After iOS 15 email marketing was changed forever, and email open rates are no longer important, right? Wrong. Since the moment that iOS 15 was a gleam in Tim Cook's eye, self-styled email marketing experts began advising that you could start ignoring open rates because, and we quote, "they are no longer accurate" and "they are artificially inflated by iOS 15." To paraphrase a beloved children's story, this is terrible, horrible, no good, very bad advice.
Let's play a game that we like to call "Can I Use This List?" or "Can I Put This Email Address on My List?". Here are fifteen scenarios in which someone may come across or into possession of somebody's email address, or a mailing list, and you have to decide whether or not it is ok to use the email address or list. Which ones are fair game to use? The answers may surprise you!
Just as with any other industry, the email deliverability and email marketing industries have their own […]
Just what is a good open rate average, and is there an open rate formula? In our world we talk a lot about open rates, and why it's so important to track them (you can read more about the importance of tracking open rates here). While open rate averages vary widely across industries, senders, ESPs, and ISPs, and there is no real open rate formula, a very general rule of thumb is that inbox providers and ISPs like to see a consistent 20% or better open rate in order to keep putting the email that you send flowing into the inbox, and help to avoid your landing in the spam folder. But what is less talked about is what causes failure to opens (FTOs) and how to prevent them.
Did you know that there are a lot of regular words that can help push your email to the spam folder if everything else isn't squeaky clean? Remember George Carlin's "7 words you can't say on tv"? Well there are a whole lot more words that you can't say in email without risking your email being a candidate for further scrutiny and possibly going to the spam folder. In fact one of the things that is most surprising to many email senders is just how many words there are that, when in their email, and if their email doesn't otherwise adhere to best practices, can trip up the spam filters. They are even more surprised when they learn what some of those words are, because they are very common words, words that seem (and often are) innocent, and yet the spam filters will chew on them, and if your email contains enough of these words, or has these words along with some other factors, they will then spit your email out directly into the spam folder.
There's a reason that email hygiene services are so popular: following regular email list hygiene best practices not only keeps email deliverability from tanking, but will also boost your list's performance to the moon! Regular mailing list maintenance gives you amazing open and click-through rates, and not just because you've removed the dead wood. So many email senders who know that they should follow email hygiene best practices often just can't bring themselves to abandon inactive subscribers. However, once you realize just how incredibly responsive a leaner, meaner list can be you'll not only want to perform mail hygiene maintenance regularly, you'll actually look forward to it, because it's the secret sauce that will keep you ahead of your competition. We call this secret sauce "compounded deliverability".
The one-click unsubscribe email law (sometimes referred to as the "one-step unsubscribe rule") is part of CAN-SPAM. The CAN-SPAM unsubscribe rules include that a recipient be able to effectuate their opt-out with a one-click unsubscribe, whether that is by replying to the email or by visiting a single web page. The one-click unsubscribe law is part of our Federal law, and so applies to any and all mailing lists and mailing list email.
Whither goest Mailchimp? Often an email company being acquired leads to abuse handling and opt-in standards declining, and so to an associated decline in reputation and deliverability. It took Mailchimp 20 years to build up the good reputation that they have in the email receiving community; it can take them, or Intuit, or both, fewer than six months to destroy it.
Today we are celebrating both the dawn of networked email, and the person who sent the first email, Ray Tomlinson. In October, 1971, Ray sent the very first networked email. To be sure, the computer to which he sent it was barely 3 feet away from the computer from which he sent it, and yes, he had sent it to himself, but nonetheless, it was groundbreaking. Prior to that some computers had a rudimentary 'email' messaging system through which one person could leave a 'mail' message for another person, but only on the same computer (sort of like a local dropbox). Sending one email to another computer was a Very Big Deal. It was also Ray who decided that there should be the "@" between the username and the domain (web address) of the email, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Mailchimp has just announced a brand new Shopify integration. Now you may be wondering "Wait a minute, hasn't Mailchimp integrated with Shopify all along?" The answer is that Mailchimp used to have a Shopify integration, but they had discontinued it. In fact, Mailchimp left Shopify 2 1/2 years ago when, in 2019, Mailchimp and Shopify had a rather public and unamicable divorce.
