Recent Posts

Goodmail

Goodmail made a splash on the email marketing and ISP industries a few years ago by announcing their CertifiedEmail program. They guaranteed that using their certification would result in email going directly to the inbox, and all images in the email would be displayed by default. Senders using Goodmail would pay money, per message, and Goodmail would split that money with the receiving ISP.
This sounds very much like a situation where everyone wins. The senders get their mail to the inbox with images turned on. The receiving ISPs get a little money to deliver email and offloads some of their sender screening onto a third party. Individual recipients know that this email is certified and that it’s safe to click on links in the email.
In the time since CertifiedEmail has been announced, however, there seems to be very little adoption. Sure, receivers do seem to be signing up, a little. AOL and Yahoo have been using CertifiedEmail for a while. In summer 2007, a number of cable providers announced they would be using CertifiedEmail as well.
Senders, on the other hand, don’t seem to be adopting this as fast as Goodmail might like. The Federal Government recently announced they would be sending email signed by Goodmail and some large online companies, Overstock.com among them, are also sending with certified email. In order to get more companies to sign up for CertifiedEmail, Goodmail announced in August 2007 that they had partnered with CheetahMail, Episilon and Axciom Digital to provide free CertifiedEmail to qualifying customers of those ESPs.
Why might companies not be adopting CertifiedEmail? I have a couple of thoughts.

Spam Documentary on TV

A few months back John Levine participated in a Canadian TV Show called Spam, The documentary. This will be shown on Court TV on Sept 18th at 11pm or the 19th at 3am.
John says

Visiting customers through email

A few months ago I was working on a deliverability problem with a new client. They are a social networking site heavily branded with black background and pink text. One of the questions they asked me during the course of troubleshooting their delivery problems was if sending pink and black branded emails to match their site branding would decrease their deliverability.
That was actually a more interesting question than many I have received and led to the following analogy. A website is your showroom on the web. It is the equivalent of a brick and mortar store where people visit you and come to see what you have to offer for sale. Heavily branding the store is the right thing to do.
An email, be it marketing, transactional or relationship, is the equivalent of sending a traveling salesperson to someone’s house. That sales person is entering the customer’s space. In this case overly branding your presence in the customer’s space which can annoy or completely turn off your customers.
Branding emails to customers is a good thing; it builds brand recognition and customer relationships. Just remember, though, that you’re entering the customer’s space. Be respectful of that space.
As an aside, I did actually ask AOL about the color of email would decrease delivery. The nice folks over there did reply “AOL SAYS NO PINK!” But I’m fairly sure they weren’t serious.

Real Spam?

Both Al and Mickey have written astute comments on Kevin Sirtz’s article about how permission is not important in web[sic] marketing.
It is pretty clear to me that Mr. Sirtz does not really understand email, and not just because he conflates email with the web. Anyone who has been involved in the email marketing space knows that permission is the lynchpin of good deliverability and high ROI.
This is not to say that Mr. Sirtz is not having the experience he states. With very small lists you can get away with personal relationships substituting for permission. Senders of any size, though, do not have the relationship with their recipients and need to actually send email only to those recipients who have requested to receive email from the sender.

Permission, Part 1

Before I can talk about permission and how a mailer can collect permission from a recipient to send them email I really need to define what I mean by permission as there are multiple definitions used by various players in the market. Permission marketing was a term coined by Seth Godin in his book entitled Permission Marketing.
The underlying concept beneath permission marketing is that all marketing should be “anticipated, personal and relevant.” Others have defined permission marketing as consumers volunteering or requesting to be marketed to.
When I talk about permission in the email marketing context I mean that the recipient understood *at the time they provided the sender with an email address* that they would receive email from that sender as a result.
Let’s look at some of the relevant parts of that definition.

Consent and laws

Derek Harding wrote an article at ClickZ talking about consent and how the email marketing industry hasn’t yet learned that consent is important.

Solving delivery problems

“The only solution to our delivery problems isn’t double opt-in, is it?” A question I get quite frequently from clients and potential clients. In the vast majority of cases the answer is no, confirmed (double) opt-in [1] is not the only solution to delivery problems. In fact, there are delivery issues that confirmed opt-in will do nothing to solve.
Many other delivery sites and deliverability experts will tell clients that the solution to their deliverability problems is to switch to confirmed opt-in as a method to collect email addresses. This overly simplistic solution only treats one possible source of delivery problems, the collection of addresses. It does not address data hygiene issues, technical delivery issues or complaints.
While address collection is important, the best address collection processes on the planet cannot fix sloppy data handling, failure to unsubscribe recipients, or non-existent bounce handling. All of these factors play a role in delivery. It is critical to identify the underlying source of delivery problems before advising anyone on how to fix it.
Over the course of the next few blog posts, I am going to take a look at the various issues that affect delivery: permission, data hygiene, bounce handling, complaints and authentication. I’ll talk about what is important and what senders need to look for and be aware of when they’re trying to troubleshoot delivery issues.
[1] There is some disagreement between senders and anti-spammers about the correct terminology to use. Senders use double opt-in to describe the process, anti-spammers use confirmed opt-in. I am using both terms here to mean the same process.

7th circuit court ruling in e360 v. Spamhaus

Mickey has some commentary and the full ruling up on Spamsuite. In short the appeals court affirmed the default judgment, vacated the judgment on damages and remanded the case back to the lower court to determine appropriate damages.
There are a couple bits of the ruling that stand out to me and that I think are worthy of comment.
Spamhaus made a very bad tactical decision by initially answering and then withdrawing that answer. The appeals court ruled that action signaled that Spamhaus waived their right to argue jurisdiction and that they submitted to the jurisdiction of the court. Based on this, the appeals court upheld the default judgment against Spamhaus. Not necessarily the outcome any of us wanted, but that doesn’t set any precedent for future cases unless defendants answer and then withdraw the answer. Specifically on page 12 of the ruling the court says:

First Post

Everybody’s doing it, blogging I mean. It struck me this was a good place to write about delivery issues I encounter in my job and solutions I’ve found for the problems my clients have. This would also be a place to comment on new issues I’ve seen from ISPs.I’ve listed a couple delivery blogs I read over on the blogroll. I’ll also be updating that with some marketing related blogs I’ve found useful.Thanks for stopping by!