Blog Links
Things you need to read: 2/5/16
Ask the Expert: How Can Email Marketers Stay Out of Gmail Jail and in the Inbox? The expert in question is an old friend of mine, Andrew Barrett. I met Andrew online in the late 90s, and we worked together (briefly) at MAPS. He was out of email for a while, but I’m pleased he came back to share his talents with us. The information in the article is valuable for anyone who struggles with getting to the Gmail inbox.
Unclutter Your Inbox, Archive & Keep Your Messages. Shiv Shankar talks about some new features at Yahoo Mail. With a simple click, you can archive email so it’s available to search, but not cluttering up your inbox. One of the things that jumped out at me from that article is that Yahoo is providing 1 TB of storage. That’s more than Google!
The EEC is doing a survey on the impact of CASL and want to hear from marketers. Go check out their blog post and take their survey.
Sparkpost has a guest blog from Alex Garcia-Tobar, co-founder of Valimail about common DKIM failures. I’ve met Alex a few times and I’ve always found him a pleasure to talk to. Alex is somewhat new in the email space, but he really gets some of the challenges in the authentication space. A lot of the issues he mentions in that blog post like lack of key rotation and shared keys are some of the technical debt I was talking about in my predictions for 2016 post.
What links have you read this week that are worth sharing?
Links for 1/7
Chris K. at Bronto blogs about in-store address collection and delivery issues. Chris is right, the Spamhaus issue isn’t going away any time soon. And companies collecting addresses in store / at point of sale really need to figure out how to make sure that their data capture is accurate. That means addressing everything from customers giving the wrong address to typos and other transcription errors.
Gene M. at Forbes asks Is Constant Contact the Best E-Mail Marketing Service?. I’m not sure Constant Contact is the best, but it’s nice to see that some people do realize that the occasional compliance incident just means that the ISP is actually monitoring things.
Matt B from Return Path posts his predictions for the new year. While I don’t always do predictions, I agree with all of his.
The Next Web says that Yahoo users are being compromised by an XSS exploit. I have noticed a lot more virus from Yahoo users over the last 2 days, including one person who said their account was broken into while she was on the ski slopes. It may not be exactly an XSS hack, but something is broken at Yahoo and the spammers seem to be somehow getting around Yahoo’s outbound filters.
Links Sept 29, 2011
Al Iverson has a post up about his experiences with customers who try to acquire email addresses through appending.
J.D. Falk has a post up about the history of DKIM.
News and links 12/31/09
We’re iced in here in DC so I’ve been catching up with some industry news while camped in front of a heater and the TV.
Best of the ESPs by Forrester Research. Congrats to ET and Responsys for coming out on top. The results, as reported by MediaPost, match reasonably well with my overall impressions of the industry (so they must be right!)
Return Path is rolling out a new version of SenderScore. A welcome change for those of us who regularly refer to an IP’s sender score and find it doesn’t match other data.
CAUCE has done a series of posts looking back at significant events in spam over the last decade.
Al has a retrospective on various data breaches affecting email addresses over the last few years.
Happy New Year, everyone!
Links Post
Lifecycle Marketing on Bronto Blog. A good summary of issues in marketing to customers as they move through a relationship with recipients.
Blocked email: why me? on Cloudmark’s blog. A good introduction to blocking issues.
Tamara’s links for 4/16. She’s found a lot of good posts here, including multiple posts about unsubscribes and others on improving your email marketing program.
Speaking of unsubscribes, Loren McDonald discusses how the location of the unsubscribe link can affect reputation and email performance.
Information you should know
MailChimp is using microformats technology to allow recipients to add senders to their address book from the subscription page. All senders should tell recipients what address mail is coming from at the point of subscription and encourage recipients to add the senders to their address books. This new technology simplifies that for the recipient.
Denise Cox posts about a recent conference she attended in London looking at what makes email valuable. She has many good suggestions on how to improve your ROI, but captures the essence of getting a good ROI on mail in 3 sentences.