CBS shows the email tide is turning

A theme in recent weeks has been the need for more people to follow best practices, or see email marketing dumped in the same basket (= spam folder) as the less salubrious purveyors of purple pills and stock recommendations.

So it's great to see a big corporation swallow hard and take one of the toughest psychological steps in email marketing: sacrificing quantity for quality.

Ken Magill describes the process used by CBSSports.com to cull its email lists of unresponsive subscribers.

While total subscriber numbers have plummeted, they now have quality, responsive, active address lists. More importantly, they're no longer sending email to the people most likely to hit "this is spam" buttons.

Which means they're protecting their email reputation, which -- as we know -- is vital to keeping up delivery rates.

For more on the size versus quality argument, read this post.

And since we're talking about safeguarding the future of email marketing, a quick plug for Campaign Monitor's efforts to get HTML email standards going. They've now invited comments on a list of baseline CSS features they think need addressing in the first standardization push.

Tags: email marketing, list size, list hygiene

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