction. However, Dell could have done a lot better in managing our “relationship” than they did.
Dell collected my email address as part of a transaction in July 2010. They did not start sending marketing mail to this address until May 2011. While Dell is a major brand and most people would recognize the name and may be a little less inclined to hit “this is spam” waiting 10 months between a purchase and regular mailings is a bad idea.  People who don’t use tagged addresses may forget they gave the sender an email address and automatically send in a spam complaint.
Sitting on an address for 10 months means Dell really should have done a welcome series, or even just a single welcome email, to ease the transition from no mail to regular mail. But, no, they just send me an email advertising their sales.
We’ve been Dell customers for quite a while, and all of our purchases have been enterprise grade hardware or software to run on those servers. We’ve never purchased anything remotely like office computers. But the sales flyer was for desktops, printers and monitors. Dell knows what I purchased from there, so why are they sending me ads for things I’ve never bought?
We have our own Dell sales rep, and my only involvement in the transaction is source of payment. Adding me to a product list really feels like spam.
Then there was the email itself.  The “update your subscription” link was broken and told me I wasn’t subscribed to their list. I mentioned it to Steve and he pointed out that particular link had been broken “forever.” How long has it been since anyone inside of Dell has checked that their footer links work?
What is Dell up to? Who knows. But they unarguably are sending mail to addresses that never opted in. And even if you consider an email giving during a purchase process their handling of that particular address was appalling and in violation of almost every good practice out there.
 

Read More