By laura
in Industry.
Last week I saw a tweet that quoted Joel Book, Director of eMarketing Education at Exacttarget as saying
less than 20% of ppl in #emailmarketing have more than 2 yrs experience
I have this feeling that some of the industry wide issues with conflicts between “frat boys” and “utilitarians” is partly due to the lack of experience on the email marketing side. Contrast that with the ISP side, where many people have 10 or 20 years experience with email.
If we take for a fact that Joel is correct and 80% of email marketers have less than 2 years of experience, how does that affect the way email marketers approach email and delivery issues? More importantly, how does this affect deliverability? Does it affect the perception of email marketing and email marketers by the ISPs and spam blocking companies?
What does it mean for the state of the industry that so few people on one side of the equation have long term experience in email marketing and so many people on the other side of the equation have long term experience with email (and marketing)?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, triggered by one of the session moderators at MAAWG introducing me as “someone who has been in the industry since before there were ESPs.” Yes, I’ve been around a long time, and his comment is accurate, if a bit disturbing.
Being around for as long as I have doesn’t just mean I have experience dealing with different problems, but also provides a deep understanding of where we are now and how we got here. The history of delivery, spam fighting and email marketing are all intertwined but never documented. Knowing that history is vital for mapping the future.
I can’t help but think that the lack of experience of the majority of the people in this industry is hindering delivery and effective email marketing. There are so few of us who could be considered old hands, is that hindering the industry as a whole?
Tags: experience, ISP, maawg, marketer, Marketing.
By laura
in Industry.
Some news stories and links today.
Spamhaus has announced their new domain block list (DBL). The DBL is a list of domains that have been found in spam.
The DBL is managed as a “zero false-positive” list, safe to use by production mail systems to reject emails that are flagged by it. The DBL includes URIs (domains/hostnames) which are used in spam including phishing, fraud/”419″ or domains sending or hosting malware/viruses.
[...]DBL has a monitored automated self-service removal system.
There are more changes over at AOL. Annalivia has announced she is leaving AOL. Anna has done an immense amount of work with senders over the years and her departure is definitely going to leave a hole. Drop by her website and wish her luck.
What this means to you: escalation paths and such are still being worked out, but the India Postmaster team and I have spent a lot of time working together in the last couple months; they’ll take care of you. The AOL postmaster website and reputation tool should also be useful. I’ll provide any further information as I get it.
Via Al Iverson, there’s a new informational source at anonwhois.org. This provides a list of domains registered behind privacy protection services.
Recently at MAAWG I had the opportunity to listen to a talk by Joseph Menn author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet. He was a very engaging and entertaining speaker who really seemed to understand the interplay between organized crime and spammers.
Tags: AOL, domains, links, news, privacy protection, Spamhaus.
By laura
in Delivery Improvement.
Permission is always a hot topic in email marketing. Permission is key! the experts tell us. Get permission to send email! the ISPs tell us.
Marketers have responded by setting up processes to “get” permission from recipients before adding them to mailing lists. They point to their privacy polices and signup forms and say “Look! the recipient gave us permission.”
In many cases, though, the permission isn’t given to the sender, permission is taken from the recipient.
Yes, permission is being TAKEN by the sender. At the point of address collection many senders set the default to be the recipient gets mail. These processes take any notion of giving permission out of the equation. The recipient doesn’t have to give permission, permission is assumed.
This isn’t real permission. No process that requires the user to take action to stop themselves from being opted in is real permission. A default state of yes takes the actual opt-in step away from the recipient.
Permission just isn’t about saying “well, we told the user if they gave us an email address we’d send them mail and they gave us an email address anyway.” Permission is about giving the recipients a choice in what they want to receive. All too often senders take permission from recipients instead of asking for permission to be given.
Tags: opt-in, Permission.
By laura
in Best Practices.
Last week there was an article published by btobonline promoting the services of a company called Netprospex. Netprospex, as you can probably gather from their company name, is all about the buying and selling of mailing lists. They will sell anyone a list of prospects.
The overall theme of the article is that there is nothing wrong with spam and that if a sender follows a few simple rules spamming will drive business to new heights. Understandably, there are a few people who disagree with the article and the value of the Netprospex lists.
I’ve stayed out of the discussion, mostly because it’s pretty clear to me that article was published solely to promote the Netprospex business, and their point of view is that they make more money when they can convince people to purchase lists from them. Dog bites man isn’t a very compelling news story. Data selling company wants you to buy data from them isn’t either.
They are right, there is nothing illegal about spam. Any sender can purchase a list and then send mail to the addresses on that list and as long as that sender meets the rock bottom standards set out in CAN SPAM. As long as your mail has an opt-out link, a physical postal address and unforged headers that mail is legal. The only other obligation on the sender is to honor any unsubscribe requests within ten days. So, yes, it is legal to send spam.
But legal action isn’t the only consequence of spamming. Today I received the following in an email from a colleague.
I work for an email service provider with many hundreds of clients. I knew when I read that article that this company Netprospex was going to be bad news, and it turns out that I am right.
Today we got a spam complaint from our domain registrar, threatening to take away our domain. We investigated and found that the client responsible had bought a list from Netprospex. At least one person on that list found the mail to be spam and sent a spam complaint that percolated all the way up the food chain to our upstream provider and domain registrar. Now we have to go to the domain registrar with our hat in our hand and beg them not to terminate our primary domain which we have used in hundreds of email campaigns.
Needless to say, we are terminating this client, but the damage is already done and I am dreading that discussion that I have to have about how we allowed somebody to spam through our network.
Unfortunately, the cost related to cleaning up the mess created by Netprospex is not being borne by Netprospex. They make money when their customers buy lists. The customers, and the customers’ ESPs bear all the cost and consequences of the spam that’s being sent.
UPDATE: It seems everyone is getting their 2 cents in on this:
Another Reason Not to Buy Mailing Lists: John Levine
Permission Is the Power Behind Email Marketing: Scott Cohen
Targeted Opt-Out Email: Busting Some Myths: Mark Brownlow
More on Netprospex: Al Iverson
Tags: purchased lists, Spam, spamming.
By laura
in Best Practices.
Ben at Mailchimp has a post up explaining what role accounts are and why mailing to them can be a problem.
role addresses are built for functions, not people…
If you read down in the comments you will see that they talk about how some people do use role accounts for their subscriptions. Small businesses might have a limited number of email accounts with their hosting, so they use info@ or sales@ to sign up to lists. But, in many cases, sales@ and info@ addresses are intended for use by people who want to purchase from a particular company. Not for use by people who want to market to that company.
Be wary of role accounts on your mailing lists. Too many of them and compliance desks are going to start thinking your list may not be opt-in.
Tags: email address, opt-in, Spam.
By laura
in Industry.
Last September, I blogged about RPost suing Goodmail for patent infringement. Today the two companies announced they’ve reached a settlement and have forged a partnership. Goodmail will be offering RPost’s technology as an upgrade to customers and replacing their own “proof of delivery” technology with RPost’s legal service technology.
“We carefully reviewed RPost’s patented technology,” said Daniel Dreymann, President and co-founder of Goodmail Systems, Inc. “We decided that we could build the strongest product offering for these compliance products by partnering with them.”
“The combined product allows both RPost and Goodmail to do what they do best,” said Zafar Khan, CEO of RPost. “Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail protects the recipients of email by letting them know that the message comes from a trusted sender. RPost’s Registered Email service protects email senders by allowing them to prove that their message was delivered and what it said.”
Last week, RPost announced a partnership with ReturnPath to offer proof of delivery certification into the ReturnPath product line as well.
Tags: Goodmail, ReturnPath, RPost.
By steve
in Best Practices.
I saw a nicely done example of integrating email into other marketing channels over the weekend.
I was helping a friend pick out a receiver and speakers for their home theatre system on Saturday afternoon. As we were chatting over IRC there was a lot of pasting URLs back and forth, as we tried to juggle speaker components to get a nice, balanced setup on a budget that was fairly tight for a separates system.
I like Polk speakers, and NewEgg are offering some nice deals on them right now, so a lot of the URLs were for bottom of the range Polk speakers at NewEgg.
Mid-morning on Sunday, around 16 hours later, this showed up in my inbox:
It’s mail customized for me, triggered by my browsing the site the day before with a web cookie in place that identifies me as someone who has a fairly long history of ordering from them.
I think it’s “just” targetted mail about home audio speakers, triggered by my browsing in that category and not purchasing immediately. But it’s possible that it’s cleverer than that – it’s listing solely Polk speakers, and it’s showing both the ones I was looking at and the higher end ones in the same product line. It’s nicely done, either way.
It’s a great example of an email that’s been prepared for a specific recipients interests, sent at just the right time. Even though I know that it’s a semi-customized boilerplate, sent by a piece of software in response to my browsing a web site it’s good enough that as a recipient I feel like it’s the company I have a relationship with being helpful, rather than it being intrusive upsell advertising.
It might not work so well if I were a brand new customer, or if it wasn’t quite as well tuned to my interests of the day, but it’s done well.
Nice job, NewEgg.
Tags: integration, relevance.
By steve
in Industry.
For companies who are sending mail on their own behalf
- Create and send a message that recipients look forward to receiving
- Send that mail technically correctly, such that it causes no problems at the recipients ISP
For ESPs, sending mail on behalf of others
- Find (or develop) a customer base who create and send messages that recipients look forward to receiving
- Send that mail technically correctly, such that it causes no problems at the recipients ISP
That’s it, really.
By laura
in Best Practices.
Seven myths and two truths about email
My favorite:
[myth] Engagement is the new reputation. Actually, reputation metrics have always been about engagement, which is what complaint data and sender reputation reflect.
Yes. This.
Reputation, permission, all of those things are a way to quantify one simple fact: Do recipients want this mail from this sender?
Send mail people want and generally it will get into the inbox. Send stuff they don’t want (or don’t care if it shows up or not) and suffer delivery problems.
Tags: engagement, Reputation.
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