The
blogs were all-a-twitter at the end of January, announcing the
"DMARC" Group and talking up its stated goals with regard to
enabling better phishing prevention.
The media perhaps didn't get the full story --
it's not so much a "group" waiting for other people to sign up and
join -- it’s more that a small group of smart folks (who, like us
are already active in industry groups Online Trust
Alliance and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group) sat down
and solidified the technical specifications for an add-on to email
authentication that was already starting to be used.
DMARC is essentially...
Read More »
As
holiday sending is starting to ramp up this year, it’s important to
maintain good deliverability to ensure your message makes it to the
inbox. Last year, ExactTarget saw
record high send volumes, which means your competition just got a
little steeper. Here are some tips to
help you make it to the inbox:
-
Optimize your subscription path—Ensure email
address accuracy with a confirmation message and only send to
subscribers who confirm. This will help
protect from spam traps, bad email addresses and increased bounces,
all of which are used to determine your fate at the ISPs.
- Evaluate list...
Read More »
Many
organizations don’t fit squarely into a B2B or B2C bucket. More
often, companies have multiple marketing teams, divisions or
business units that focus on different marketing and sales
objectives. One team may manage vendor or partner relationships;
another drives online sales; while yet another supports a lengthy
direct sales cycle.
We are in the midst of a transformational shift in the Revenue
Performance Management market whereby:
- The buying process has changed; customers now touch dozens of
online and offline information sources before they ever talk to a
sales representative or buy...
Read More »
We all know that sending an mass
email can be stressful. But there's nothing quite like a last
minute "you have to send this NOW" type of email to really get the
blood flowing.
In my position as a Product Support Specialist, I was in charge of
sending our product marketing emails, as well as answering all
emails and phone calls that came into our Support queue. While
either of these jobs would have kept me busy enough, together they
proved to be especially stressful.
On one crazy day, while our Support queue was overflowing with
requests, I was tasked with the job of sending a product...
Read More »
What is Optimization? It’s one of those buzzwords thrown out in
nearly every interactive campaign conversation, so this seemed like
a simple, innocent question. However, after interviewing close to
twenty interactive marketers and industry experts, I realized it
was anything but simple. There is no interactive marketing
definition of Optimization. There is no 3-step process to follow.
And there definitely isn’t an “Easy” button that does it for
you.
Through my conversations, I heard many different answers to my
simple question: “What does the word optimization mean to you in
the context of...
Read More »
Social networking has certainly changed the ways in which people
communicate and interact in the world today, shifting much of it
from a physical environment to an online environment. In an effort
to increase the amount of interaction that takes place amongst
peers, a group of ExactTarget Slingshot
interns have launched a social networking campaign endeavouring
to give back to the Indianapolis community in which they work. "The
major goal is to host a community service project at the end of the
summer that will be comprised of only intern volunteers," said
Lauren Hobbs, one of the program...
Read More »
Over the next few blog posts, I’m going to go over some tactical
recommendations for overcoming bulking. Being delivered to
the bulk folder is a major concern because it means subscribers are
not seeing their emails.
When it comes to deliverability, most people worry about getting
blocked at a domain and getting a bunch of bounces. This is a
serious problem, and is usually due to major reputation
issues. However, a block is pretty easy to spot since your
bounce rate will spike from 1% to 20% overnight. Bulking is
more subtle, but no less impactful on the effectiveness of your
email...
Read More »
Return
Path's Christine Borgia writes, "
We have confirmed with both Gmail and Hotmail that
they made recent updates to their filters."
We're not seeing anything too widespread here at ExactTarget, but
there have been a few instances where a client's mail may be going
to the bulk folder at either ISP now, but it wasn't
before.
What's the fix? The ISPs don't ever tell us exactly what
they've changed, so we can't tell you EXACTLY what to do to fix it.
But what we can tell you is that ISPs are looking closer and closer
at senders, trying to find ones who don't follow permission best
practices or...
Read More »
We get asked a lot of questions in the email marketing world, but
there’s one that tends to come up more often than most:
What’s the best time and/or day to send emails?
I’d love to be able to tell you that the best time to
send an email is at 6:42 AM on Wednesday morning.
Unfortunately, however, it’s just not that easy. The truth is
that the best time to send varies from industry-to-industry and
even company-to-company –
there is no single, perfect time to
send. 
Here’s
why. I bet that your company is pretty unique, catering to a
fairly unique set of customers. Your customers will...
Read More »
The new Social Inbox platform from Facebook is very new. There are
so many unknowns that it makes it hard to provide any substantive
advice on what clients and other savvy marketers should be doing or
watching out for. For now, allow me to share with you a roundup of
first thoughts on the new Facebook messaging platform from a
variety of smart folks.
David
Daniels of the Relevancy Group offers a
clear and consise overview of what Facebook announced during
launch. Highlights include rich media/attachment support, relevancy
control and control over message threading.
Over on
ClickZ, Christopher...
Read More »
Deliverability: Holiday Smackdown Edition
The holidays are the time of year
when email marketing becomes a contact sport. Retailers are
notorious for cranking up the email volume during the holidays,
especially around Black Friday/Cyber Monday (the weekend after
Thanksgiving). Everyone knows that there's a delicate balance
between pushing a few more emails and burning out your list with
unsubscribes and complaints. So what can we do to accommodate
the extra emails, cut through the clutter that your competitors are
so inconsiderately creating, and keep our lists healthy?
Some common holiday...
Read More »
We come across all manner
of email hosting solutions when helping customers get
their email through. I had the pleasure last week of
working with Red
Condor for a customer whose email appeared to be
disappearing for a few of their recipients. Red Condor is an
outsourcing solution for email. They give their
administrators and end users a lot of control over the final
disposition of the email. Red Condor was one of the best
companies for us to work with to resolve inbox
deliverability.
As it turns out, Red Condor marks all bulk email, whether its
transactional or marketing, in the subject...
Read More »
You have a brand new IP address
and are ready to start sending some emails. Now what? Whether you
are a new client starting from scratch or an existing client adding
a dedicated IP for a new division or brand, IP ramp-up can be a
daunting task. Many of us marketers have tight timelines to work
with and need to start sending today, not tomorrow. However, I have
seen it time and time again where clients who don’t properly warm
their IP dig themselves into a deliverability black hole that can
be extremely challenging to get out of.
The main question I get from
clients is, “Why do I have to ramp-up...
Read More »
I'm always surprised when I hear the following from a client:
"Well, our revenue's off a bit off so we decided that we'd email to
our entire database including really old addresses and some
addresses we're not sure how we acquired. I knew it'd cause
problems and I told them it would, but my boss, the (insert big
title here), said we had to do it."
If you ever find yourself in
that position and the boss isn't listening to you, hopefully
they'll believe the message from experts at Yahoo, Earthlink,
McAfee, ReturnPath, and elsewhere who contributed to our latest
whitepaper,
Letters to the...
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 »
Goodmail has just informed us that as of Monday, February 1st,
how Yahoo will handle Goodmail CertifiedEmail messages delivered to
Yahoo recipients will changes. Previously, Goodmail-certified
messages were guaranteed inbox delivery with images and links
enabled. Goodmail-certified messages will continue to be delivered,
but inbox vs bulk folder delivery may vary based on unknown
factors. I assume that the reputation of the sender is the
primary factor there, but that is a guess on my part.
Goodmail has indicated to us that they are in discussions with
Yahoo regarding the future of...
Read More »
Our previous blogs,
Connections
Extreme Makeover: AAA Ohio Redesign and
Connections
Extreme Makeover: MarketingExperiments Redesign covered the
Design Solutions teams’ redesigns for
AAA Ohio and MarketingExperiments. To finish up, we’d like to share
our thoughts on our final redesign.
Pier 1
Imports is a retailer that focuses heavily on unique furniture,
home décor and accessories. Based on our conversations with Pier 1,
the bulk of their customer base falls around females in the 50-60
age range. High quality products are marketed through the channels
of print, in-store collateral, web, and...
Read More »
I read a great post today by Ken Magill entitled,
Let's Play the Email Blame Game!
As usual, Mr. Magill's material is frank and sensibly presents the
notion, dare I say fact, that bad things happen when you stray
from email marketing and deliverability best practices. And,
wait for it... Often, there's no one to blame but
yourself.
Amongst the cardinal sins mentioned in the post is that dusting off
the house file and sending to really old addresses will get you
into trouble.
Although not mentioned in the post, another holiday treat for
receivers (and subscribers) is the thought that if...
Read More »
Do you ever feel like you're outside in the cold, looking in on
someone else's wonderful celebration? Is that what you felt
like this weekend, when you looked at your Yahoo test box and saw
other people's emails being delivered yet yours were delayed?
It's not fair! You send good email. You get low
complaints. Your users are engaged. This cannot
be!
When I worked in network abuse, the department responsible for
stopping spam coming out from ISPs, I hated this time of
year. You pretty well work from Thanksgiving straight through
to New Year’s including weekends, along with the mail...
Read More »
I ran across
this blog
post on the DMA UK's Email Marketing Blog today. In it, Simone
Barratt talks about what you should do about inactive recipients on
your list. (Apologies; I've lost track of which other blog linked
to this post.) She capably covers a lot of the marketing concerns
around inactive subscribers - what constitutes engagement, what to
consider when trying to decide whether or not to write off a list
segment.
Go back
one blog post on that very blog, and author Guy Hanson explains
how he was "gob smacked" by the thought that deliverability is a
subject that "most companies are...
Read More »
Powered by Compendium