Recent Posts

Vote for a new name

Mickey is trying to decide if his blog needs a new name. 

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Engaging subscribers

On Friday I talked about using clicks and opens as a way to monitor recipient engagement and dropping recipients who do not interact after a certain period of time. One of the critical parts of this is that a sender must send mail that encourages recipients to click and then actually tracks clicks. If a sender does not send mail that encourages recipients to interact, then using interactions as a way to measure engagement does not work.
For some types of emails this is more difficult than others. One example is newsletters. Newsletters do not always encourage recipients to click through to read the full article and many readers will not click on ads. There are a couple ways around this.
One way is the way used by Ken Magill in his Magilla Marketing Newsletter. In his newsletter there are article slugs to 4 articles, but to see the whole article a reader must click through the link. Ken can quickly see which recipients are actively reading his newsletter by tracking clicks. By writing timely and interesting articles, Ken engages his readers into interacting with his newsletter in a way he can track.
Another way newsletter recipients can be encouraged to interact with the newsletter is demonstrated by the Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society. Their newsletters contain full articles but there have lots of links. These links encourage people to click through to the website to view pictures of cute bunnies, see more stories about the cute bunnies and discover more ways the reader can help save the cute bunnies. Joanna, President of the Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society, says that adding a fun link to emails encourages people to click. She tries to put one fun link (like Howard’s Big Dig) in every email. Give the readers something to pique their interest and they will click through.
For marketing and advertising messages, there are different pressures and partial slugs may not work. Generally, market email must stand on its own and should not rely on readers having to click through to get the full offer. Most marketers also do not have lots of pictures of cute bunnies to encourage readers to click through.  Buy our product or the bunny gets it will probably generate a lot of unwanted negative publicity for a company. But there are ways to provide interaction opportunities with recipients in ways that allow senders to track the interaction. Discounts can work, or links to recommended products based on the recipient’s previous purchases. In this case it is not always about getting users to make a purchase, although that is a nice bonus, but just to click on something to indicate they are reading your mail.

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Large volumes of mail

John Levine talks about the challenge of handling large volumes of inbound email in a single mailbox. 

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Comcast "hacked"

Comcast recently had their whois registration password compromised by hackers, who then changed the authoritative DNS servers from the real ones to ones run by the hackers. Today Wired has an article saying that the hackers warned Comcast that this would happen. 

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Angry Pills Spammer

It looks like Postmaster Direct angered some pills spammer. This morning I received spam redirecting to a Canadian Healthcare pharmacy site (selling me Viagra at 73% off!) containing the footer from a Postmaster Direct email. 
The term “Joe Job” is used when a spammer deliberately uses spam to cause harm to a specific person or company. In this case, it may or may not be a Joe Job against Postmaster Direct. There have been cases of spammers stealing text and graphics from legitimate ESPs and using that text in an email. Whether that is to make the ESP look bad or the sender look more legitimate is not clear. 
Given ReturnPath’s position in the industry, though, it’s certainly possible this is an aggrieved spammer looking to inflict a little pain on one of the most trusted email certifiers. 

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Funding the lawsuit

Mickey asks if you want to be the sender that funds the lawsuit that establishes case law about your new, nifty process. 

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Israel Spam Law

Israel has passed a new anti-spam law requiring senders to only send opt-in email, according to the Jerusalem Post.
 

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Those addresses are costing you

Mark Brownlow has a post up about the hidden costs of bad email marketing. These center around brand damage, but there are other costs to poor email marketing strategies.
Previously, having old and non-responsive email addresses on a mailing list did not hurt and may have helped a reputation at an ISP. In some cases, these addresses may have even helped a reputation by increasing the number of emails delivered thus lowering the overall percentage of complaints.
More recently, some ISPs have started looking at the characteristics of recipients as part of the reputation score of a sender. If a sender is mailing a lot of abandoned email addresses, these ISPs can detect that fact. This counts against a senders reputation and may result in email ending up in the bulk folder or being blocked at the transaction.
Many senders are extremely resistant to removing old addresses from their lists. Some of the more numbers driven ones have even followed the statistics and can tell me exactly how many people ignore their email for 12 months or 18 months, and then come back and make a large purchase. This is true, sometimes people will ignore email for a long time and then come back. Keeping these people on a list may be beneficial.
However, in those recipients who ignore email (no opens, no clicks) for a long time are some addresses that have been abandoned. While these addresses are not spamtraps, repeatedly sending email to large numbers of abandoned addresses will lower the sender’s reputation over time.
All senders should have a process for dealing with non-active addresses. Allowing cruft to accumulate on a list does negatively affect reputation.

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Anger

Seth Godin writes about angry people. Every marketer should ask where their recipients are on that curve. 

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New Blog Theme

As you can see we have updated the blog theme. This is a custom theme based on the WordPress K2 theme. The overall look is much lighter and fits in better with our main website.
As part of the change I have also re-categorized all the previous posts into 4 categories: 

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