Domain reputation versus email reputation: which one should you worry about? Happily, they are actually essentially the same.
We have a customer who sends email out on behalf of a very large, very well known institution in the financial investment world. Some of these mailings lists are paid mailing lists. By which I mean that the users paid to receive these emails. And yet, they still report it as spam. Why would they do this? Here's why.
A fascinating, and a bit shocking, study was released today, rating how well online commerce sites do when it comes to responding to prospect and customer email queries. Not very, it turns out.
We've talked previously about why all the email addresses you send from (i.e. your email's "return address") should really exist. It's because if they don't, you're email is going to get junk foldered, both due to spam complaints, and because ISPs actually test whether your from address exists. But there are some email addresses - used as "From:" addresses - that even if you create them on your system - even if they really do exist - you should just never use.
The results of two studies which looked at whether people are less inclined to be honest in email are out, and the answer is a big "yes". Based on these studies, at least, people tend to lie a lot in email. In fact, the two studies, published jointly as a paper entitled "Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining", found that in their tests, subjects were likely to lie as much as 92% of the time!
While I'm off at the last of the three conferences in four weeks (actually I'm running the Boulder Business Retreat), I thought I'd share this little example of what not to do with your email marketing. I should be back more regularly next week; I hope you've missed me as much as I've missed you! Today's shining example of a company that just doesn't get it is AmericaRX.com.
Challenge response systems have been around long enough now that pretty much everybody has an opinion on them. The end users who use challenge response systems seem to love them. But legitimate email senders often never respond to challenges, and so the end users are actually missing out on a lot of wanted email.
We've talked in the past about why address book importing is just not ok. But in addition to the fact that it trains people to enter their passwords at third-party sites, and to the fact that when you send out all those invitations it makes you look like a spammer, there's another big reason to not do address book importing.
