The Email Delivery Guru

Chip House: "[ExactTarget's 2009] list growth survey showed [that tactics like append, list rental and purchasing] produce low quality names, and since permission is not in place, mailing to rented, purchased or appended names can do significant harm to your deliverability, brand and ROI. Don't kill the goose to get the golden egg. Your core program can really suffer when you try to grow your email list campaign unreasonably quickly using these tactics."

So if you can't do email append or buy a list, how do you grow your subscribe base? Chip House has tips for you here.

On Wednesday, my boss, Chip House, led an excellent webinar: Expert Advice on Hitting the Inbox. In the webinar, Chip, Stephanie Miller from Return Path, Jamie Tomasello from Cloudmark, and me took turns explaining exactly how spam filters work nowadays. What you need to do , to do things “right” and keep from running over the kind of landmines that drive deliverability issues. We’ve recorded here – I recommend checking it out.

One of the questions that multiple folks asked during the webinar was, “How do I test and confirm my email deliverability success and reputation?”

Well, there are a...Read More »

Hey, today I am proud to share our new whitepaper with you. It's called "Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious About Permission and Deliverability."

In it, we've pulled together expert insights from a bunch of smart folks, including Geralmy Swint from Earthlink, Sam Masiello from McAfee, Carlo Catajan from Yahoo, and more! The advice is framed in the context of a letter to a company's executive team: If you could corner the CEO of a company and briefly tell them what they need to understand about permission and deliverability, what would you tell them?

ISP spam filters are smarter today than...Read More »

It doesn't seem to be. In 2005, plaintiff Rodney Joffe sued Acacia Mortgage Corporation for sending unsolicited SMS messaging to his cell phone. This case successfully argued that the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) applies here, that unsolicited SMS messaging is using an "automatic dialing system" to make a "call" to a "telephone number assigned to a cellular telephone service."

The court also ruled that the TCPA's application to effectively prohibit unsolicited SMS messaging is not preempted by the US Federal anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM.

Read all about it here.

(Even if it were legal, it...Read More »

Over on MediaPost's Email Insider, Return Path's George Bilbrey explains what changes for marketers now that Hotmail has been upgraded.

The changes seem to apply a razor-sharp edge to engagement, showing us that engagement continues to be necessary if you expect your email messages to land in front of your recipient's field of view.

Spamtraps (addresses you shouldn’t be mailing) end up on your list for one of the following reasons:

• Lack of permission
• Lack of address validation
• Mailing old lists
• Failure to remove old, bouncing addresses

All of these things are indicative of poor list hygiene. If you have any of these issues, your list isn’t clean. It probably looks like a spam list through the eyes of an internet service provider.

If you have a very old list, you’re going to run into spamtrap issues, especially if you haven’t sent an email message to your list in many months. Issues may also occur if you recently...Read More »

Spamtraps are bad news. If you’ve ever had a deliverability issue with a large ISP, you’ve already run into them. ISPs and blacklists regularly use spamtrap data to determine which senders to block.

Spamtraps come in three varieties: Long dead email addresses at the top ISPs (that were once valid), email addresses that never existed and addresses that anti-spam advocates put on the internet for address harvesters to find.

AOL and other top ISPs recycle long-dead email addresses into spamtraps. Addresses are converted after mailing attempts bounce for a long period of time, usually eighteen...Read More »

Pivotal Veracity reported (and AOL has confirmed) that AOL has begun bulk disabling of inactive AOL email accounts. They write, "We've heard reports from numerous ESP partners and clients that AOL has been sending back large volumes of bounces due to the deactivation of old and unused email accounts. Although the exact reasons for what constitutes an inactive email account isn't 100% clear the numbers and reports we've been seeing range anyway from the documented 30 days in their Terms of Service (this document specifically applies to screen names but also appears to cover email) to 90 days... Read More »

The Canadian government has introduced Bill C-28, the Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act, according to Canadian legal expert/blogger Michael Giest. He writes, "The bill carries a new name from the old Bill C-27 (which was titled the Electronic Commerce Protection Act), but the bill is roughly the same as the bill that passed the House of Commons last year." Click here to read more.

Savvy retailers running a successful one to one marketing programs know how important it is to be able to get your emails delivered to the inbox. It’s almost a matter of life and death, as far as marketing program success goes. Here are a few do’s and don’ts that can help to improve any retailer’s inbox delivery.

Build a solid remarketing program, focusing on recent buyers and your most active subscribers. Use your last 18 months of purchasers as the core of your marketing program. Find a useful way to engage with them once or twice a month. Stop mailing (or come up with an alternate strategy...Read More »

Occasionally a coworker or client will say, hey, don't suspend that mailing, put yourself in MY shoes, I HAVE to get this mail out, etc.

I can totally understand where a client or coworker is coming from, when they say this. Anything related to your business is likely to have a deadline. Goals. Milestones that have to be hit, in order to show success. To prove your value as an employee. To show that you're doing your job.

But now, it's time for me to ask you to put yourself in MY shoes. When we're dealing with a spam complaint issue, when we find somebody sending to a purchased list or doing...Read More »

Maximizing your deliverability can be tricky for somebody in the financial services space. There’s a lot of confusion surrounding best practices, what things you must do, or must avoid, to promote consumer confidence and prevent security or phishing issues.

My thoughts here are by no means going to be comprehensive for every single scenario; there are a lot of moving parts and different financials have different issues. But, at a high level, here are a few things that I think companies in this space should keep in mind when sending marketing or transactional email messaging.

Avoid Lead Gen or... Read More »

In response to my recent post on B2B spam sources, I received an angry comment from somebody who thinks bygones should be bygones and it really shouldn't be that big of a deal and I should just delete the spam if I don't like it. Here's what he had to say:

"Hey Al, What's the big freaking deal. Just delete the emails. I personally don't have the time to keep track of the spams and spammers. And besides, this country was founded on telemarketing, cold calling, and other means of marketing known to mankind. The company you work for probably used some form of this marketing when they initially... Read More »

I just saw a colleague at another email marketing company complain on Twitter (and rightly so) about Amazon continuing to send him books on pregnancy long after the baby has actually been born. Plus, he points out that they're losing out on the opportunity to sell him books on babies.

It got me to thinking of where I've run into this kind of thing; and it's invariably marketers who haven't really considered what constitutes the life cycle of a consumer. I'm all about deliverability; not spamming, compliance, and obeying consumer expectations, so I regularly deal with senders who violate one...Read More »

Anti-spam group CAUCE reports on the Canadian government's efforts to resurrect comprehensive anti-spam legislation. They include a statement from the federal government's Minister of Industry, Tony Clement, highlighting a commitment to move forward: "The federal government is committed to the passage of the ECPA and will act to reintroduce the bill as quickly as possible."

View the CAUCE website to read all about it.

Today, ReturnPath announced that their certification standards are tightening. Specifically, mail comprised of only third-party advertising will no longer qualify for ReturnPath Certified (formerly Sender Score Certified) status.

In an announcement to affected clients, they write that "on April 30, 2010, Certified status will no longer be available for email streams strictly comprised of 3rd party marketing. These email streams will be eligible for Safe status only, continuing to receive a level of benefits and reporting not available elsewhere. 'Third party marketing' is defined as email-based...Read More »

ReturnPath contacted us today (and posted to their blog) to tell us and the world that Yahoo has agreed to automatically enable links and images for senders on the ReturnPath Certified whitelist (formerly known as Sender Score Certified). From the context of the emailed announcement, I believe that ReturnPath will be contacting SSC-whitelisted entities to work with them to ensure that the proper information is submitted to Yahoo to ensure that things work smoothly in this regard. For more information, view Alex Rubin's blog post on the topic.

My esteemed colleague here at ExactTarget, Phil Schott, was tapped to guest blog about his experiences in our industry over on the Word to the Wise blog. Check it out!

Wendy Davis reports for MediaPost that Maine has repealed "An Act To Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices Against Minors," a 2009 law that attempted to prevent misuse of minors' medical data for marketing purposes. The law was worded in such a way to essentially apply far beyond just medical data, raising potential constitutional issues and creating a problem for some marketers advertising to individuals in Maine.

Now if they would just do something about the state's interpretation of how Maine's Freedom of Access Act applies to state-held email address data.

(Hat tip: @ddayman and @jacaldwe... Read More »

As I mentioned before, Yahoo is ending support for Goodmail CertifiedEmail.

Today, Goodmail confirmed this via an email notice to Goodmail clients and Goodmail partner ESPs. In the email, Goodmail says that "Goodmail and Yahoo failed to renew their service agreement. As a result, effective 3/24/10, Yahoo will no longer accept CertifiedEmail messages. We hope to restore the CertifiedEmail service at Yahoo in the not too distant future, but for now our customers are advised to plan on sending plain (non-CertifiedEmail) messages to Yahoo as of March 24."

We're already working with Yahoo to ensure...Read More »