No man is an iland

November 24, 2004

Increase Delivery Rates With Active Bounce Management
After going over some bounce basics, the article offers a series of practical suggestions for minimizing your bounce levels.

DarthVader's email address?
If you want a cool hotmail.co.uk email address, then you have 5 days to bid on a charity auction at eBay, where names like LukeSkywalker@ and JamesBond@ are being auctioned off. Also included are MediaPlanner@, MediaBuyer@ and AdAgency@ addresses...

Take E-Mail Marketing Copy From Good to Great
Jeanne Jennings has some general advice on writing and commissioning copy for email campaigns, together with some specific examples from her own experience.

Ads Making Overtures in RSS
The RSS revolution continues, with more initiatives to get advertising into feeds. Another free content lunch bites the dust.

November 21, 2004

Can the DMA and Interactive Marketers Kiss and Make Up?
Rebecca Lieb reports and comments on moves by the DMA to regain some credibility in the email marketing space, after the PR debaucle of recent times.

November 19, 2004

CAN-SPAM Targets Text Messaging
Attorney Kristen E. Bloemker summarizes the Can-Spam Act as it now applies to sending text messages to mobile communications devices.

November 17, 2004

Yahoo! Nipping at Google's Heels on Email
Yahoo announces a slew of new features for its free email offering. It includes an increase in storage allowance to 250MB and anti-spam measures. Time to take another look at the Yahoo addresses on your house list and make sure your email is getting through.

November 15, 2004

At Your Service
As an example of the growing relevance of the technology, RSS gets an article in Time magazine (the European edition).

November 11, 2004

When Good Newsletters Go Bad
Many people fall victim to the dark side of e-newsletter publishing, losing sight of the role of value and personality in driving reader interest and engagement. Meryl K. Evans offers some examples and advice to prevent this from happening to you.

How to Conduct a Company-wide Email Marketing Audit
EmailSherpa reports how one company conducted a comprehensive audit of their email marketing structures, results and activities. The result was a lot of actionable data and insights.

Industry Collaboration in Email Authentication
The link will take you to the full text of a letter delivered to the FTC by a group of big industry players, including the likes of Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, Earthlink and eBay. The letter makes the case for authentication technologies in general, and suggests a way forward on adoption of competing solutions.

November 09, 2004

E-mail and Attitudinal Segmentation
David Daniels has some more advice on campaign segmentation, this time focusing on using customer satisfaction data and pass-along rates.

Next-Gen Analytics: Combining E-Mail and Web Site Data
Jeanne Jennings reports on the growing availability of custom email/website metrics packages. She outlines why this is a good thing and mentions some of the solutions available in the marketplace.

November 05, 2004

2004 Email Metrics Survey
Sample results from EmailSherpa's annual survey of marketers - this time almost 2300 answered. Interesting reading and here two snippets:

* only 11.2% of respondents are tracking response metrics by ISP (how will you know where you're blocked if you don't do this!)
* 48% track conversion rates of these (room for improvement there)

The full report is here (that's an affiliate link BTW)

Email authentication the key to fighting spam, claims security vendor
The article argues that email authentication techniques are crucial in the war on spam. Essentially, it's not authentication itself that stops spam, but it allows other methods (like whitelists) to become much more effective.

November 04, 2004

E-Mail List Atrophy: The Effects of Old Addresses
Derek Harding goes over some of the dangers of letting email addresses get old or unused, with suggestions on how to avoid the negative consequences of email attrition. A useful reminder, though I'm not sure I agree with his final point that if you don't have anything to say, then you should send people a reminder of how they signed up and where. I'd say that can sound a little hollow six months after sign-up, so suggest you do find something to say (which can't be that hard).

A Short, Sweet Turnkey E-Mail Campaign
A case study which contains little to nothing in the way of practical tips you can use yourself, but does highlight again the value of email, in this case as a replacement for direct mail.

An article suggesting that search and email marketing should not be seen as competitive, or either/or alternatives. The author pleads for more holistic and integrated approaches. Which may seem obvious, but we do have this remarkable tendency to think in terms of discrete categories, rather than taking the larger view.

Benchmark Study of Email Database Services
FreshAddress, Inc. released some data covering 75 million processed records, and revealing the likely % matchups you get when conducting email appending and change of address solutions.

November 02, 2004

In E-Mail We Trust?
Paul Soltoff looks at the issue of consumer trust and email marketing, exploring what you can (and can't) do with (and in) your emails to earn that trust.

November 01, 2004

Email Marketing and the 2004 Election
G. Simms Jenkins looks at how the candidates shape up in terms of different aspects of their email marketing campaigns, and notes a few lessons for marketers.

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