Recent Posts

TWSD: Hiding the opt-out

• laura
• Best practices

This is an actual opt-out link that came in a recent email. Sadly, this is a real company, listed on the NYSE sent by a major ESP.
 

Verifying addresses after POS collection

• laura
• Best practices

Collecting email addresses at point of sale is a challenge. Some stores collect the addresses electronically, where the clerk or the customer types addresses directly into the register. Smaller stores, however, typically collect addresses on a sheet of paper at the cash register. Eventually someone takes the list and types it into whatever contact management system the store maintains.
There are all sorts of errors that can happen when someone types in an address, but those errors are only compounded when the addresses are written on a sheet of paper for later transcription. Not all of us have perfect, copperplate handwriting and many of us have barely legible scribbles. In one case I had a sender read the tag in my email address wrong causing all their mail to me to bounce.
One person found an interesting solution to the problem of illegible addresses: using Facebook’s lookup to clarify illegible addresses.

Fast and loose

• laura
• Industry

Politicians often play fast and loose with permission and data. This can cause them all sorts of problems with email delivery at major ISPs. I really expect that politicians buy, sell, transfer, spindle, mutilate and fold data. If they can use it to further their goals, they will. And, many of the consumer protection and privacy laws don’t apply to political groups.
The news that Representative Bachman may have known that some of her mailing list was taken and used by others is a surprise even to me. I talked with a few ESP reps, though, and they told me that this was mostly par for the course and that they often have a lot of delivery and compliance issues with their political clients. Many have had to suspend or terminate political clients, and a couple people mentioned SBL listings.
This isn’t a problem with just one side of the political spectrum, it seems endemic in how the game is played.
 
 

Happy Valentines Day

• laura
• Industry

From our friends at Mashable, Buzzword Valentines.
My favorite

Spamming to hide fraud

• laura
• Industry

An interesting article at NetworkWorld last month, describing spam bombs to victims of fraud and identity theft to hide the transactions and notifications from financial institutions.

The challenge of Gmail

• laura
• Industry

A lot of my sales inquiries recently are about getting good inbox delivery at Gmail. I’ve mentioned before, I can usually tell when an ISP changes things because they suddenly become the subject of a great many phone calls.
In this case, Gmail seems to have turned up their engagement filters and is sending a lot more mail to the bulk folder. I have also noticed other people are blogging about Gmail delivery problems. Al eventually determined that it was mailings sent from other IPs that were degrading the delivery of his customer’s emails.
Gmail, more than the other major ISPs, seems to not be weighting IP reputation very heavily these days. They’re looking at domain reputation and they’re using all mentions of a domain in that reputation. A lot of senders, some of them spammers, segregate their email streams (acquisition, marketing, transactional) across IP addresses in order to stop poorly performing mails from harming delivery of other emails they’re sending. But Gmail’s current filtering scheme seems designed to focus on domain reputation and minimize the impact of IP reputation.
This is making the Gmail inbox tough to reach for a lot of mailers these days. Even in cases where the mailer isn’t hiring affiliates or actively partitioning mail, if a domain is seen frequently in spam then delivery for that whole domain is hurting. Signing with DKIM and publishing a DMARC record may help. But the reality right now is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet into the Gmail inbox.

DMARC makes it a year

• laura
• Industry

Yesterday DMARC.org announced that in a year DMARC protects over 60 million mailboxes worldwide.

They really think we're stupid

• laura
• Industry

More on CASL

• laura
• Legal

Three great articles on CASL.

• Does Canada’s Anti-Spam Law Really Make It Illegal To Email a Step-Parent or Great Uncle? No.
• Does Canada’s Anti-Spam Law Really Make It Illegal To Promote a Child’s Lemonade Stand? No.
• Does Canada’s Anti-Spam Law Really Stop Small Business From Using Email Marketing? No.

HT: Neil Schwartzman

Mini Cooper and their email oops

• laura
• Best practices

I haven’t been able to track down any information about what happened, but it seems MINI USA had a major oops in their email marketing recently. So much so that they’re sending out apologies by snail mail. Pictures of the apology package appeared on Reddit earlier this week, and include a chocolate rose, some duct tape and a SPAM can stress reliever.
It’s a great example of a win-back campaign that really focuses on the recipients rather than the sender.