Recent Posts

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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Yahoo suing lottery spammers

Yahoo filed suit against spammers using the Yahoo trademarks in lottery spam on May 19th. 
 

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More evidence the DMA does not get it

A friend of mine sent me a link to a blog a few weeks ago. Jeff Nolan points out that to get to content on the DMA website one must go through a registration process. Not only do you have to register, but the registration requires you first search the DMA database to see if you are already registered. Jeff has screen shots of the process.
I fully understand the desire to control access to information put on the web, and the desire to know who is reading your stuff. And, of course, the DMA is all about collecting personal information in order to provide meaningful targeted advertising to recipients. If this is not their goal with the website, then there is no reason to require registration.
Taken with the EEC fiasco, it demonstrates that the DMA is not a leader in online marketing.

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Hard drive failure

I’m feeing a bit disconnected today. See, my hard drive failed last night and my laptop would not boot. Thanks to the local Apple store Genius bar and Apple Care my current laptop is in getting repaired. Unfortunately, that means I am stuck on my old machine without any of my RSS feeds or bookmarks and a mail client that has taken all day to sync with my IMAP server.
Tomorrow will be better.

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Political Spam

At Adventures in Email Marketing, there is a post up this morning about political spam. It seems Anna discovered that providing her email address on her voter registration card not only results in political groups sending her email to that address, but also that political email does not have to follow the rules of CAN SPAM. The article ends with a few questions and makes some suggestions.

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Disposable or Temporary Addresses

Mark Brownlow has a really good post up today about disposable and temporary addresses and how they affect marketers trying to build an opt-in list.
I use tagged addresses for all my signups, and have for more than 10 years now. It lets me track who I gave an address to and if this mail is contrary to what I signed up for or the address has leaked, I can shut down mail to that address entirely.
Tagged addresses also have another function. One of our local brew pubs has a rewards program, spend money there, get points. As part of the signup process, they requested an email address. All the email I have received from them has been clearly branded, well designed, they are an example of how to use email right. That is until last week. Last week I received an email to the tagged address from some survey company. The survey company provided no branding, nothing.

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