List Of Email Services

When people talk about the basic elements of a successful email marketing campaign, there are a lot of facets to consider—responsive design, relevant messaging, personalization, pertinent send time, and beyond. But one facet of a successful email campaign that many marketers regrettably overlook is deliverability. After all, no matter how great the email, if it doesn’t reach the inbox, it can’t be effective.

Which brings us to Sky Angel.

Sky Angel came to ExactTarget in 2007 after experiencing deliverability issues sending emails from their internal servers. As a faith and family television...

According to a recent survey by Accenture, US home and auto insurance customers are choosing digital sources for insurance quotes and other related information more than ever before. While 76% of consumers prefer to set up and pay for their insurance policies in person with an agent, 58% indicated a preference for doing so via the Web. (Respondents were allowed to choose more than one answer.)

If consumers are seeking digital outlets and want to work directly with an agent, then why not make insurance agents’ jobs easier and give them the necessary tools?

How can insurance companies make it...

Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing guest articles from experts in the realm of content marketing. This week, Josh Miles writes.

Josh Miles is principal and founder of Miles Design, a branding firm specializing in branding and website design for professional services and software firms. Josh is the author of the new Content Marketing Institute book Bold Brand: The New Rules for Differentiating, Branding, and Marketing Your Professional Services Firm.

“It will look like you guys are on everywhere, even if you’re not.”

Our media buyer always had a way of helping our clients make the...

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...

Yahoo has announced that they are closing down their Chinese email service. Any mail sent after August 19, 2013, may not be received by its intended recipient unless they have sign-up with Alibaba's AliCloud service (in which case mail will be received until the end of 2014).

This brings up a question that is similiar (but not quite the same) as one that we have dealt with previously when you had a domain that was in transition when a partnership was winding down: How do you deal with the shutdown of an entire domain?

In this case, you know that the domain is closing. You also know the date upon...

You can have a massive subscriber list and a powerful subject line ready to impress, but without the right email designer, your subscribers will be deleting your email long before they notice the CTA.

A highly skilled email designer is a crucial member of your email marketing team, as ExactTarget Regional Manager, Services (Central Region) Chris Studabaker points out. In a recent column for MarketingLand, Chris argues for six required skills that marketers should consider when hiring a designer for an email marketing campaign.

Be sure your next email designer is the best you’ve ever hired...

All legitimate commercial emails have an unsubscribe link or two in the message body to enable recipients to stop receiving future messages if they so choose. Ideally, most unsubscribe requests from recipients are facilitated by this direct mechanism.

As email marketers know, however, there are many other ways by which recipients can directly or indirectly choose to stop receiving periodic emails: e.g., by replying with the word "unsubscribe" (or some similar variant) in the subject or the message body, or by hitting the "This is spam" button which generates a feedback loop report, creating a...

Everything was going fine. You had set up your email marketing campaigns properly, all of your subscribers were double opt-in, you were sending emails on the right frequency, and your content was exactly what you had promised.

As far as you knew, people loved this stuff.....

But then, out of the blue, Gmail and the other ISPs started blocking your emails! But why? Why? Because those subscribers aren't interacting with your email anymore. They've become disinterested. They've become what are now known as 'the un-engaged.'

Just sending email to your subscribers isn't good enough

Just sending email...

What is the easiest way to comply with ExactTarget's Anti-Spam Policy?

First things first... What is ExactTarget's Anti-Spam Policy? If you have a look at the policy, you'll find that we expect that our customers "will use our software only to send emails to customers and prospects that have directly consented (opted-in) to receive email."  In a nutshell, the answer is found in two simple words: "No surprises."

Clients often ask about the propriety of engaging in buying or renting lists, or engaging the services of an append house. All of these are against the Anti-Spam Policy.

To understand why,...

When I am dealing with blocklist issues, it is not unusual for someone to ask me, "Well, why doesn't the blocklist operator just tell us what the spamtrap addresses are?" At first blush, this would seem to be an outstanding question.

But, the issue isn't really quite that simple. These lists of addresses are the bread and butter of the blocklist operator. (See, now the picture makes sense!)

Blocklist operators look at their lists of spam traps as sources of information--and the source of their livelihood. They view them the same way that journalists view their sources of information. In fact,...

I recently got an email asking what we would call an email address that used to belong to a person but no longer does. The answer is that these addresses are still called "spam traps"--the big difference is that we have several categories of spam traps now.

These days, we seem to be dealing with three main types of spam traps:

1. "Pure" traps: These are accounts that never existed and aren't used to sign up for any mail streams. If they are published, they're published in hidden places (such as comments on web pages).
2. "Typo" traps: These are relatively new traps that we have had to start dealing...

Joanna Roberts of Return Path explains that Gmail "does not have a traditional feedback loop available to senders." Unlike Yahoo, Hotmail, and various other ISPs, Gmail has not implemented that automated mechanism that allows us to help you track and unsubscribe people who tell their ISP that your mail should be considered spam.

That's is indeed a bummer, but don't despair. Joanna goes on to explain that as long as you're authenticating your mail with SPF or DKIM, have a good sending reputation, and have implemented the list-unsubscribe email header functionality, Gmail will display an...

Permission-based email has become the foundation of successful one-to-one marketing, and a company's database of email subscribers is one of its most valuable assets.

And with good reason! As our 2012 Channel Preference Survey revealed, 66% of US online consumers report making at least one purchase that was triggered by an offer received via email. And for BtoB marketing, nothing tops email for aiding the customer’s buying decision. In a 2012 article, BtoB Magazine reported that 59% of BtoB marketers say email is their most effective channel for generating revenue.

At the recent 2013 MarketingShe...

Email subscribers stop engaging for a number of reasons: message volume, frequency, irrelevancy, etc. But many companies fail to adjust their programs to re-engage these subscribers.

This week, I had an opportunity to visit with our 3sixty Live group in Dallas for a lively discussion on re-engagement campaigns.The group shared examples of successful re-engagement programs, including a great success story from Half Price Books. Last month they were looking for a solution to improve deliverability, open, and click through rates. After reviewing the data of their current subscriber list, they...

As a follow-up to the article I wrote for ClickZ the other day, I wanted to talk a bit more about the use of technology and the adoption of best practices in large B2B organizations.

My research for the ClickZ article looked at B2B companies on the Fortune 500* and their adoption of modern marketing tools. But when you look at the raw data, it becomes clear that there are three easy lessons for any B2B marketer.

Lesson 1: Technology is only the beginning

When adopting radical new technologies, the technology itself is often only part of the story. The other part is a shift in thinking or action....

When running a re-engagement campaign, what's the most important part? Is it the email list or the creative? While there are rarely easy answers, this question gives an opportunity to look at one of the more important parts of your email program.

The short answer to this question is... the list. Re-engagement campaigns are notorious for low response rates, and with good reason. These are programs that tend to target poorly gathered and/or poorly engaged list segments--in other words, email addresses that aren't responding well to your offers to start with. While I have seen response rates...

Spamhaus issues are on the rise.

We believe that Spamhaus has recently taken a greater interest in watching for list hygiene issues from known brands, particularly retailers. Activity has particularly ramped up in the third and fourth quarters of 2012, and we suspect this to continue into 2013.

Spamhaus wasn’t ignoring retailers previously, but the volume of issues, as reported by multiple ESPs and ESP clients, is definitely higher of late. It is our understanding Spamhaus recently brought live a bunch of new spam trap addresses that they didn't previously utilize when monitoring for known...

And so it begins again. The Consumer Electronics Show is currently running in Las Vegas and is full of technological advances and surprises. This year’s show boasts over 155,000 attendees and more than 3,000 exhibitors.

We know many of you are already at CES, and are looking to make the most of this crazy technology show. Whether you are exhibiting or just attending, it is important to remember some digital marketing guidelines to help make the most of your networking. So here are some quick tips on how to leverage mobile, social, and email to maximize your experience.

1. Create Twitter Lists to...

There's no shortage of advice aimed at interactive marketers today. In fact, your inbox probably fills up every day with tips, tricks, and helpful hints. But how much of that advice is really useful?

This week, I'll present a series of posts that reveal some of the top things consumers want from marketers—backed by solid, statistical data. Then we'll go a step further, providing real, actionable recommendations to help you improve your cross-channel marketing program.

Ready to get started?

TIP #1: Consumers want email... but not just email!

Our research tells us that 77% of consumersprefer email...

During the holiday season, most retailers want to maximize their email revenue. This time of year it's very tempting for senders to dig deep into their databases. Hey, let's send an email to everybody from ten years ago. Hey, let's reactivate those bounced addresses - maybe some of them will deliver now. More email means more money, right?

But, it's never quite that simple. It actually seems to lead to deliverability problems just about every time somebody digs up and mails to that old list.

It all starts on Black Friday. Or "Blacklist Friday," as a representative for another ESP put it. (What...