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 going to the spam folder. In fact there are a lot of regular words that can get your email into trouble with spam filters? One of the things that is surprising to many email senders is just how many words there are that, when in their email, can trip 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 often 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 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.
Conventional wisdom says that personalizing your email marketing subject lines, such as putting someone's first name in the subject line using tags or other automations, increases the open rate for that email marketing. That may not be the case any longer.
We get asked "Why is my email going to the junk or spam folder?" all the time. Here is one of the most comment reasons that email gets sent to the junk folder, and what to do about it.
Domain reputation versus email reputation: which one should you worry about? Happily, they are actually essentially the same.
