Red Pill Email

Three Hard Bounces

What a good day to dust off another in my pile of unfinished blog posts and random ideas thanks to the folks @StrongMail for sharing “Marketing chiefs: Are you spamming your customers?”

“And nearly one fifth (17 per cent) of marketers surveyed are not failing to remove email addresses from mailing lists after messages bounce back.”

Reminded me of a story from a year or so ago.  It was after dinner with some email friends when like the wine the email war and horror stories started to flow. 

Being a consultant I have to maintain a certain level of obliqueness when sharing stories.  Sure there’s the whole NDA thing, but more importantly I don’t like to kiss and tell; I don’t care what you think you see on my collar….

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November 25, 2009 | Deliverability, Operations & Integration, Story Time | 5 Comments »

“6 reasons to fire your ESP”? Seriously!?

So I’m wading through my Inbox on a Monday morning, like a lot of people I’m sure do, when the Subject Line, “6 reasons to fire your ESP“, jumps out at me from my iMedia Connection subscription. 

Since I’ve spent lot of time studying ESPs; a lot of time working with clients on vendor selection; consulted with ESPs; and regularly monitored the ESP marketplace during my tenure at a multi-billion dollar enterprise organization with 8-digit email channel revenue, might be something of interest to me

Rather than leave a long windy blog-length comment, why not just blog my comments here….

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November 10, 2009 | Operations & Integration, Vendor Selection | 4 Comments »

An Underpants Gnomes View of Email Marketing

I started this post a while ago – one of something like 15 in my pile of unfinished blog posts and random ideas for blog posts – and never got around to finishing it.  After some South Park fun on Twitter with my friends Shannon Holato from Bronto and Andrew Osterday of Premier Global this seemed like a fun post to pick back up today….

So, do you ever get frustrated, or just shake your head, at those with an Underpants Gnomes’ view of email marketing?  If you’re a fan of, South Park, and have seen the Underpants Gnomes episode you can probably guess what’s coming…. 

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November 3, 2009 | Nuts & Bolts, Operations & Integration | 5 Comments »

An Email Marketing Holiday

Everyone in email – and all of their family and friends – have all heard about last month’s Wall Street Journal article, “Why Email No Longer Rules…” Blah blah blah blah….  Anyone that’s been around email long enough has heard it all before….

I won’t belabor the points made by a couple of Cohen’s, Scott & Jordan(related only by email marketing), or even reiterate why I think email is an online 800lb Gorilla.  I won’t even mention that at last week’s Responsys Leaders Forum, David Daniels pointed out that the columnist received her “email is dead” assignment by email, or that she submitted her article by email…. Why bother?  Some *get it*; some refuse to….

But for the sake of argument, let’s just say that email is dead….

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November 2, 2009 | Story Time | 2 Comments »

Why I Critique Political Email Practices

I probably should have made this post some time ago, but then again I don’t think that it would have had the same impact as doing so now.

If you’ve read some of my posts you know that I’ve taken political emailers to task on several occasions and I’m not usually nice about it.  So why do I critique political email practices?  Because bad email practices are bad email practices regardless of political affiliation, but let me give you a few more reasons….

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October 22, 2009 | Story Time | No Comments »