Everyone ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns? I know many retailers are already mailing, my inbox is exploding with offers. For me, this is often a quiet time of the year. As a strategist, most of my worked happened months ago. Now, it’s time for execution.
I wish everyone a successful week of mailing.
May your deliverability be high.
May your subject lines be correct.
May your personalization work.
May your strategy rock.
August was a busy month for both Word to the Wise and the larger world of email infrastructure.
A significant subscription attack targeted .gov addresses, ESPs and over a hundred other industry targets. I wrote about it as it began, and Spamhaus chief executive Steve Linford weighed in in our comments thread. As it continued, we worked with M3AAWG and other industry leaders to share data and coordinate efforts to help senders recover from the attack.
In the aftermath, we wrote several posts about abuse, blocklists, how the industry handles these attacks currently, and how we might address these issues going forward. And obviously this has been on my mind before this attack — I posted about ongoing problems with internet security, how open subscription forms contribute to the problem, and other ways that companies inadvertently support phishing operations.
I posted about the history of email, and recounted some of my earliest experiences, when I had a .bitnet and a .gov address. Did you use email before SMTP? Before email clients? I’d be curious to hear your stories.
Speaking of email clients, I did two posts about how mail gets displayed to the end user: Gmail is displaying authentication results, which should provide end users with a bit more transparency about how authentication is used to deliver or block messages, and Microsoft is partnering with Litmus to improve some of the display issues people face using Outlook. These are both notable — if this is not your first time reading this blog, you know about my constant refrain that delivery is a function of sending people mail they want to engage with. If the mail is properly formatted and displayed, and people have a high degree of confidence that it’s been sent from someone they want to get mail from, that goes a long way towards improving engagement in the channel.
On that note, I spoke at length with Derek Harding about how marketers might change their thinking on deliverability, and he wrote that up for ClickZ. I also participated in the creation of Adobe’s excellent Teaching the Email Marketer How to Fish document (no, not phish…).
Steve was very busy behind the scenes this month thinking about abuse-related topics in light of the SBL issues, but he wrote up a quick post about the Traffic Light Protocol, which is used to denote sensitive information as it is shared.
Finally, for my Ask Laura column this month, I answered questions about delivery and engagement metrics and about permissions with purchased lists. As always, if you have a general question about email delivery, send it along and I’ll consider it for the column.
I had other posts in the pipeline, but saw a link to the Litmus 2017 State of Email Deliverability Report and decided that deserved a mention here.
There’s all sorts of interesting data there, and well worth a download and read. I was, of course, interested in the “most problematic subscriber acquisition sources.” Senders having blocking issues or blacklist problems in the past 12 months use list rental, co-reg and purchased lists more often than senders that didn’t have problems.
Senders acquiring addresses through list rental are 104% more likely to be blacklisted than senders not using list rental. And they’re 47% more likely to be blocked.
These stats are the primary reason that most ESPs don’t allow list rentals, purchased or co-reg lists. They cause blocking and blacklisting. The ESP ends up having to deal with lots of problems and clean up the mess.
I’m unsurprised that lead generation by giving something away (a report, ebook, whatever) is related to problems. Most of these forms do little to no data checking and accept any and all fake data. There are fairly simple ways to enforce better data, but that does limit the spread of the information.
I am surprised to see signup through direct mail and catalog sales is so bad. Unless maybe people don’t know how to say no when asked for an email address over the phone. I know it seems awkward to say no when asked for an email address. Maybe some folks are giving fake addresses. I sometimes say I don’t have email, or just tell them no, they don’t need one.
The white paper itself is well worth a read. Go download it yourself (but don’t give them a fake email address!).
August 2017 marks 10 years of blogging. In that time we’ve written almost 2200 posts. We’ve had millions of visitors.
Read More