Everything Email Marketing

Texas has passed their HB 4, joining a growing list of states which have passed their own data privacy laws, laws which impact email and email marketing, among other things. The new Texas law has a very short fuse: it goes into effect on July 1, 2024, and affects any business which either is in Texas, or which does business with individuals who reside within Texas. It is also very strict on email address collection, email use, and email marketing, and among other things it requires consent before you do nearly anything non-transactional with someone’s email address. We break it down for you here.

Just when you thought it was safe to turn your back on political email skirmishes, Ready for Ron (a/k/a RFR and R4R) challenges the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) in Federal court over not being allowed to give a list chock full of email addresses to a candidate. Here's the outcome, explained in plain English.

Here’s a random question that we were asked “We just got an email with an unsubscribe link going to kmail-lists.com; who is behind kmail-lists?” It turns out that it’s pretty hard for at least the average person to figure out who is responsible for the kmail-lists.com domain; the ESP behind kmail-lists.com is Klaviyo, who is an ESP for primarily B2C businesses, in fact they are a primary competitor to Shopify, who used to dominate the B2C (‘business to consumer’) and D2C (‘direct to consumer’) ESP space.

So you want to be (or are) an SMS Marketer. As you navigate the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing, it’s crucial to understand the SMS marketing legal landscape and SMS marketing laws and best practices. One key thing that SMS marketers in the U.S. often overlook, but which actually requires your attention, is the Federal Do Not Call (DNC) list. The thing is, checking the DNC list is not only essential (in fact required by law), but it can actually increase your ROI, and benefit your customers and your business! Here’s how.

Not confirming email addresses can put your customer in physical danger, and can cause you legal liability if they are harmed. We’ve written before about how not confirming email addresses can potentially create real-world, real legal liability, because in certain settings, and particulately in ecommerce, it can actually lead to your customer suffering physical harm; maybe even death.

Microsoft will start honoring p=reject DMARC policies for incoming email which does not pass a DMARC check when the associated DMARC record designates a policy of p=reject. This affects inbound messages at Microsoft Outlook email addresses, Microsoft Hotmail email addresses, Microsoft Live email addresses, and MSN email addresses.

Spam trigger words, do they exist, or don’t they? And if spam trigger words exist, what are they? Ask 5 different email marketing or email deliverability experts whether there is really such a thing as spam trigger words, and you’ll get seven different answers. Even highly respected deliverability sources will say something like “There is no such thing as spam trigger words… except..” or “Spam trigger words don’t exist, but…”. Because you see, spam trigger words do exist.

Google is ending a pilot program that allowed political campaigns to bypass the spam filter, and they have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that the RNC filed against them. Note that Google is not ‘restarting’ spam filtering in Gmail for political campaigns, as claimed by some, and that’s because they never stopped. Confused? You won’t be, read on.

The one-click unsubscribe law (sometimes referred to as the “one-step unsubscribe rule”) is part of CAN-SPAM. The CAN-SPAM unsubscribe rules include that a recipient be able to effectuate their opt-out with a one-click unsubscribe, whether that is by replying to the email or by visiting a single web page. The one-click unsubscribe law is part of our Federal law, and so applies to any and all mailing lists and mailing list email.  In this episode we walk you through the requirements, and how to not be in violation of this very clear law.

Did you know that certain popular buzzwords can actually hurt your deliverability when used in your email subject line? No, we’re not talking about so-called ‘spam trigger words’, although those are still a thing despite what some may say. And did you know that personalization in your email subject line (and even in your opening salutation) can also hurt your deliverability?

Here’s a fun “what if” game, play along with us: What if the boss gave you $10,000 to improve your brand’s email marketing ROI? How would you spend it? What would you do? Well, for us that was a no-brainer. But before we tell you how we would spend that $10k, and why, let’s cover some basics.

It’s hard to believe as we are closing in on 2023 that there are still email marketers and other bulk email senders who don’t immediately remove people who unsubscribe from their list, but it’s true. So this article is for those people who need to understand that you really really need to remove the email addresses of people who want to opt-out from your mailing lists as soon as humanly possible. Even though CAN-SPAM gives you 10 days to do it.

GDPR, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect on May 25, 2018. The UK adopted their own UK GDPR after Brexit, which closely tracks the original EU GDPR. GDPR applies to any business that collects any personal information data about individuals. This personal data, or ‘personally identifiable information’ (PII) includes things from which identity can be derived, such as, for example, a street address, a telephone number, an email address, and even an IP address.

Despite that GDPR is coming up on its fifth anniversary, people are still asking questions like “What is a ‘data controller’ or a ‘data processor’ under GDPR?” And “How is a GDPR data processor different from a GDPR data controller?” And even “Can a company be both a data processor and a data controller at the same time under the EU General Data Protection Regulation?” And the ever important question: “Do we have to comply with GDPR if we are in the U.S.?” Here are the answers.

We talk about the CAN-SPAM Act often, and you may even hear about it from time to time when email spam makes the news, or when looking at your own email marketing policies, or, even, when dealing with spam complaints. But what exactly is CAN-SPAM and which parts of it are most applicable to you? Here are the 10 things that you need to know about CAN-SPAM.

Did you know that your mailing list’s MR is way more important than LS (List Size)? In fact, MR is one of the most important, if not the most important, metric of all, and yet it is often the most overlooked metric! Not familiar with ‘MR’? Read on!

Here’s something that often comes up in discussions with email senders. You really really need to remove the email addresses of people who want to opt-out – that is, to unsubscribe – from your mailings lists as soon as humanly possible. Even though CAN-SPAM gives you ten days to do it.

Users of mass email services such as Gmass, Woodpecker, Lemlist and others, that have been using Gmail’s API to send bulk email that tricked recipients into thinking that they were receiving personal one-to-one emails, have been put on notice today by Google: “Applications that use multiple accounts to abuse Google policies, bypass Gmail account limitation, circumvent filters and spam, or otherwise subvert restrictions are prohibited from accessing Gmail API scopes.”

As we have always predicted they would, the shortcomings of the CAN-SPAM Act have given rise to new state email opt-in laws and email consent laws, in the form of their new personal data privacy laws. The new Connecticut privacy law, along with new privacy laws in Colorado, Virginia, and Utah, all require consent before you can send targeted advertising to someone whose personal data you have acquired.

One of the many things that we explain to people in our Email Deliverability Handbook is that while you must comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, you shouldn’t say that you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. This advice may seem counter-intuitive, however here’s why.

“Never use a ‘do not reply’ email address” is something that we seem to have been saying for years (because we have). Today we are repeating it, hot on the heels of a real-life example, a retail mini-saga that unfolded for us with a large, well-known online retailer. The saga could have been easily downgraded to a minor glitch, had it not been for the fact that we kept receiving what seemed to be quite urgent, even strident, emails, all from a “do not reply” email address, and with no other way to respond to the email (no alternate email address, no phone number, zip, zero, zilch). It serves as a good reminder that not only can “do not reply” email addresses be incredibly frustrating (especially if some sort of alternate communication option is not provided), but they can also affect your email deliverability, especially when “no reply” email addresses are in fact non-existent email addresses.

You’d think that by now people would understand that spam complaints impact your deliverability, both to the inbox and, ultimately, even to the inbox provider themselves. Yet we regularly get questions and comments, both in the course of our business day, and in casual conversation, which make clear that there is something that people just aren’t grokking, so here it is, put as plainly and clearly as we can put it: If you get too many spam complaints your email is going to start going to the junk folder and may eventually be blocked.

ISP email delivery requirements and ISP whitelist requirements differ from ISP to ISP. In fact one of the most frustrating things for commercial and volume email senders is that different ISPs have different standards for what they require in order to ensure that your email gets delivered.

We are often asked “Why are my emails going to spam?” And while we know, and you may know, that there are obvious missteps to avoid when ensuring that your email is not marked as spam, there are some commonly overlooked practices, or lack thereof, that can still cause a legitimate email to be marked as spam.

Here’s one way to tell transactional email vs marketing email: have a court slap you for putting what it says is advertising or marketing content in your opt-in confirmation email. This court decision happened inside the EU, however it is also a cautionary tale for anyone in the U.S., or Canada, or really anywhere that has national email marketing laws.

What are email headers? Email headers are that part of your email that contain the date, the subject, the information about who sent the email and to whom it was sent. (See our email headers example below.) Often you will be asked to provide “full headers” to a mailing organization, particularly if you are reporting spam, or a problem with email. That is so that you can help them to identify exactly who sent you the spam, and how they did it. Someone who is skilled at reading headers can usually see through even the most crafty attempt to falsify that information. Here is how to find those headers – it’s easy once you know how!

Many email senders rage against the machine – the spam filtering machine, that is, and specifically spam filters for email. And it’s easy to understand why: legitimate email getting caught and misidentified as spam, also known as false positives, can play all sorts of havoc for an email sender. But consider this: what would the email world look like if the email receivers (ISPs and inbox providers) didn’t use spam filters?

Every once in a while a sender comes to us with a sense of entitlement, or even righteous indignation, about how this inbox provider or that ISP should, or must, or 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 responsibility, and a duty, and an obligation to accept their email. Sometimes they even rant that it’s required by {CAN-SPAM| tort law | the 1st Amendment | insert your favorite rant here}.

Getting spam complaints and not knowing who made a particular email spam complaint is really frustrating. We get it. A common complaint that we hear, particularly from email senders who are signed up for feedback loops from ISPs, is “why won’t the ISPs let us know who is complaining and clicking “this is spam” on our email, so that we can unsubscribe them?” This is frustrating for senders who are following all best email marketing practices, including confirmed opt-in, because it means that someone who confirmed their consent to receive the email still complained that it was spam!

Back in 2009 we had the pleasure of working with journalist Karen Bannen on an article that she was doing about email deliverability for B-to-B Online. Karen interviewed both our CEO Anne Mitchell, and R. Dave Lewis (CMO of Message Systems at the time) for the piece, in which she distilled down to their essence 5 ways to improve your email deliverability.

“Am I blacklisted?” “What is a good IP blacklist checker?” “How can I find out if my email is being blocked?” These are common, frustrating, and perplexing questions. First, let’s clear up blocklist vs blacklist: these lists are more properly called “blocklists”, not “blacklists”. This is because they are lists which are used to block email spam, not to blacklist people. However we recognize that many people, and even some services, use the more common “blacklist”. (Don’t be common!) Anyways, often people want to determine whether their email server (the computer from which their email is sent) is listed on a blocklist. But how do you find out whether your email is being blocked by a blocklist?

Wondering how to avoid emails going to spam? Here’s a very basic thing to remember: one of the main reasons that people may mistake your email for spam is because, in fact, the content of your email makes your email look like spam. Remember that old saw, that “content is king”? Well, content can also be the joker, where the joke is on you. Because if your content is garish or gaudy, or full of lots of big images and little text, then instead of getting the royal treatment, it may go straight to the spam folder.

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.

Improving email deliverability rates is both an art and a science, and to really get results you need to have some expertise in both. And of course, that’s one of the reasons that many companies pay someone to do it for them, be it an in-house email deliverability expert, an outside company such as ours, or a combination of both. But there are some fairly simple things that you can do on your own to help monitor and improve email deliverability, no experience needed! Here are three things that you can do that can make a big difference to your email deliverability rate, and all they will cost you is your time.

While Google’s Gmail Feedback Loop (Gmail FBL) is intended primarily for high volume senders and ESPs, Google offers their Google Postmaster Tools (PMT) to everyone. Here are how to sign up for Google Postmaster Tools and the Gmail Feedback Loop.

If you are in business online you must have an email retention policy (ERP), and your email archive must follow it (email archive meaning the storage of your email). If you either send or receive email in the course of business (and you probably do if you’re reading this) then it’s imperative to have a written email retention policy, which includes your email archiving policy. And at least as important, you need to follow it religiously.

We all know that email delivery problems are costly, and can damage your email reputation. But sometimes email deliverability issues can actually create dangerous situations. As more and more people rely on email for delivery of vital information, and less on the post office and phone calls, this is is something about which everyone, and services and agencies in particular, need to be aware.

Here’s one of those things that impacts email deliverability which can be so subtle, and yet so critical. It can bite you in the back without your realizing it, and then six months later you wonder why you have gangrene in your knees; it can be that difficult to connect the dots. That is until someone points it out to you, and then you have that forehead-slapping moment: of course! And that thing is that setting and meeting subscriber expectations will have a direct and demonstrable impact on your email deliverability (not to mention your email’s effectiveness).

Email cadence and how you schedule email to be sent is of crucial importance to both your email ROI and your email deliverability! Yet in all of the focus that email marketers, newsletter publishers, and other volume email senders put on tweaking their content, format, and other aspects of their email to help maximize deliverability and ROI, they often overlook the scheduling of their mailings, by which we mean when they send their mailings, and how often they send them. Yet this can have a seriously negative impact on your deliverability! Here then, are the top 5 mistakes that email senders make in their email cadence.

Recommend a Friend email, Refer a Friend, Tell a Friend (TAF), Share with a Friend, Forward to a Friend requests, whatever you want to call them, they can negatively impact your email deliverability and online reputation. Generally Tell a Friend links or words encouraging people to Refer a Friend or to share your email with a friend don’t really generate much quality traffic, but they sure can bring deliverability trouble. In fact, there are a couple of different ways that exhorting your readers to “tell a friend” can cause you problems.

Exactly what is a CAN-SPAM physical address? The CAN-SPAM Act, which is the U.S.’ Federal email marketing law, requires that you include your physical mailing address in each and every bulk mailing, such as an email newsletter, email marketing, or other email to a mailing list. For some reason this requirement confuses people – maybe because it’s so straight-forward, and people are used to complex, convoluted, and contradictory (the Three Cs of legislative drafting) language when it comes to the law. So what exactly does this mean in the context of CAN-SPAM?

Wondering how to report text message spam?

Even better, get that SMS spammer to settle with you for good money, no lawyer needed!

It's true.  Just the very threat of having you report their SMS spam will make them cough up the money rather than rick a court ordering them to pay much more.

That's because under Federal law you can collect up to $1500 for every single message that they send you!