No man is an iland

May 31, 2004

Seth Godin's little note
He brought us permission marketing and now he's shaking his head sadly at what people did with the concept. This short blog note from Seth Godin kind of gets at the core of what went wrong with email marketing. But is he too pessimistic?

May 28, 2004

Porn Spammers Thumb Noses At CAN-SPAM
At least we think it was their noses...Techweb summarises the latest findings on Can-Spam compliancy, particularly the new requirements placed on porn email. This may shock you, but it seems those nice folks who spam aren't being terribly good at complying with the law.

May 27, 2004

Jaffe Juice: Can You Put Spam in a Can-Can?
Joseph Jaffe rings the death knell for email marketing, though it's more of a despairing rage against how spam has messed up email (I know how he feels) than a real argument against the commercial effectiveness of the medium.

May 21, 2004

How Microsoft's Deal with Ironport's Bonded Sender Affects Bulk Emailers
MarketingSherpa outlines the different approaches to whitelists and other authentication systems and suggests some questions to ask before deciding if you need some outside deliverability help.

Microsoft Anti-Spam Proposal in Merger Talks
Good spam news at last. According to this ClickZ article, talks are ongoing regarding merging two of the main proposed sender authentication techniques. Widespread implementation of a sender authentication standard would do a lot of damage to spam, which relies heavily on forged headers. (They don't want you to be able to track where it comes from so you don't get their internet access shut down.)

May 19, 2004

Free email changes
Google's announcement that users of its Gmail service get 1GB of space to store their emails has encouraged other providers to up their storage limits, too.

Lycos Europe just announced a new email service with 1GB of storage. And Yahoo will upgrade the current 4MB of storage for free email users to 100MB.

Will this have repurcussions for email marketers? Well, it might mean that...

...people are less likely to unsubscribe from a list because of an overflowing inbox
...people are less likely to delete emails to make space for new ones
...people are less likely to resent larger email sizes, as in html or rich media emails.

I'm not sure it will have massive implications, since there are so many other factors in play. But I'd certainly rate it as good news for marketers.

May 17, 2004

Are Surveys Spam?
Though specifically addressing the issue of email surveys, Michael Mayor makes the case for all bulk emailers (not just commercial ones) conforming to Can-Spam requirements and email marketing best practices.

Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?
Just as we're celebrating RSS as a spam-free way to get content to peoples desktops, it seems it may be killed by its own success. If too many applications are looking for new content on feeds too frequently, they'll eat up all the bandwidth and server resources.

Here's what's being done to eliminate spam
Byron Spice has an overview of the various techniques being used or proposed to tackle the spam problem.

May 14, 2004

The Deadly Duo: Spam and Viruses
For those of you not already immune to more statistics on email and spam, here's a summary of what's gone on in April...including some suggestion that maybe Can-Spam is making a difference, albeit a small one.

May 13, 2004

Opera Takes 7.50 Browser To Final
Opera's new web browser has a built-in RSS reader. Could this be the first step in the mainstreaming of RSS as a delivery medium for stuff that used to go out in emails? Is there such a word as mainstreaming?

How to Do an E-Newsletter Really, Really Well
Worthwhile case study of hpshopping.com's email newsletter. You'll find a few useful practical tidbits in there, too, such as the best positioning for a "send-to-a-friend" feature. If nothing else, it should bring home the value of testing.

May 12, 2004

You think you've got it bad?
If you're worried that spam is messing up the market for email marketing in the USA, spare a thought for Korean marketers. According to this article, an average 90% of email is either spam or viruses.

May 10, 2004

Everything New is Old Again
Michael Mayor (a vendor in the space) has a few things to say about the state of email marketing. His underlying message is that there are too may unqualified "experts" offering email-related services and advice. And that their opinions about this marketing vehicle (mostly negative) are tainted by this lack of expertise. In other words, a bad workman always blames his tools.

This Is Your E-Mail; This is Your E-Mail on Gmail
Right on the button article by Rebecca Lieb at ClickZ. She explains how Google's new email service is going to present some big challenges to email marketers. And that's before we get into the issue of contextual ads being displayed on your messages. Be prepared folks.

May 07, 2004

Catalogers and email
Janet Roberts reports on the Annual Catalog Conference and describes the email marketing problems and successes of various attendees. Lots of little useful snippets of information in there.

Same old broken spam record
It's almost becoming boring to report more record levels of spam email. But the folks at MessageLabs, who track these things, say April was the worst month yet.

May 06, 2004

It's a mad, mad world
According to this 2004 Spam Monitor survey, 44% of the surveyed companies market using email, yet only 16% are aware of anti-spam legislation in their country. Worse, 46% said they haven't communicated the legal obligations of email marketing to their marketing department.

If it was a small business survey, I'd understand. But heck, the demographics of the respondents suggest otherwise.

Ignoring any potential metholdological problems with the survey (which was carried out by a vendor) it still shows a breathtaking level of ignorance on a subject that's not exactly suffered from a lack of media coverage.

Nice email tactic
Yesterday I logged into my account at a domain registrar and looked up some domains with a view to buying them. A couple were available as .coms, but I decided not to go ahead.

Within a couple of hours of doing so, I got an email from them with a special offer on new domain registrations (I've opted in to this kind of thing there).

I just wonder if they were clever enough to spot that I failed to complete a transaction, and sent off the offer in response (it's worked by the way). Definitely a tactic retailers should use, assuming they have the right permissions from their customers.

IT marketers like email marketing, sort of
According to this survey, they rank email marketing to house lists as the second most budgeted-for marketing tactic (websites come top). Third-party rental lists aren't so popular, continuing a well established trend.

Pay to play
If you're sending legitimate permission-based email and are worried about getting through to Hotmail addresses, MSN has a solution. They'll whitelist your emails, ensuring delivery to inboxes, provided you abide by some guidelines and post a $20,000 bond. See below for relevant stories:

* MS opens Hotmail to bulk mailers (The Register)
* IronPort, Microsoft team on antispam effort for Hotmail, MSN users (Computerworld)
* Discussion at slashdot

May 04, 2004

CAN-SPAM Comments Flood FTC
ClickZ News reports that the FTC received 12,525 comments on the Can-Spam legislation, whereby over half of them were form letters from realtors. The article has some sample comments from big businesses like VISA.

May 03, 2004

Don't ya love it?
And again, a reminder to all those sending broadcast email messages to test before they send. Today I got a personalized email from a PR company which started, "Hi First_Name,"

Oh the irony of a PR company making a PR blunder like that.

Wedding Dress Is a Hit
Forget all those executive brainstorming meetings. if you want a viral marketing hit, just put up your ex-wife's wedding dress on eBay.

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