Archive for the 'Email Deliverability' Category
AOL Clarifies Its Requirements and Recommendations
Marc Kline - April 29th, 2008It really does make sense for ISPs to want to help email senders to get messages through to users who want them.
But “who wants them” is more complex than “anyone who filled out my sign up form” in an age where message relevancy, bounces, complaints, and authentication increasingly way in.
Just today, AOL announced two new or revised documents they’ve published that should give a firm understanding of both what they suggest strongly as well as what they require.
Your ESP should help you take care of most of the requirements they list, since most are technical or procedural in nature. A quick read of the suggestions validates recommendations you’ll find being expressed in the permission only email community over and over again.
It’s also nice to see where we’re on the same page with those who decide what happens with our email. This type of transparency helps everyone but those who don’t adhere to the standards.
Posted in : Email Deliverability | 9 Comments »Comcast Added to Feedback Loop System
Marc Kline - April 23rd, 2008
Since our messages’ relevance to subscribers is crucial to the deliverability of our messages, knowing how they respond to them is important.
Opens and clicks tell us some things, like the rate at which our subscribers positively respond to messages. But at best, that’s only half of the story.
That’s why we’re glad to be a part of Comcast’s new feedback loop system.
Posted in : Email Deliverability | 2 Comments »Confirmed Opt-in Myths Exposed
Sean Cohen - December 20th, 2007Confirmed opt-in as defined by SpamHaus, who is one of the most respected anti spam organizations in the world:
Known as “COI” in the legitimate bulk email industry, also known as “Confirmed Opt-in”, “Verified Opt-in” or sometimes “Double Opt-in”.
With Closed-Loop Opt-in the Recipient has verifiably confirmed permission for the address to be included on the specific mailing list, by confirming (responding to) the list subscription request verification. This is the standard practice for all responsible Internet mailing lists, it ensures users are properly subscribed, from a working address, and with the address owner’s consent.
In the event of “spam” accusation:
The Bulk Email Sender is fully and legally protected because the reply to the Subscription Confirmation Request received back from the recipient proves that the recipient did in fact opt-in and grant verifiable consent for the mailings.
Source:Spamhaus Website
Numerous myths have circulated regarding confirmed opt-in and its effects. There are many misconceptions out there, and we’d like to help clear those up.
Posted in : Email Deliverability | 29 Comments »Sending to Yahoo? Confirmed Opt-In Is The Way To Go
Justin Premick - December 7th, 2007If you’ve ever spoken with anyone here at AWeber about what you can do to maximize your email deliverability, you’ve probably heard us say “use Confirmed Opt-In.”
While it’s certainly not the only thing you can and should do (check out our Email Deliverability Guide for more tips), it’s a best practice that clearly correlates to more email getting to the inbox.
And as time goes on, it’s become less of a suggested best practice, and more of an ISP requirement.
Just ask Yahoo!
Posted in : Email Deliverability | 12 Comments »Migrating Your List? Remember To Tell Them…
Justin Premick - December 5th, 2007
Over the past few weeks I’ve come across a lot of businesses talking about migrating their email marketing campaigns — either from in-house systems to hosted solutions (such as AWeber), or between hosted solutions.
Once you’ve decided that it’s time to upgrade your mailing capabilities, it’s tempting to focus on doing so quickly. After all, if you’re unhappy with an email system, why would you want to spend any more time at all using it?
Today, I want to highlight a common mistake that we see businesses make as they migrate their lists:
Posted in : Email Deliverability | 9 Comments »Spam Complaints: How Many Is Too Many?
Marc Kline - November 29th, 2007
With some things in life, what is “too much” is quite clear.
Last week, we might have had too much turkey or sweet potatoes, or in the ensuing weeks we might go over our holiday spending budgets. When we hit the scales or balance our checkbooks, we know whether or not we went overboard.
Still, in other cases, we need some guidance on the matter. For instance, if we receive too many spam complaints from subscribers, the deliverability of our messages can really suffer.
But how do we know when we’ve received too many of these?
Posted in : Email Deliverability | 18 Comments »Holiday Marketing Tip: Don’t Send Pointless Greetings!
Justin Premick - November 28th, 2007
Can sending a “Happy New Year” or “Merry Christmas” greeting hurt your email deliverability?
Earlier this week, I was talking with Tom (our founder) about the holiday marketing tips we posted recently, and we got to talking about the email habits of both publishers and subscribers around this time of year.
There’s something that thousands of businesses (and in my experience, especially small businesses) do on holidays that brings you little benefit while making it harder to get your email through. Plus it potentially hurts other areas of your email marketing and your business as a whole.
So what is it?
Posted in : Email Deliverability | 32 Comments »How Gmail Fights Spam
Justin Premick - October 31st, 2007
Stumbled across this yesterday: Google Blog: It’s Not About The Spam.
The video they included with their post gives a basic — and amusing — overview of what they do to filter out spam while delivering wanted email to the inbox. (Bonus: the lab costumes add a nice Halloween touch!)
Posted in : Email Deliverability | 2 Comments »SpamAssassin’s Tips on Deliverability
Justin Premick - October 30th, 2007We get a lot of questions about SpamAssassin, the popular content filtering tool. It’s used by smaller ISPs and individual domains to minimize unwanted mail on their networks, and we automatically check users’ messages against it in the control panel.
People often want to know what’s a “good” SpamAssassin score, and/or how they can get their score to 0, so that their messages don’t trigger false positives.
I can certainly give my own take on SA, but why not get the skinny directly from them?
Posted in : Email Deliverability | 7 Comments »Free Email Deliverability Guide For Our Blog Readers!
Justin Premick - October 17th, 2007While talking with our Support Team a while back, I was reminded of not only how often people ask about deliverability, but also what specifically they ask — questions like:
“How good is your email deliverability?”
“Can you use SPF? How do I set it up?”
“How do you guarantee that my email will get to people’s inboxes?”
Questions like these are easy enough to answer, but simply answering them isn’t enough, because there’s a bigger, more important question about email deliverability that people need to get an answer to:
Posted in : Email Deliverability | 5 Comments »« Previous Entries
