Recent Posts

Spamming the wrong person

Chris from Cloudmark tracks a UK text spammer.

Read More

Asking smart questions

Your mail is being blocked or deferred and you’d like to know why.
Before you ask someone “why?” you should have done these things:

Read More

Quick blog housekeeping

I’ve been getting a lot of comments on posts 2 and 3 years old. Most of them aren’t very valuable comments, so I decided to shut down commenting on any threads older than 2 months.

Read More

Spam makes only 200MM dollars a year

Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Justin Rao of Microsoft and David Reiley of Google (who met working at Yahoo) have teamed up to estimate the cost of spam to society relative to its worldwide revenues. The societal price tag comes to $20 billion. The revenue? A mere $200 million. As they note, that means that the “‘externality ratio’ of external costs to internal benefits for spam is around 100:1. Spammers are dumping a lot on society and reaping fairly little in return.” In case it’s not clear, this is a suboptimal situation. The Atlantic

Read More

Non marketers speak

A couple quotes from different folks, who aren’t actually in marketing, but have insightful comments on marketing.

Read More

Outlook.com in practice

I’ve seen a few people talking about outlook.com and how it’s working. There aren’t many insights here but there are a couple.

Read More

More on Yahoo and Engagement

A friend of the blog contacted me earlier today and pointed out that the news that Dan posted about Yahoo and engagement that I blogged about last week was actually reported by George Bilbrey in a Mediapost article on August 1.

Read More

I am, after all, a geek

Not email, but science is so cool.

Read More

Yahoo looking harder at engagement

In a post this morning, Dan Deneweth from Responsys says he’s received confirmation from Yahoo that they have increased the value of engagement metrics when making delivery decisions.
The really great thing, for the ISPs, about engagement metrics is that they directly measure how much a particular email is wanted by recipients. There’s no guessing about it, it measures how engaged the recipient is with a mail. Even better is the fact that, unlike proxy metrics, engagement metrics are extremely difficult for the sender to manipulate. As a sender I can artificially lower complaints and bounces without improving the mail I’m sending. But I can’t improve engagement metrics without actually engaging my recipients.
As I wrote back in 2010:

Read More

Check what now?

A client sent me a shot of a page where they were attempting to change their preferences at a website. This is one of my long time clients, and someone who has been in email marketing for years. He tells me that he spent quite a long time staring at the screen trying to figure out what he was supposed to do to opt out.

Read More
Categories
Tags