Email marketing is a blood sport. In the last 20 years, the only thing that’s changed with email is that good email senders continue to get punished more and more by email service providers. While ISPs and ESPs could totally coordinate if they wanted to, they simply don’t. The result is that there’s an adversarial relationship between the two. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) block Email Service Providers (ESPs)… and then ESPs are forced to block clients. It’s not as simple as double opt-in in the industry. Sites like ours work with partners on shared campaigns
Somewhere Between SPAM and Creepy Lies Transparency
Recent weeks have been eye-opening for me regarding the data scandals reported in mainstream news. I’ve honestly been taken aback by many of my peers in the industry and their knee-jerk reaction and response to how Facebook data was harvested and utilized for political purposes during the most recent campaign. Some History on Presidential Campaigns and Data: 2008 – I had an amazing conversation with a data engineer from President Obama’s first campaign who shared how they harvested and purchased data. Their primary was difficult, and the Democratic Party wouldn’t release donor and supporter lists
Website Features Checklist: The 65 Ultimate Must-Haves for Your Site
Wow. I love it when someone designs a checklist on an infographic that’s both simple and informative. UK Web Host Review designed this infographic to develop a list of features they believe should be included with every business’ online presence. For your business to succeed online you need to make sure that your website is feature packed! There are many small details that can make all the difference – both in terms of giving customers trust and also giving them extra functions that aid conversions and improve the overall user experience of your site. It
We All Hate Spam and Cold-Calling… Until We Don’t
On May 15th, I received an unsolicited email (aka SPAM) from an agency in Atlanta telling me what an explainer video was. I knew what it was, we’ve written about explainer videos extensively and published quite a few of our own. I didn’t respond to the email. A week later, I get another email with a similar note. A week later, another one. I don’t respond to either. Four emails that I didn’t respond to or even click a link on. We started work with a new client and have solidified their branding requirements for
The History of Email and Email Design
44 years ago, Raymond Tomlinson was working on ARPANET (the U.S. Government’s precursor to the publicly available Internet), and invented email. It was a pretty big deal because up until that point, messages could only be sent and read on the same computer. This allowed a user and a destination separated by the & symbol. When he showed colleague Jerry Burchfiel, the response was: Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on. The first email Ray Tomlinson sent was a test e-mail Tomlinson described as insignificant, something like “QWERTYUIOP”. Fast forward