by Karen Talavera on May 16, 2012
Unless you overhear a conversation about porn spam, the words “email” and “sexy” don’t get used in the same sentence very often. Email, the loyal silent workhorse of social media, steadfast driver of e-commerce, overshadowed stepsister of search, is more often likened to Martha Stewart – reliable, conservative and past her prime – than Angelina Jolie – slinky, seductive, and unpredictable – although both have built sizable empires of wealth and influence.
That is, until now. Oh yeah, we’re finally bringing sexy back to email marketing.
I’m not sure if email ever truly enjoyed a flirtatious and provocative adolescence – it sort of leapt from childhood to married-with-two-kids – but we got a brief glimpse of its sex appeal a little over a decade ago when video in email first arrived on the scene. Unfortunately, deliverability constraints and increased receiving environment security quickly thwarted passage of live-motion-video and audio in the inbox, and video moved almost exclusively to websites and later, YouTube.
Today, three exciting innovations are bringing video, audio, animation and dynamically-updated content to email and the inbox has never looked hotter!
So without further ado, let me roll out the red carpet for [click to continue…]
by Karen Talavera on April 30, 2012
There’s a heated debate in email marketing over what to do with inactive subscribers and whether or not they can seriously harm a sender’s reputation, deliverability and response enough to justify no longer emailing them. The passion on both sides of this issue – the potential harmful downside of continuing to mail “inactives” juxtaposed with the potential helpful upside of keeping them on your list – makes this argument one worth taking a closer look at.
The Downside
In the one corner, it’s a reality that major email account hosting ISPs (like Yahoo, Hotmail and Google) convert abandoned email accounts into what is known as “spamtraps”. While there are many kinds of spamtraps, perhaps the most damaging are the ones that were once valid email accounts, now abandoned. Email is often still deliverable to these abandoned accounts (although some ISPs will reject mail to them for a period of time, not all will), yet like an empty house “the lights are on but nobody’s home”. So to a marketer, it appears as if an email list subscriber is simply ignoring their messages when in fact a live human is no longer using the account – rather, an ISP is managing it to “trap” unwanted email.
The problem arises because [click to continue…]
Unless you overhear a conversation about porn spam, the words “email” and “sexy” don’t get used in the same sentence very often. Email, the loyal silent workhorse of social media, steadfast driver of e-commerce, overshadowed stepsister of search, is more often likened to Martha Stewart – reliable, conservative and past her prime – than Angelina Jolie – slinky, seductive, and unpredictable – although both have built sizable empires of wealth and influence.
