Whenever
you're starting out on a new IP address, it's important to slowly
and methodologically build a good sending reputation. The IP
address is new and unused; it does not yet have a reputation of its
own. ISPs are suspicious of mail from new, previously idle IP
addresses, as they say that the vast majority of such connections
is to attempt to delivery bad stuff, like spam or phishing
messages. (Hotmail once told me that more than 80% of time, a new
IP address connecting to them is trying to send them something
bad.) So they're pretty touchy about that.
It's not that hard to deal with,...
Email Delivery Tips
My last post focused on offering engaging content and the all-important idea of testing. Today's tips revolve around managing your identity as it relates to ISPs as well as your subscribers:
Tip #7
- Authentication Continues to Factor in Delivery
Decisions
Email authentication has become increasingly
important over the past five years, and this emphasis will
continue. Many marketers think of authentication as an
anti-spoofing or anti-spam measure, but savvy marketers recognize
the true value of authentication is that it allows ISPs to assign a
reputation to a mail stream by accurately and...
Our
last post focused on managing customer conversations and
preferences. Next up are #5 and #6 on our Deliverabilty Top 10
List:
Tip #5 - Offer Engaging
Content, Not Just Marketing
Marketers who succedd are the ones who recognize that users remain
in control when it comes to email. Mail streams that consist of
nothing but marketing material are likely to fail, as they will
experience high spam complaints and low user engagement. On the
other hand, mail containing content that the recipient finds useful
or desirable should do well as ISPs move to engagement models when
making filtering...
About
a week ago Gmail announced a "new inbox." Since then
I've seen a few frantic emails and blogs from concerned email
marketers and those who support them who believe their marketing
email will essentially cease to exist inside Gmail subscribers'
inboxes. They're using phrases like, "OMG," "Big deal," "Game
changer," and "Now what?"Rest easy. Gmail's new inbox isn't a big deal.
People fear change. Veteran Gmail users who are used to the
inbox as it's always been aren't likely to change when it's all
said and done--especially since Gmail isn't forcing the change on
users, and they'll be...
Read More »
My
colleages and I have dispensed a lot of deliverability tips on this
blog throughout the years. But wouldn't it be nice to have the most
useful nuggets of delivery-related wisdom compiled for easy
reference? Well, your wish is our command.
Over the next few posts, we will, ahem, "deliver" the top ten tips to get your email campaigns to subscribers' inboxes in today's email ecosystem Let's start it off with the first two tips ...
Tip #1 - Subscriber Engagement Is Critical to
Email Success
In years past, permission was seen as the key to having mail
accepted. But we know things are changing. As...
A
client recently asked, "Are there any deliverability issues with
using images hosted on third party CDN whose domain does not match
the domain of the sender?"
If you're not aware, CDN means Content Delivery Network. A CDN is means of making
your web pages and/or web applications load faster, by caching
content on multiple servers, then requests for that content can be
fulfilled by the nearest or most responsive available server. I
might be oversimplifying it a bit, but in my personal experience
with various CDNs, that's how they tend to work. Akamai might have been the first one-- they...
Email addresses are not permanent. In fact, a historically active email address may suddenly croak—without warning or a farewell note—much to an email marketer's dismay.
Such email addresses that vanish into the ether do come with a somewhat bland obituary, though, in the form of a non-delivery report (NDR). The NDR generally indicates a useful yet enduring error, such as: "no such user"; "mailbox not found"; "the mailbox has been deactivated"; "the recipient has moved on so please stop mailing". (OK, I may have made up the last one.) These are what are known as hard bounces.
Hard
bounces...
Each Thursday
at 11am EST, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget
user community on Twitter for a conversation about trends and
campaign ideas across the interactive marketing industry. We
call the virtual coffee chat the ExactTarget Café. We recently hosted a chat about Email Design Tips with
Kristina Huffman, Design Practice Lead at ExactTarget.
In the beginning of our chat, Twitter experienced an outage so we
moved the conversation onto the ExactTarget
Facebook page. It was a lively discussion and many tips
were shared! Participants moved over to Facebook to continue...
Read More »
The
Feeding Your Kids Foundation was a Power
of One Award winner at Connections 2012. Since its inception in
May 2010, this organization has powered messages to 12,000 families
in 85 different countries, teaching parents how to feed their
children healthier foods and instill better attitudes toward
healthy living.
THE FEEDING YOUR KIDS FOUNDATION STORY
The Feeding Your Kids Foundation runs an international program to
help children make better meal choices and develop a healthy
relationship with food to avoid childhood obesity. As part of their
work to educate parents, the team created a 42-day...
Happy
Birthday to SMS! On this day 20 years ago, Neil Papworth sent the
phrase “Merry Christmas” from his computer to the Orbitel 901
handset of Vodafone’s Richard Jarvis, and so began the great SMS
race.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “In the developing world, where smartphone penetration is low, SMS remains a key technology, enabling mobile money transfers, the sending of alerts on weather and planting advice for farmers, and distribution of health information for consumers. Globally, SMS traffic is continuing to grow and stood at 7.4 trillion messages in 2011, up 44% from the year...
Read More »
Each Thursday
at 11 a.m. EST, marketers from around the world join the
ExactTarget user community on Twitter for a conversation about
trends and campaign ideas across the interactive marketing
industry. We call the virtual coffee chat the Nexus
Café.For a recent #NexusCafe chat we asked Jeff Rohrs, VP of
marketing and leader of the research team at ExactTarget, to share
some insights from one of the latest research papers The
2012 Channel Preference Survey. The brief is part of an
ongoing research series Subscribers,
Fans, and Followers, that examines consumer behavior across
Email,...
Read More »
Each Thursday at 11 a.m. EST, marketers from around the world
join the ExactTarget user community on Twitter for a conversation
about trends and campaign ideas across the interactive marketing
industry. We call the virtual coffee chat the Nexus
Café.
A recent chat focused on evolving email marketing programs
with the new reality of social and mobile centric audiences. With
smart phones and wireless connected devices, people consume email,
Internet, social media, text messaging, and mobile apps in a single
device all day long. We discussed the challenge for interactive
marketers to stay on top...
Read More »
You are in the final stages of choosing ExactTarget as you new email service provider (ESP) and the realization that the task of either migrating your existing campaigns, or integrating a new ESP into your back-end system comes into focus. Whether you are using the services provided by ExactTarget or a consulting partner, here are the top 5 tips that we give clients to ease the burden on your team at the same time as speeding up the implementation.
-
Define your marketing objectives and
goals
Prior to engaging with your assigned services team or partner agency, it is critical that you
have...
Each week, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget Nexus partner ecosystem on Twitter for a conversation about trends and best practices in the interactive marketing industry. We call it the Nexus Café.
We chatted recently with Chip House (@cehouse) about Email Marketing Deliverability (full transcript). The nine-year ExactTarget veteran oversees the Email Marketing Deliverability team and is passionate about helping email marketers improve their deliverability and reach the inbox. Chip shared numerous practical tips on improving email delivering, spanning from how relevant...
Read More »
This time of year sees lots
of reasons for people to be out of the office...escaping to warmer
climates, skiing trips, snow days or even just the flu. If you're like many marketers out there, you are the only person in your office that hits the send button. That begs the question: who mans the send button while you're away? Does your office's email calendar simply have no sends while you're away? Does the new person in the office get a rush tutorial and then cross their fingers for success?
If you have AIM (Automated Interaction Management) on your ExactTarget account, one option is to...Read More »
Happy Holidays from everyone
on the ExactTarget Design Solutions team! To end the year with a
bang, we’re highlighting our ten (okay, a few more than ten) most
useful interactive marketing tips from 2010.-
The 6 Stages of Subscriber Experience
Performance-driven design is the foundation on which emails are created.
-
Email + Video
Take 1 and Take 2
These posts discuss support, delivery methods, benefits and the concerns of using video in email.
-
The Design Center on 3sixty
The Design Center is an all-inclusive design resource to view and download our latest design whitepapers, template source...
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 »
Over
the past few weeks, I've been posting about
escalated
spam complaints. They're scary things to have
happen. What can you do to avoid getting them? List
hygiene goes a long way. In this day and age, we're used
to having our every action turned into a
number. When you look at those numbers all day long, it
can be easy to forget that each complaint you receive is sent by a
person making a concious decision to complain about your
mailings. Escalated spam complaints come from
treating people like numbers.As part of your regular email campaign management there are a few things that you...Read More »
In my last post, I talked about something very scary -
the escalated spam complaint. When one
spam complaint can point out an underlying problem in your list
practices that shakes the foundations of your entire email
marketing campaign. If you get an escalated spam complaint,
someone from Deliverability will reach out to you personally and
walk you through what needs to be done. For your part, you
need to respond quickly.
The two most common reasons for getting one of these is appending your list or sending to very old lists. Both of these practices can cause you to send to spamtraps....Read More »
The two most common reasons for getting one of these is appending your list or sending to very old lists. Both of these practices can cause you to send to spamtraps....Read More »
Gmail's
Priority Inbox isn't doomsday for email marketing for several
reasons. First, it's got to be widely adopted and it's too early to
tell just how many are going to adopt.Second, it simply reinforces what we've been telling senders for years--get permission, be relevant, offer value, on and on. Now, unless you're doing what we've been telling you for years your mail could be relegated to the bottom of the barrel. (That is if anyone adopts Priority Inbox)
Third, in practice priority inbox has already been happening for years. What do you look for first when you open your email?...Read More »
