Steve Atkins
There comes a time in many marketers’ lives where they are faced with and old, stale database and a management chain that wants to mail those addresses. Smart marketers know that delivery problems will arise if they just reactivate all those users. They also know that mailing older addresses can affect current and engaged addresses as well. Still, many executives think there is no downside to mailing old addresses. A long time ago I wrote 5 answers you need before mailing old addresses, which covers a lot of the underlying things to consider first. What it doesn’t do is talk about how to mail them. Management will know all those things and still decide that sending to old addresses is a good idea. So, now what? A lot of folks just run the list through a data hygiene service. But, to my mind, most data hygiene services don’t address the…
A while back I wrote about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, what it does and how it works. Since MPP was first announced I’d assumed that it would be built on the same infrastructure as iCloud Private Relay, Apple’s VPN product, but hadn’t seen anything from Apple to explicitly connect the two and didn’t have access to enough data to confirm it independently. But the nice folks at MailChimp did gather enough image load data to confirm that the two are related, and prompted me to look into Private Relay a bit more. Apple have a nice description of Private Relay from the consumer perspective in their support pages, but the interesting bits are in their technical info for network admins. Their description there matches my black box testing of MPP image loads exactly, but the bit that clinches it is the directions for how enterprise networks can block private relay…
You’ve probably heard about Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Email marketing chat has been all a-twitter about it since it was announced in June. Skipping over all the “Openpocalypse” panic, what is it and what does it do? Image Loads It’s all about images in email and how they’re loaded (particularly invisible one pixel images that are used solely for tracking). Why do we care about image loads? Email marketers and ESPs have used the metadata included with image loads for years to grab information and metrics from their recipients. By using a unique name for an image they can tell when a particular recipient loads that image. That image load correlated with a particular recipient is what ESPs describe as “an Open”, and it means that means the sender knows the recipient read the email. They’ll often use an invisible, single pixel image that can be easily added to every…
A lot of folks are talking about Apple’s recent announcement about building privacy protection into email. I have somewhat stayed out of the conversation and I’m not sure what I really think about it. This is a change to how a lot of folks use email and no one really likes change. I actually have a post I’ve been quietly working on talking about open rates. From my perspective, they’re an increasingly useless metric for deliverability and too many senders put too much emphasis on them and they’re not telling us what we think they’re telling us. I might work a little bit more on that, but at this point it kinda feels moot given Apple’s new announcement. I do have some thoughts and opinions on the Apple change but I’m still thinking about it and looking at the longer term implications. I know there’s a rush to be the…
(Copied and lightly edited from a Facebook post) It occurred to me as I was commenting elsewhere that there is a lot of confusion about domains / subdomains and where they’re used in emails.I get confused when people talk about ‘domain reputation’ because I have at least 4 distinct places where domains show up in an email that heavily influence delivery. But a lot of other folks talk about domain reputation as a single thing. I can never work out which place they’re talking about and thus find it difficult to comment on the domain reputation. Domain Types: SPF domainDKIM domainVisible From domainURL / Image hosting domains SPF is the Envelope From / Return Path / Bounce domain / 5321.from. The end user does not see this domain unless they go look for it. It is the domain that is checked by SPF and the one that must match the…
Kickbox interviewed a bunch of us to find out what methods of opt-in we recommend. Go check it out. What’s your favourite method of opt-in?
I regularly see folks asking how to fix their Gmail delivery. This is a perennial question (see my 2019 post and the discussions from various industry experts in the comments). Since that discussion I haven’t seen as much complaining about problems. There are steps that work to get delivery fixed at Gmail. Verify that your mail is actually going to bulk. I had one client that had a bad / medium reputation at Google, but their mail was actually inboxing for the most part. We spent a lot of time trying to fix the reputation without success but it didn’t matter as they were reaching the folks they needed to reach. Cut way back on your mail to google. Stop sending to anyone who is currently receiving the mail in their bulk folder. About the only way to know who’s getting mail in bulk is to focus on those folks who…
That was a longer than intended hiatus from blogging. I’ll be honest, though, talking about email just seemed so trivial in the face of what was and is continuing to happen. I posted this over on slack, earlier, and Steve pointed out I should make it public on the blog. It’s as good a way as any to come back to the blog. With everything going on in the US, people are applying the brakes to some types of content and speech. These are not, at the moment, going to be nuanced or careful. They’re trying to stop violence, insurrection and sedition. This is potentially a place of ‘block it all and we’ll sort it out later’ I think folks should expect filters to tighten down on content – particularly political content – in the next few days and lasting for at least a few weeks. I don’t think this…
At tomorrow’s #ltdelivery session we’ll continue talking about session: Maintaining and warming up reputations. Invitations are going out end of the day (Dublin) today. Want to join dozens of your colleagues talking about Reputation? Sign up on our #ltdelivery page.