Recent Posts

Long posts and little time to write them

It seems I’ve hit the wall on short and easy blog posts to write recently. There’s a lot I want to talk about like the recent changes at Spamhaus, filtering in the upcoming year and where I see the industry going, some thoughts on DKIM and how folks are using it. All of these things, though, will take some focused writhing time. And right now most of my focused writing time is spent on customer work.
I don’t even have time to read other blogs to comment on things folks are saying.
So blogging is likely to be light over the next few weeks, although I’m going to try very hard to get posts up 3 times a week.

Frequency and Relevance: Insight from Actual Recipients

Last night, the email practices of Facebook, Verizon and LinkedIn sparked something of a discussion on IRC.
Rather than trying to summarize into a business language friendly post I thought I’d share the whole thing.
Warning: Includes strong language and graphic descriptions of human on salesman violence.

More on the Yahoo exploit

Exacttarget’s Carlo Catajan talks about the Yahoo exploit. My own mailbox seems to indicate this hole is closed.

Links for 1/7

Chris K. at Bronto blogs about in-store address collection and delivery issues. Chris is right, the Spamhaus issue isn’t going away any time soon. And companies collecting addresses in store / at point of sale really need to figure out how to make sure that their data capture is accurate. That means addressing everything from customers giving the wrong address to typos and other transcription errors.
Gene M. at Forbes asks Is Constant Contact the Best E-Mail Marketing Service?. I’m not sure Constant Contact is the best, but it’s nice to see that some people do realize that the occasional compliance incident just means that the ISP is actually monitoring things.
Matt B from Return Path posts his predictions for the new year. While I don’t always do predictions, I agree with all of his.
The Next Web says that Yahoo users are being compromised by an XSS exploit. I have noticed a lot more virus from Yahoo users over the last 2 days, including one person who said their account was broken into while she was on the ski slopes. It may not be exactly an XSS hack, but something is broken at Yahoo and the spammers seem to be somehow getting around Yahoo’s outbound filters.

Canada publishes updated proposed regulations for CASL

Based on initial feedback collected in 2011, updated regulations for CASL have been published by the Industry Canada. Interested stakeholders have until February 4, 2013 to comment on the proposed regulations.
Edit: to identify correct Canadian Govt Agency (Thanks, Neil!)

Increasing engagement for delivery?

I’ve talked a lot about engagement here over the years and how increasing engagement can increase inbox delivery.
But does driving engagement always improve delivery?

Take LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn has started to pop-up a link when users log in. This popup suggests that the user endorse a connection for a particular skill. When the user clicks on the popup, an email is sent to the connection. The endorsement encourages the recipient to visit the LinkedIn website and review endorsements. Once the user is on the site, they receive a popup asking for endorsement of a connection. Drives engagement both on the website and with email. Win for everyone, right?
I get lots of these endorsements, but I’ve had a few that have made me wonder what’s really going on. Are these people really endorsing my skills? If they are then why am I getting endorsements from people I’ve not seen in 15 years and why are some of the endorsed skills things I can’t do?
This morning I asked one of my connections if he really did endorse me for my abilities in Cloud Computing. His response was enlightening.

Images in the subject line

I’ve seen this trick used by a few senders recently, with varying effectiveness.

Where do they get these pictures?
While you can scatter any images you like across the body of your message, the subject line is limited to just text. But “text” is more than just “a, b, c” – using RFC 2047 encoding you can use any character you like, including many tiny pictures.
⛄ 💰 🐘 ✈ 🎁 ☂
☀|||||||☀
Experian, Vertical Response and Bronto all have some interesting things to say about the effectiveness of using these.
Finding the right glyph can be tricky. Macs have a fairly decent glyph search engine (under Edit > Special Characters… in most applications) while Windows has a fairly mediocre one (Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map > Advanced View). Both are missing some useful features, though, so I put together something better.
emailstuff.org/glyph lets you search for glyphs by name. It’ll tell you about related glyphs (“helicopter” and “airplane”, or “package” and “wrapped present”) which can help you find the right image when you don’t know it’s name. And, once you’ve chosen a glyph, it shows how to use it in various encodings (if you’re using a GUI tool or a web form to compose your emails you can probably just copy and paste, but it’s handy for manually editing messages when your composition tool isn’t unicode-friendly).
Will all your recipients be able to see these glyphs? All mail clients support utf-8 text and this sort of encoding so the only issue is whether the recipient has a font installed with the glyph in it. That’s operating system specific, rather than depending on the web browser or mail client, so if you want to test – and you probably should – you can get away with just Windows and OS X for desktop, iOS and Android for mobile.
Have fun! But don’t overdo it.

Meaningless metrics

I’ve been having some conversations with fellow delivery folks about metrics and delivery and bad practices. Sometimes, a sender will have what appear to be good metrics, but really aren’t getting them through any good practices. They’re managing to avoid the clear indicators of bad practices (complaints, SBL listings, blocks, etc), but only because the metrics aren’t good.
This made me laugh when a friend posted a link to a Business Insider article about how many website metrics aren’t useful indicators of the business value of a website. Then I found the original blog post referenced in the article: Bullshit Metrics. It’s a great post, you should go read it.
I’d say the concluding paragraph has as much relevance to email marketing as to web marketing.

Hotmail issues

A number of people, both at ESPs and on the mailops mailing list, are reporting problems at Hotmail. The most common reports are senders getting

Winding down for the holidays

I’m frantically trying to get a couple client projects finished before next week so blogging will probably be light until the New Year.