I have just experienced, for the fifth time, a silent-but-deadly problem with email delivery systems. I wrote about it back in 2005, but recent experience shows another discussion of the issue is due.
Well after 8 months and countless hours of thought, design, re-design, coding, hosting, sweat, tears, anger and finally love we have launched the new Konami Video Games American Idol KKR site. It is a labor of love in the end but I can tell you it was no easy task. We went to the bench with our team to write all the code from scratch instead of just taking some apps/code libraries off the shelf to build this one.
New IPs are going to be watched more and regulated.
This is good news to many but a word of caution to ESPs (Email Service Providers) and companies out there that try to switch IP addresses or add new ones. Some mailers actually decide to switch IPs and abandon them once they are permanently flagged and/or blacklisted. And if you start a new IP broadcasting from scratch without any prior solid and good traffic on it, expect a poor delivery rate until you establish a REPUTATION on this IP.
As for companies that decide to take to setting up their own PHP mailer or other in house system for email marketing you should not expect great open and read rates out of the gate. I think that this actually puts more benefit on good ESPs with solid IPs and good ISP relations and reputations. It should make more marketers think twice about rolling their own email marketing solution.
Microsoft last week verified it is significantly throttling the volume of e-mail it will allow to come into its Hotmail accounts from new IP addresses.
The admission won’t come as a surprise to many e-mail service providers. However, it will help them explain to ornery new clients why their e-mail delivery rates temporarily drop when they switch providers.
I thought this update from Pivotal Veracity from the Authentication and Online Trust Summit (AOTS) was quite valuable to share with the MediaPost audience. As background, Microsoft started AOTS in 2004 to foster adoption of Sender ID and promote email authentication through the industry. I will warn you, if you are a novice to deliverability and authentication, you will be completely lost in this article, so I recommend you read a few things before you dive into this. Authentication: http://www.deliverability.com/resources/emailAuthentication.php DKIM: http://www.dkim.org.
Thanks to Len Shneyder, director of partner relations & industry communications at Pivotal Veracity, for writing this very timely update.
I love to see that this trend is growing. We have set up SPF, Sender ID and DomainKeys for all of our customers at eROI for a long time now. We have actually seen it to help delivery and it is not just a hoax or fad. What surprises me is how many companies really don’t understand the importance of setting these records up and we really hammer it home on our customers when they first come on board. The funny thing is the push back so many IT departments give the marketing departments when we send these records over to them to set up. Now you would think that the IT folks would be all over this as they are battling this factor each and everyday. But nope. They give some push back and set it up in the Queue to implement when they have time.
In last week’s column I talked about all the uses retailers have found for videos in their emails — everything from commercials and product demonstrations to trade show and fashion show coverage. This week I’m going to talk about how retailers integrate video links into their email messages.
But before I do that, I wanted to let everyone know that the Email Experience Council is hosting a special Email Insider Summit Whitepaper Room. The really exciting part is that we are soliciting for case studies, whitepapers and best practices from anyone (yes, anyone) that support or extend the conversation about any of the current sessions at the Email Insider Summit. Please email your whitepapers to us at whitepapers@emailexperience.org by May 1, and we’ll make them available via our Whitepaper Room, giving all attendees one place to access supporting materials. I hope to see everyone at the Summit.
Does Design and Coding Matter in Email Marketing?
We are closing this survey down at the end of the week. We would love a few more people to take part. IF you have 5 minutes and would like to get the results of this study, please give us your answers. We really appreciate it.
We like to ask people what they think about certain issues facing email marketing. We started last fall asking people about their email inbox preferences. Seemed that we hit a nerve as so many marketing sites and bloggers picked up on it and carried the message around the global block.
I love it when I get an email that is right on the mark of talking to me based on what I have done and giving me some benefits for doing business with an online brand.
Fandango did just that. Not only did they hit me with a relevant email, but they went a step farther in rewarding me with 6 magazine subscriptions for simply being a frequent customer of theirs. Now I read a lot of offline content, and I still believe in print 100%. There is something about reading that is still a good experience for me.
When I started writing this column in 2003 (hard to believe), I was one of only a few people writing about email. Today it seems there more people writing about email than are on a Russian spammers’s mailing list. And it is about to get even worse — or better, depending on your point of view.
Besides the 4-times-a-week Email Insider columns, along with columns in ClickZ, Marketing Sherpa, and Direct Magazine’s iconoclastic Magilla Marketing, there is now the EEC reports and white papers.
So I was hopping through the Junk box on my MSN.com account today, fishing through the weekend’s sends when I noticed something. It not only took ONE click to see the email, but 3 clicks to actually get it to truly open. So if your email is not getting to the inbox, will you click three times to read it? AND if you do, you MUST be a qualified responder, right? I mean after 3 actions to get to the email creative, you must WANT to get this email.