Do you use Salesforce's Pardot email platform? Lucy Mazalon of the Drip just posted a simple how-to guide that explains how you can automatically send a follow up email to people who didn't open your previous email message. Don't do this to be endlessly annoying to somebody who isn't responding, but instead, keep this functionality in mind when executing a re-engagement step as part of your subscriber lifecycle management strategy. For subscribers who haven't engaged with your mail (haven't opened or clicked) in 6-12 months, send them a re-engagement (winback) email, and then you could even use a process like this to potentially send them one more follow up email, one more chance to re-confirm that they're alive and they want to stay subscribed to your email messages. If they don't respond by that point, let them go. They're no longer active subscribers; at this point they're dead weight that will bring your reputation down at ISPs due to lowered engagement metrics.
Click here to read the article over on the Drip's website.
Why Email Engagement Is the Holy Grail of Email Deliverability
ActiveCampaign's Robert Colomberti's explains.
This is REALLY good stuff. The date range guidance might change depending on your industry or differences in sales pipeline, and the segmentation guidance gets a bit platform specific, but the core of this is solid.
As far as the bit at the end about using an email validation vendor, that's a whole other discussion. Upfront verification that somebody isn't submitting an invalid address into a form is a good thing, but don't forget that it's not the same as verifying permission. Data validation isn't going to fix a non-permissioned list, for example. That kind of thing is still deliverability killing. (I don't mean to imply that ActiveCampaign says otherwise. I am just making my own voice heard here.)
This is REALLY good stuff. The date range guidance might change depending on your industry or differences in sales pipeline, and the segmentation guidance gets a bit platform specific, but the core of this is solid.
As far as the bit at the end about using an email validation vendor, that's a whole other discussion. Upfront verification that somebody isn't submitting an invalid address into a form is a good thing, but don't forget that it's not the same as verifying permission. Data validation isn't going to fix a non-permissioned list, for example. That kind of thing is still deliverability killing. (I don't mean to imply that ActiveCampaign says otherwise. I am just making my own voice heard here.)
Apache SpamAssassin 3.4.4 now available
The Apache SpamAssassin Project has just announced the release of version 3.4.4 of the popular spam filter SpamAssassin.
Apache SpamAssassin 3.4.4 is "primarily a security release," but includes various fixes for things like improved carriage return handling for DKIM checks and re-implementing Perl 5.8.x compatibility. Click here to learn more about it and/or download the updated version.
Apache SpamAssassin 3.4.4 is "primarily a security release," but includes various fixes for things like improved carriage return handling for DKIM checks and re-implementing Perl 5.8.x compatibility. Click here to learn more about it and/or download the updated version.
Following best practices for sending to Gmail
(Thanks to the smart folks at Postmark for the tip!)
Is 2020 the year of BIMI?
You might notice that in my "2020: What's next?" post, I didn't mention BIMI.
BIMI, aka Brand Indicators for Message Identification, is the new way to specify what logo or brand avatar a sender wants shown alongside their email messages. (Learn more about BIMI here.)
Showing a logo, avatar or little graphic along side an email message isn't a new thing. Gmail, Yahoo Mail and others have supported some form of logo display for a long time now. But where that logo was sourced from, how it was populated, this wasn't always clear or obvious. Gmail would pull the graphic from a Google Plus profile or Google account. Yahoo Mail would do the same, I found, but it also could pull the logo from other places. It had some sort of internal process that I wasn't privy to. And there's Gravatar, which is still out there and still (modestly) supported. (And at some point, Microsoft announced something called Brand Cards that never seems to have launched. So I have no idea if anybody ever set up or observed a "brand card" logo in the wild.)
Showing a logo, avatar or little graphic along side an email message isn't a new thing. Gmail, Yahoo Mail and others have supported some form of logo display for a long time now. But where that logo was sourced from, how it was populated, this wasn't always clear or obvious. Gmail would pull the graphic from a Google Plus profile or Google account. Yahoo Mail would do the same, I found, but it also could pull the logo from other places. It had some sort of internal process that I wasn't privy to. And there's Gravatar, which is still out there and still (modestly) supported. (And at some point, Microsoft announced something called Brand Cards that never seems to have launched. So I have no idea if anybody ever set up or observed a "brand card" logo in the wild.)
Mashable's wrong (sort of) -- empty your inbox!
Mashable's Alex Perry wrote just the other day that one should never bother to clean out your email inbox. Sort of right, sort of wrong. Me, I'd go crazy if I left 250,000 email messages in my email inbox. His point, though, is that you might as well save everything forever in email, and have it available to search through as needed. That's something I completely agree with. But he misses the point-- you don't have to "leave it in the inbox" to do that. In Gmail, for example, just "archive" it all at some point, and it is still there for you, in "All Mail," and available to be searched, without specifically cluttering up your inbox. So keep all that mail, but empty the inbox out periodically.