The Email Wars

BREAKING NEWS: 

Just work to find in my inbox some news of ReturnPath buying Habeas. WOW. Nice work Matt and team. This consolidation is great. I am excited to see how this plays out in the integration of your teams and tools. 

Cheers. 

—- FROM the Release —-

Return Path & Habeas: What It Means For You

Today Return Path is announcing that it has agreed to acquire Habeas. We think this is an exciting day for anyone who cares about the email universe. The combination of the two leaders in email reputation management and deliverability services means more innovation for both email senders and receivers. 

Of course, you are probably wondering what this means for you as a current Return Path client.

(more…)

Yes, we have it going on our here in Portland, Oregon. The Tech scene is rocking and the companies are moving here from all over the US. But enough about PDX and more about what is going on here this fall. Year TWO of the Inverge Conference is coming up Sept 5-6th. If you need any more reason than that well that week is one of the all time best weeks each year for weather here. 

And here are ALL the awesome speakers >>

If you need more reasons than this… here is what else is going on. And NO we are not talking about email marketing at this event. 

+ Time-Based Art Festival (performance : dance : music : new media : visual arts)

+ MusicFestNW (over 100 indie bands)

+ First Thursday Gallery Walk (an evening of art, wine and music)

+ Portland Creative Conference (focused on design across categories)

Welcome to Mu.eroi.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Funny thing is one of our team caught this yesterday and had me audit some SenderID records to make sure they did not get messed up.

From ReturnPath today.

Microsoft Phishing Filter Error

We just learned of an issue at Microsoft domains that may be affecting your inbox percentages. Starting on Monday you may have noticed some of your campaigns being routed to the junk folder with the message: this message may be a phishing scam. It is very likely this was caused by error with the Microsoft phishing filter that flagged a very common link in HTML content, specifically: http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml.

We have been in contact with the Microsoft team and they have assured us that the issue has been resolved.

You don’t need to do anything. We just wanted to let you know why some of your deliverability numbers may have been off during the last 24 hours or so.

Questions? Just pick up the phone; your Return Path account representative is ready to help.

All best,
The Sender Score Team

It came to our attention earlier today that Comcast has officially retired the following Road Runner domains:

- jam.rr.com
- midsouth.rr.com
- mn.rr.com
- se.rr.com
- sport.rr.com
- swfla.rr.com
- ucwphilly.rr.com
- houston.rr.com

What does this mean for your deliverability? Any mail sent to these domains is bouncing with permanent, network DNS errors. Comcast has been forwarding mail for several months and reminding subscribers to update their accounts — and just recently retired these domains permanently. These dead addresses cannot be translated to @comcast.net - the individual user must update their own account.

What action should you take today? We recommend a proactive approach, start by disabling any address that has the above listed domains. In addition, check your system for addresses that return a bounce code (usually a 500 error, with: ”PERM_FAILURE: DNS Error: DNS server returned answer with no data”) and suppress any that are associated with the domains listed above.

I wrote this post a few weeks ago, so as not to forget this day. Thanks to you Jeanniey for helping to pull us all together in the EEC and as a community.

I know it is not your 21st (29th right) but in a few days at the Email Insiders Summit in Park City Utah, we will throw our party there. Hopefully like last year in 11 degree weather at the foot of the mountain around a fire pit. This time maybe being prepared so we don’t have to swill bottles of wine.

Cheers and thank you.

Love the creative coming out of Lenovo. They have been doing a great job of branding with email campaigns. The only flaws in this email are the amount of padding at the top, which shoves the creative lower in the preview pane of any email clients, making the actions and copy sink lower; and the subject line (although pricing attractive) is really confusing. What am I really saving? Do I have a calculator handy to figure out if I should open this email? And when did Black Friday become such a HOT subject line leader?

Email is a learning and testing experience. I make comments on so many of them as we develop them each and everyday. I find flaws even in the work we do at internal reviews and try to move the bar higher on our work. You should do the same. Test it internally and show it around before you send it. Get feedback and then evaluate what is going to work best.

Who knows, maybe this was a good lift in sales? Or maybe I am sticking to an Mac….

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I was working on Thanksgiving, of course, and reached out to a friend with a question. I was not expecting an answer, but was dually shocked to see this auto responder. Should we all be taking less time in the inbox to focus on work.

“Greetings!

Due to a high workload, I am currently checking and responding to
e-mail twice daily at 11a Pacific, and 4p Pacific (weekdays only).

If you require urgent assistance (please ensure that it is urgent)
that cannot wait until 11a or 4p Pacific, please contact me by phone
(call or text).

Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and
effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you better.”

Could not imagine only checking my inbox twice a day. Can you?

I have been seeing more and more creative ways of taking email to new levels lately. Most of these are done by entertainment or hipster brands. And of course I test them out. If you are not familiar with FlavorPill, you should get to know them. I have long been a subscriber, but actually heard one of the team present on a panel at OMMA East 2007 this fall in NYC. The panel was great as I wanted to learn more about daily emails as we have been doing more and more with new clients like BeThree and others. What I really want to understand is content, frequency and list burnout (aka attrition).

But when I was paying close attention to this email the other day, I noticed something that had been there all along, the ability to send events listed in the email by SMS to your and others phones. It was very cool and worked flawlessly. IPSH was the one that powered it and really the 800 lb gorilla in my mind in the SMS space with entertainment brands. I know Warner Music and others use them.

What was cool to me, and more importantly useful, was the content it delivered to my phone. It was all the relevant info I needed to get to this event and had things like the address, the band, the time and date that made it all easy to add it to my blackberry calendar as well as get the map to pop up in my google maps mobile version. Killer use of email and 2.0 thinking.

Now just to figure out how I am going to use this in a client campaign.

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Found this article on the WSJ today. This strikes me as CRAZY. Companies putting “no email use rules in place on Fridays and the weekends”. This article is worth a read for all email marketers. I can tell you that I have some personal rules where I turn off my Blackberry when I pull in the garage at home each night and don’t turn it on until I get in the car in the AM. But I do check email at night after taking 3-4 hours uniterrupted with my kids and wife. My wife is actually worse than I am, and she does not work, but this iPhone I got her has her checking email all day long wherever she is. What would my clients think as an email marketer and an interactive ad agency if I just shut down?

What would you think if all companies just stopped using email on Fridays. Would this affect your b to b campaigns? Your overall marketing efforts? Would you roll out some heavy Friday DM or even mobile advertising (and I mean rolling vans with sign boards or projectors here not phones)?

From the WSJ:

When U.S. Cellular’s chief operating officer, Jay Ellison, imposed a “no email Friday” rule at his company, he thought it would ease workers’ overload.

Instead, he got a rebellion. Among many irate responses, Kathy Volpi, a marketing director, confronted Mr. Ellison and “just ripped me,” he says. “She really gave me a piece of her mind.”

Ms. Volpi says that at the time the ban seemed like a needless obstacle. “I thought, ‘He just doesn’t understand how much work we have to get done, and how much easier’ ” it is when using email.

A growing number of employers, including U.S. Cellular, Deloitte & Touche and Intel, are imposing or trying out “no email” Fridays or weekends. While the bans typically allow emailing clients and customers or responding to urgent matters, the normal flow of routine internal email is halted. Violators are hit with token fines, or just called out by the boss.

Read Full Article on the WSJ

So the power of RSS is being humbled by the powers of the Red Army of China. Now if RSS is going to be medium that trumps email, why can it too be blocked? Any medium is going to have its challenges and it seems that RSS, email and websites all face the same type of treatments from parties that wish to stop them from reaching their desired target subscriber.

China Blocking RSS Feeds
The Chinese Government has added a blanket ban on all RSS feeds, according to a report at Ars Technica.

There have been reports previously that Feedburner feeds have been blocked, but to-date information delivered by RSS feeds has generally gone uncensored, providing Chinese viewers information that would otherwise be blocked if attempting to visit a regular webpage or blog.

I wonder how much more we work now that we have email. It is on our screens, our phone, and our brains. Check your email, execute campaign, do more work, lather, rinse repeat. I had an amusing email come in to my inbox from an agency friend that I had to post, as he has become ULTRA efficient due to his reliance and IMMEDIATE response time and OVER communication (in humor) due to email.

I am available all hours all days other than Fridays between 7am and 9pm, Tuesday from 10:30-10:45, Saturdays 5am until 8:15 and then from 8:16 to 9pm I have a Japanese Shinto tour, Monday are no good between 11am and 5:30pm due to unexpected family issues that I can’t really go into right now. Then All Wednesdays are booked as a result of a recurring meeting on city planning issues that I am not obliged to go into at this moment as it may jeopardize my membership in the local shriners. (I only ride in the parades, but still). If it’s on a Thursday there could be a conflict with my busy potting schedule. I have to throw seven pots by next Tuesday! Mornings are better than mid-day except Friday’s I am in training for UFC 78 “The Comeback!” from the Amory in Yonkers. If we can meet for lunch, I volunteer at a soup kitchen on all days except Christmas and most other major holiday’s. The soup is a little bland, but it gets the job done. Oh and Monday’s…..

Let me know what works for you. I’m actually pretty open.

Do you feel that email is helping you or a hindrance? I love it personally and what the above example shows me is how VOICE comes through in email. I love conversational voice or one to one instead of corporate forced copy. Try it as people tend to respond better.

How can this statement be comforting? If you lost 6.3 million records in your database and they were now out in the public domain, would you respond like he did? I hope not. Data theft is a very serious issue. I know that we have a system that logs people in and out and what actions they took by IP Location as well as permissions by user. If you are not keeping an eye on your email databases you should. Last thing you want it either someone getting into your data OR a disgruntled employee or employee of opportunity taking and giving up your list data. I personally know one company that had this happen with an employee that was terminated on a Friday only to login from home and export and delete the entire company email CRM. Fortunately we were able to get the login and user actions in about 5 minutes to put a stop to it for them. But imagine if you never knew…. it could really do some damage.

This quote below still stuns me.

6.3M Names Leaked from Ameritrade Database

Was spokesperson Dennis Hopper to blame?
Online brokerage company Ameritrade revealed this week that 6.3 million names from its database were stolen.

To ease the seething throng, no financial information or social security numbers were reportedly lost, according to DM News.

CEO Joe Moglia said while no financial info was taken, members will likely see an increase in unwanted spam, “which is annoying and inconvenient for them.”

So I caved this past week, after stating that I was going to hold out, and bought an iPhone. It wasn’t for “me” but for my wife who needed a phone that brought her everything she needed on her Apple on the go. I spent some time with it last week setting it up for her and found that the email and web experience was better than I first thought it to be. The size of the screen is not as important as that of other mobile devices like Blackberries and MS Mobile based phones, do to the fact that you can use your two fingers to zoom in and out and read content easier (and in HTML) than doing it on another phone type.

I was actually able to log into emailROI (our eROI ESP platform) and review campaign statistics and send out an email campaign from the car. (She was driving, but those that know me would expect me to be launching campaigns at 75 MPH.) I am a convert to the experience and the platform. I am not rushing out to get one for myself just yet, as I still love my Crackberry, and the keyboard experience is still better from a business utility perspective for me.

This device is going to change Business to Consumer email marketing. I can drink the Kool Aid now. The ability to target with compelling creative emails and interact surpasses that of any other mobile device I have used. The only thing holding this back from the business user is the lack of corporate business plans from ATT at this point in time. When that time comes, you will see me with one, launching targeted email campaigns from all points of my weekly travels. It also has a Movable Type plugin to blog directly from it with MT4 which we use for our corp blogs.

Now that I think about it, I might go get one next week. I am a tech sucker… but it is for “business reasons and research” right? At least that is how I am mentally justifying it to myself right now.