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April 29, 2004

Top 10 Ways to Sabotage Your Viral Marketing Program
The best thing about MarketingSherpa articles is that the headlines really need no explanation. A practical analysis of the typical mistakes made in "email to a friend" features.

April 27, 2004

Avoid Email Blacklists
Matt Blumberg has some excellent advice on improving your deliverability through engaging your customers better. I just interviewed David Rosen over at myPoints.com and he said something similar. If you have consent and provide relevant, valuable emails, then a lot of the deliverability issues simply fall away because nobody's shouting spam, and the recipients act as advocates for your mails - calling their ISPs and postmasters to make sure your email gets through.

Spam Slayer: Opting Out is Hard to Do
Tom Spring of PC World has my head shaking again with his report of how much trouble he had unsubscribing from email lists. It's hard to feel much sympathy for those email marketers who decry the impact of spam on the business, when even top companies can't get an unsubcribe process to work properly. Nor do I think much of the excuses. For years now, simple unsubscribe processes have been best practice. Some marketing heads need to be extracted from some sand.

April 26, 2004

Taking a Second Shot at Spammers
Wired News reminds us of an important point about Can-Spam; it still allows states to have their own anti-spam laws when it comes to emails that use falsity and deception. Which is good news, because it adds another swathe of lawmakers and enforcers who can go after spammers and help clean up inboxes.

April 23, 2004

Text is the new black
EmailSherpa has a whole heap of advice on how make the most of those text emails. Yeah, HTML is cool. But like the article says, if your prize-winning HTML newsletter is blocked by AOL's spam filters, then you need to think about text-only alternatives.

Happy Birthday: Turn a Special Day into Revenue
Jeanne Jennings has some practical email marketing advice on how best to use the "date of birth" demographic you've collected.

AOL changes
AOL announced that its members will be able to access their AOL mail using third-party clients like Outlook and Eudora. From my vague understanding of things technological, it doesn't look like this will impact deliverability, but it will certainly complicate the issue of how emails to AOL subscribers appear to the recipient.

* Press release

If you ever doubted the importance of email...
I was struck by this headline that crossed my inbox today, "Parliament's email goes down - whole day lost." You see, an email system collapses and we've got problems with the space-time continuum.

April 21, 2004

Can-Spam naughty, naughty
According to a study conducted by JupiterResearch, even top notch marketers are failing to comply properly with the requirements of Can-Spam. Among their findings from surveying "leading email marketers", the frankly soul-destroyingly astonishing fact that "Nearly one-quarter of marketers continued to send e-mail marketing messages after opt-outs were submitted and 16% sent messages after the legally prescribed 10-business-day period."

April 19, 2004

No-Spam Registry Faces Numerous Hurdles
David McGuire provides a summary of the various criticisms levelled at the postulated "do not email" list. A nice overview of the problems such a list would incur as it currently stands, with comments from anti-spammers and legitimate email marketers.

April 16, 2004

Word of the month...
...is phishing, where scammers send out emails pretending to be from a leading brand, and encourage recipients to reveal their personal info (like credit card details), for example by "reverifying their account data" at some website. MarketingSherpa describes the phenomenon and has some advice on what to do if your brand is an unwitting victim.

April 15, 2004

Maryland Lawmakers Pass Anti-Spam Bill
We all know that the less spam there is, the better deal both permission-based email marketers and consumers get. So good news that Maryland has complemented the Can-Spam legislation with a related law which goes after deceptive emailing practices, with tough consequences for those caught and charged.

April 14, 2004

E-mail lists choke on spam
John Borland delves into the history of the email discussion list, and also highlights how its popularity and viability has also fallen victim to the spam plague. One message I got out of this for marketers is that it's more evidence that less is more - people simply can't cope with an email source that requires frequent attention.

Email...sighs wistfully
An interview with SendTec's Greg Morey, where he discusses the state of online advertising from his company's point of view. One of his main threads is the promise still offered by email marketing, but he's frustrated by the image problems that this particular marketing tactic still has.

April 13, 2004

Happy spamiversary
Paul Festa and Evan Hansen trace the history of spam (the email sort, of course) and some of the ways people have tried to stem the flow. Nice background reading for marketers. The implied conclusion is that the only way to really stop spam is to make it uneconomical for the sender.

April 09, 2004

FTC Extends Comment Period on Spam Regulation
The FTC are giving you an extra few days to get your comments in on Can-Spam. So if you were rushing to get something together by April 12th, you've now got until April 20th...

April 08, 2004

How to Use a Do Not Email List for Protection from CAN-SPAM Lawsuits - Part II: Vendors Profiled
In the second part of their do-not-email advice article, MarketingSherpa offers some tips on choosing a supression list vendor, plus thoughts on how to deal with viral marketing and Can-Spam, as well as what to do when someone unsubscribes, but later asks to get back on your list.

April 07, 2004

The battle between good e-mail and bad e-mail
The lead article in April's Internet Retailer is a long, hard look at email marketing in the context of Can-Spam legislation. There's a heap of info and insight in the piece, including a case study or two and best practice suggestions.

The Customer Perspective: Blacklisted
Here's a salutary tale by Max Smetannikov, who describes how a virus turned his laptop into a spam machine, leaving him blacklisted and seriously hampered when it comes to communicating by email. It could happen to you or your company...unless you have the right software protection.

April 06, 2004

CAN SPAM and Beyond Email Marketing in an Era of Customer Control
A comprehensive review of the legislation for email marketers, with action recommendations and a look at some grey areas. Written by Loren T. McDonald of EmailLabs, though there's no self-promotion in there at all.

April 02, 2004

Email Tuesdays
David Myron at DestinationCRM.com reports on the latest deliverability report from EmailLabs. Nothing startlingly new, but some reminders of how sometimes it's better not to do what everyone else is doing.

How to Create, Manage, & Use a Do Not Email List for Protection from CAN-SPAM Lawsuits - Part I
MarketingSherpa aren't the sort for cryptic titles are they? As usual, down-to-earth practical advice for email marketers.

Survey: Antispam law still not making a difference
InfoWorld reports on a recent survey suggesting that spam is on the increase, rather than decline. And highlighting the interesting tidbit that 60% of all spam originates in the USA. So much for the pesky foreignor theory, eh?

Google Gmail - Initial Analysis
So it's not an April Fool story after all: Google's Gmail is the real thing. The above article by free email guru Edwin Hayward discusses contextual advertising and email, and warns of a likely shake-up in the free email market. Remember - it's not unusual for 70% of consumer lists to be free email addresses.

April 01, 2004

Welcome to Gmail
Assuming it's not an April Fool's joke, Google announced a new free email service. A quick look at the proposed features suggests it will be *massively* popular.

B2C marketers in particular need to watch this one because a lot of people will migrate their free email account to Google and it's a new service to learn about from a deliverability point of view.

If it is an April Fool's joke, the funniest part is probably the reaction it might provoke in the Microsoft-owned Hotmail offices.

* Google launches email, takes the Bill Gates defense (The Register)
* Google to offer email service (San Jose Mercury)

Google Clarifies No AdSense In Email
Garrett French gets official confirmation that you can't yet run their contextual AdSense ads in your emails. But I've heard that the concept is being tested, so it may be something for the future.

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