Recent Posts

Things people hate about your email marketing

• laura
• Asides , Industry

I found this article over on Hubspot, and I think it covers a lot of why people hate email marketing quite well.

Spamtraps are not the problem

• laura
• Industry

Often clients come to me looking for help “removing spamtraps from their list.” They approach me because they’ve found my blog posts, or because they’ve been recommended by their ISP or ESP or because they found my name on Spamhaus’ website. Generally, their first question is: can you tell us the spamtrap addresses on our lists so we can remove them?
My answer is always the same. I cannot provide a list of spamtrap addresses or tell you what addresses to remove. Instead what I do is help clients work through their email address lists to identify addresses that do not and will not respond to offers. I also will help them identify how those bad addresses were added to the list in the first place.
Spamtraps on a list are not the problem, they’re simply a symptom of the underlying data hygiene problems. Spamtraps are a sign that somehow addresses are getting onto a list without the permission of the address owner. Removing the spamtrap addresses without addressing the underlying flaws in data handling may mean resolving immediate delivery issues, but won’t prevent future problems.
Improving data hygiene, particularly for senders who are having blocking problems due to spam traps, fixes a lot of the delivery issues. Sure, cleaning out the traps removes the immediate blocking issue, but it does nothing to address any other addresses on the list that were added without permission. In fact, many of my clients have discovered an overall improvement in delivery after addressing the underlying issues resulting in spamtraps on their lists.
Focusing on removing spamtraps, rather than looking at improving the overall integrity of data, misses the signal that spamtraps are sending.

Congrats!

• laura
• Asides , Industry

Congratulations go out to Matt Blumberg for being named one of the top entrepreneurs for 2012 by Crain’s New York Business!

AOL update

• laura
• Asides

A reader has been talking with AOL about the mtain* responses that people were receiving. AOL has said both responses mentioning mtain-*.r1000.mx.aol.com are actually DNY:T1 bounces that are being presented incorrectly. Both responses should be treated the same as 421 DYN:T1.

Permission.

• laura
• Industry

• Permission-ish based email marketing
• Customers want to get mail from us!
• Some thoughts on permission
• Relevance or Permission
• Evangelizing Permission
• Ask; Don’t Assume.
• Taking Permission

AOL … again

• laura
• Asides

A number of senders are reporting that they’re getting unusual responses from AOL servers. The responses include:

Another reason not to use no-reply@

• laura
• Industry

A story from someone handling support at a UK company that regularly sends out transactional email with no-reply@company in the From: line.

The challenge of integrated marketing

• laura
• Industry

There are dozens of ways for companies to interact with customers these days. Business Insider recently posted this infographic, only to realize that they’d left off Pintrest.

Delivery reflects recipient desires

• laura
• Delivery improvement

Ken has an article today about how Pro Flowers managed to get their mail out of the bulk folder at Gmail by asking their recipients for help.

Return Path on Content Filtering

• laura
• Asides , Industry

Return Path have an interesting post up about content filtering. I like the model of 3 different kinds of filters, in fact it’s one I’ve been using with clients for over 18 months. Spamfiltering isn’t really about one number or one filter result, it’s a complex interaction of lots of different heuristics designed to answer the question: do recipients want this kind of mail?