A Lesson from The Onion

By Bonnie Malone Fry
Director, Strategic Services

In a recent article featured on The Onion, Presidential candidate Barack Obama expressed his personal frustrations in receiving an onslaught of emails from the polictical association MoveOn.org. He subscribed to the organization's email program 4 years ago, but continues to receive email after months of deleting it without reading a single message. He finds the content uninteresting and not valuable, and the frequency (3x a week) highly irritating. Of course it's immediately obvious why this is so funny - MoveOn.org has gained a reputation as a very aggressive email marketer.

But, aside from being so funny, The Onion spoof offers a good object lesson for marketers. Because it's all too easy to think, what's the big deal if people delete your email daily without reading it? But this piece hits a nerve because it articulates ...

Categories: Response

Building on Great Transactional Messages

By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services

A recent post by Tamara Gielen of OgilvyOne on the Be Relevant blog included a list of 10 helpful tips from Wendy Roth of Lyris Technologies about making the most of your transactional messages. Implementing these tips will go a long way towards ensuring that marketers are "celebrating" a customer's recent action or purchase. In other words, an optimized transactional message reaffirms that the customer made a good choice by providing them with relevant and useful information that's personalized, detailed and action-oriented.

This got me thinking about the email customer lifecycle and how marketers can build on great transactional messages. After subscribers have clicked, signed up or purchased (effectively moving from inactives to actives or non-buyers to buyers), what comes next? They're clearly engaged with your brand, which means they're primed to receive your follow-up messaging. So how can your next emails keep the momentum going and pave the way for continued engagement and retention?

There's really a two-part answer to that question. First

Categories: Response

Is Your Email an Invited Guest or a Drunken Frat-boy?

By Neil Schwartzman
Director of Standards and Security, Sender Score Certified Compliance

I have been thinking about the analogy between the email inbox and the postal mailbox we all have. It doesn't work.

It is true that the inbox is a replacement for where we receive news about friends, since handwritten letters seem to have been all but replaced by email (and to a lesser degree, instant messages, and text messaging).

But the inbox isn't your mailbox, it is your living room, a far more intimate and personal space. It is where your friends can drop by unannounced, and invited guests are welcome.

Now, when an invited guest comes into my home ...

Categories: Deliverability

The Root of All Email

By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products

This week, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published a number of what they call "RFCs," which originally meant "Requests for Comment" -- the standards documents which specify the technical underpinnings of the internet. Two of these, numbered 5321 and 5322, replace earlier documents defining the very core of internet email. On the surface, each of these seem surprisingly simple; one aims "...to transfer mail reliably and efficiently," while the other defines itself as "...a definition of what message content format is to be passed between systems." Yet without general industry-wide acceptance of (and compliance with) these standards, internet email simply would not exist.

This week also marks ten years since the death of Jon Postel, who arguably had more influence over the creation of the internet than any other single person. One of Jon's most enduring recommendations is ...Tell me more

Categories: Deliverability