Recent Posts

Targeting and Segmentation

MarketingSherpa has a great case study of a retailer that got a 208% higher conversion (purchase) rate for a targeted email sent to a small segment (10%) of their list.

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Gevalia spamming

A number of people have contacted me over the last week pointing out that Paul Wagner was handed a negative jury verdict in his lawsuit against Gevalia and Connexus. (background Wash Post Article Washington Post verdict article, Ken Magill Article).
I spent some time this afternoon downloading different documents from Pacer trying to understand what was going on in the case and what the implications were. This lawsuit was originally filed in 2008 and has had nearly 600 documents filed with the court. Suffice it to say, I didn’t start at the beginning and work forward, I started at the end and worked backwards.
Beyond Systems, Inc. filed suit against Kraft and Connexus for spamming addresses under the California and Maryland anti-spam laws.
This recent “mini-trial” assessed 3 questions:

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Services, abuse and bears

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about handling abuse complaints. As a bit of a throwaway I mentioned that new companies don’t always think about how their service can be abused before releasing it on the unsuspecting internet.
Today’s blog post by Margot Romary at the Return Path In the Know blog reminds me that it’s not always new companies that don’t think about abuse potential before launching services.

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Report Spam button

Cloudmark has an interesting discussion about the Report Spam button and how it’s used.

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Working as intended

There’s a certain type of sender that thinks every ISP block or email delivered to the bulk folder is a false positive. They’re so sure that the filters aren’t actually supposed to catch their mail that they’ll spend any amount of money and do every possible thing to get their mail to the inbox.
The problem for these senders, though, is that their mail is exactly the type of mail filters are designed to catch. They’re sending mail without recipient permission. I’m not talking about the lists that get a few typos or problem addresses on them. I’m talking about senders that buy and trade mailing lists. I’m talking about senders that don’t believe they have to have permission to send mail.
This mail getting filtered is a sign that the filters are working as intended. They’re keeping the unsolicited email out.
A lot of us take for granted that all commercial mail, at least that isn’t selling fake watches or herbal viagra, is always sent with permission. But there’s an awful lot of mail out there that doesn’t even have a minor fig leaf of permission. Filters stop that mail. And senders have very little recourse when they do.

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Deliverability of Facebook.com email addresses

Christopher Penn at What Counts did some testing to see what delivery to Facebook.com addresses looks like. It looks pretty grim.
 

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Address verification

In the comments on my Address Verification in Real Time Ken asks:

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Scam, Scam, Scam

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about phishers is how incredibly creative they can be in writing text that encourages recipients to open their emails.
There have been two separate incident recently that inspired me to talk about phishing.
The first was watching viruses propagate through my local neighborhood mailing list. I live in Silicon Valley and we do have an email list for neighbors to talk, plan and generally share information. Last week one of the neighbors got infected with a virus, and their address started posting links to more viruses to the list. Over the weekend I watched half a dozen neighbors get infected and post more viruses to the list.
The second is the dozens of messages I’ve been receiving telling me there are naked photos of me on the Internet. They have a couple different forms. Some pretend to be concerned friends worried that my private photos have leaked. Others threaten legal action or that the police are investigating me. Still others tell me I’ve ruined a friendship by sharing these photos.
None of those things are true, of course. They’re all trying to get me to open a file and infect my machine with some virus or another.

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Engagement in email

From Tim Roe at eConsultancy.com: Is engagement email marketing finally here?
Tim lays out a number of factors for why engagement is important in email marketing and how to use engagement to improve ROI.

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A quick comment on commenting

I don’t have a published comment policy. Most people around here are polite enough I don’t think one is needed. There are a couple things I feel I should say, though.

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