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.
A New York court yesterday affirmed that New York can charge sales tax on sales made through affiliates who are based in New York state. Known as "The Amazon Tax", and indeed the primary plaintiff in the case was Amazon, the rule says that so long as the affiliate is located in New York, and the company for whom the sales are generated has sales of at least $10,000 attributable to affiliates in New York, then the company must pay sales tax to the state of New York.
Customer service email response time expectations are such that a lead or customer expects to get an email reply to an email inquiry within minutes or, at worst, a few hours. That means that if you are taking more than a few hours to respond to a customer's email, and especially to a lead or prospect's email, you are both tarnishing your company's reputation, and losing out on business - in fact, you are effectively turning business away. Instead, answer it immediately, or at least as soon as you can, even if it's just to acknowledge it and say that you will get back to them more fully later.
We recently had one of our email accreditation customers ask us whether we would contact all of the blacklists listed at on a particular site on their behalf, because the site listed their IP address' reputation with these blacklists as "neutral".
Every so often we run into a sender who has a sense of entitlement - or even righteous indignation - about how an ISP should, must - even has to - accept their email. Whether because it's "requested" or opt-in or because it "complies with CAN-SPAM", the sender gets all in our face about how a given ISP has a responsiblity and duty to accept their email. Sometimes they even rant that it's required by {CAN-SPAM| tort law | the 1st Amendment | insert your favourite rant here}. Except, that's completely wrong.
Having a good email reputation is actually much more important than being on a whitelist. But lots of people still talk about trying to get whitelisted, and they are looking for information about how to get on an email whitelist. And indeed, getting whitelisted used to be the holy grail of email deliverability. Did you catch that? Used to be.
I'm sure that you know that more and more people are reading email on the go (I, for example, read a large percentage of my email on my Sidekick, many others read email on their Blackberrys). In fact last year Marketing Sherpa determined that 64% of key decision makers are reading email on their mobile devices. Reading your email on their mobile devices. Have you ever stopped to think about what that means in terms of your email deliverability?
We recently had a customer muse to us "I think there's got to be a phone number at the ISP that we could call, so we can ask them to explain the reason we are being sent to the junk folder." As most of you who read this probably know, well, there isn't such a phone number. But why not?
This has been a long time coming.
We've been asked and asked to do this, and so now we finally are.
The Email Sending Secrets Insiders Circle.
Listen to Our Blogcast
- Iowa, Montana, Indiana, and Tennessee Join the Ranks of States with Email Opt-in Requirement in New Data Privacy Laws (Season 3 Episode 8)
- New Texas Data Privacy Law is Strict on Email Collection and Email Marketing (Season 3 Episode 7)
- The Value of a Political Email List: Ready for Ron (RFR) versus the FEC (Season 3 Episode 6)
- Who is Behind the Domain Kmail-lists? Here's Who (Season 3, Episode 5)
- Get a Great Return on SMS Marketing While Following SMS Marketing Laws and Best Practices (Season 3 Episode 6)