Everything Email Marketing

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!

Did you know that an automated out of office message (OOO messages) or autoresponder vacation message can hurt your email deliverability? In fact, there are a few different ways that those automatic out of office messages can hurt your email delivery, and for that reason, we advise you not to use them at all or, if you must, to use them very, very carefully.

Our reverse DNS tool allows you to do a reverse DNS lookup on any IP address and see the reverse DNS (rDNS) value, i.e. you can see what domain sits at that IP address (this is why it is sometimes referred to as a “reverse IP lookup tool”). Reasons that you may want to do a reverse DNS lookup are many, however in the context of email you want to be sure that the IP address through which you send email is associated with your sending domain.

Do you need to get consent from your customers before adding them to your B2C email marketing list? Building your B2C email list with consent is very important to your bottom line. (B2C stands for “business to consumer” or “business to customer”.) There are many examples of when you can do something, but perhaps shouldn’t, and nowhere is this more evident than in what is permitted by the CAN-SPAM Federal email marketing law. For the purposes of this article in particular we are going to be talking about adding a customer’s email address to your marketing mailing list without asking them first, and hopefully convincing you that you should always get consent before adding them to your B2C email list.

Do not use a noreply email address in the email you send out; just don’t do it. Don’t send out email with a noreply email address as the ‘from’ email address, don’t send out email from an address that can’t accept replies, just don’t go near any type of noreply email address at all. Here’s why. Besides being the opposite of best practices, think about what happens if you reply to a noreply email. When someone to whom you send email doesn’t notice the noreply email address from which you sent the email, they will reply and either get a bounce (frustrating) or get no response (also frustrating). And if they do notice the noreply email address, that on its own will frustrate them. Why would you want to frustrate your customers, leads, or others to whom you are sending email?

Of the current email authentication mechanisms, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, DKIM seems to be the most confusing for people (this is why we offer a human-powered DKIM checker, contact us for a free DKIM check). What is a DKIM selector? What are the DKIM tags? How does one create a DKIM record? Is there a good DKIM record generator? Here is a plain English explanation of DKIM, and a breakdown of the anatomy of a DKIM record.

SMTP codes can be so confusing, especially those SMTP response codes and SMTP error codes like the dreaded SMTP error 550. These are often returned in bounced email, such as “550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable” or “550 5 2 1 mail from refused spam site.” They are in response to SMTP commands that have ‘gone wrong’ between your email server that sent the email, and the receiving email server that is unable to deliver it (or refuses to deliver it) for some reason. But what exactly do they mean? Why should you care and what should you do? And why do we say that SMTP error 550 is dreaded?

“Which copyright date should be on a website?” someone asked us recently. People are often confused about which date they should use as their copyright date on a website. In fact, a whole lot of sites have the wrong copyright date on their website. As an Internet policy institute, and because our CEO is an Internet policy lawyer, we often get questions unrelated to our core offering of email sender certification and deliverability services, and we are happy to answer them if we can. The answer to this one is actually really easy, and will make perfect sense to you once we explain it.

You may be surprised to learn who comes out the winner in the plain text email vs HTML match. Whether you go plain text email or HTML can impact many things, including deliverability and engagement, which of course are the most important rates for your email campaigns. Digital marketing solutions provider Vendasta actually conducted research on which gets not just better deliverability, but better traction in terms of response when it comes to HTML vs plain text emails, and what they found may seem counter-intuitive. (In case you’re not sure whether the email you are sending is HTML email, basically if it’s not plain text, then it’s HTML. Using a template? It’s HTML. Using email stationary? It’s HTML.)

Email address confirmation messages are those messages that email senders who use best practices send to people who sign up for their mailing lists. The purpose of the email confirmation message is to confirm that the person actually wants to be on, and consents to being put on, your mailing list before they get added to the mailing list. The problem is, some email senders see confirmation messages as a place to slip in a little advertising.

The best spam email blocker is not getting spammed in the first place. Here’s how to prevent spam email (or at least reduce the amount of spam you are getting) by removing your personal information from the Internet. You may already know this, but here in the United States, where the privacy laws are so lax, it’s perfectly legal for a company to scrape all of your contact information and then sell access to it. ZoomInfo, Spokeo, Crunchbase, Apollo.io, and RocketReach all do this, as do many others. And removing your data from those databases can help to reduce the amount of spam email that you receive. We’re going to tell you how to remove yourself from these top 4 sites, and then we’re going to tell you about a service that will remove you from all the sites (more than 500 of them), if you want to go in that direction.

Google’s Gmail Verified Sender Pilot Program for political campaigns is up and running, and political campaigns can now apply to be part of Google’s program which allows certified and verified political campaign email to bypass the spam filter and be delivered directly to Gmail users’ inboxes, but only once unless the user doesn’t click on the big red “I don’t want this” message that will accompany it.

After iOS 15 email marketing was changed forever, and email open rates are no longer important, right? Wrong. Since the moment that iOS 15 was a gleam in Tim Cook’s eye, self-styled email marketing experts began advising that you could start ignoring open rates because, and we quote, “they are no longer accurate” and “they are artificially inflated by iOS 15.” To paraphrase a beloved children’s story, this is terrible, horrible, no good, very bad advice.

Are you doing email delivery monitoring? We sure hope so, because inbox delivery monitoring is one of two critical ways to keep your finger on the pulse of your email campaigns (the other is tracking your open rates and click-through rates, which is another discussion for another day).

SMS marketing, also known as mobile marketing or text message marketing, is really popular, and so we get a lot of questions about SMS marketing best practices and SMS marketing law. These are really important questions, because the laws around SMS marketing are very strict, and very clear, and allow someone that you message to sue you directly. This is also why you have to be really careful when selecting SMS marketing platforms and SMS marketing services, and why you have to be sure you are working with an SMS marketing service that helps you adhere to the law.

Confused about what is an email whitelist, what is email whitelisting, what is email certification, and how to get whitelisted or certified?  Email marketers and businesses spend time, energy, and money creating great email content and campaigns to inform customers and subscribers about products, services, and other information. This is a valuable way to connect with customers and subscribers when done right. But how many of those emails that you are sending are actually being delivered to the inbox, and how many are going to the spam folder where they are never seen? If you’re concerned about this (and you should be), it’s a good ideal to tell your email recipients to add you to their personal whitelist.  But it’s an even better idea to get yourself whitelisted on system-wide whitelists, and to get yourself certified.

If you are asking “What is SPF?” or “What is DKIM?” or “What is DMARC”, or generally “What is email authentication” and “Why do I need it”, well, you are far from alone. There is a lot of confusion around email authentication, so here is a plain English, simple explanation of what each email authentication is, and what it does.

First, SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework, DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail, and DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. But, in the immortal words of the movie Airplane, that’s not important right now. What is important is that you understand how these things work.

People spend a lot of time worrying about how to keep their email from going to the Gmail promotions folder (technically the Gmail promotions tab), and how to get their Gmail promotions to the inbox. So what we are about to tell you may surprise you: Google and Gmail actually think that they are doing you a favor by putting your email in the Promotions tab and, similarly, they think that they are doing their users (the people you are sending your email to) a favor by putting your email in the promotions tab.

Disclaimers. Whether in email, print marketing, or contracts, who reads them? We’ll tell you who reads email disclaimer language: spam filters. Email senders often put disclaimer language at the bottom of an email saying something like “You are receiving this email because you opted in and requested to receive it.” Of course how often do you think a user sees a message that starts with “You have received this message because” and thinks “Oh! That’s right, I did ask for this, so I won’t mark it as spam!”? Less often than you might hope.

One of the things that spam filters look at is the ratio of text to images in email marketing. Did you know that? While it’s easy to embed images in email, it’s not always to your advantage. If you’ve ever gotten one of those spam messages which has a big old image, and only a little text, or perhaps even one of those spam messages where the text is embedded in an image, you can understand the reason for this. It’s because spammers likes to send messages with images and little text – because of course the spam filters are analyzing their text.

Conventional wisdom says that personalizing email subject lines in email marketing and other commercial email, such as putting someone’s first name in the subject line by using tags or other automations, increases the open rate for that email marketing. n fact, if you do a web search, such as in Google, for “email personalization open rates”, you will find over 16million results, most of which tell you that personalizing email subject lines in your email marketing will boost your open rate. That may have been true some years ago, but not necessarily so much now.

You should never send mass or bulk email through a new IP address before you warm up that new IP address. Warming up an IP address is a critical step towards not only having good deliverability, but also to making sure that your email isn’t tagged as spam, or blocked. To illustrate the importance of warming up an IP address, we’re going to tell you a story.

Email personalization (i.e. personalizing email subjects and greetings) has become a widely used practice in email marketing. So it always surprises people to hear that personalizing email can actually hurt your email deliverability if not done well and carefully. Most mailing software these days will allow you to personalize email by putting someone’s name in the subject line and salutation, and, not surprisingly, most commercial emailers take advantage of this. After all, using the recipient’s name when addressing them seems like it should be a really good idea.

We are often asked “Do I really need a dedicated IP address?” and also how to get a dedicated IP address. So just what is a dedicated IP address, and why should you have one? In the context of email sending and email marketing, a dedicated IP address means an IP address through which you and only you send email. It means that nobody else can send email out from that IP address, just you. On the other hand, a “shared IP address” means that you are not the only one who is sending email out through the shared IP address, others are as well.

We are often asked “Where can I buy email lists?” or “Where are free email lists for marketing?” and the answer is “all sorts of places”. But the correct question is “Can I use a list of email addresses that I purchased or otherwise acquired?” and the answer is “No”, not even if it is a targeted list of email addresses. Now, to be more precise, of course you can use it, we mean you can physically load that list of email addresses into your sending platform and press “send”. But it will get you into a world of hurt, deliverability-wise. It also may get you into trouble legally, and it will definitely get you into trouble with your sending platform, because it will be a violation of their Terms of Service (ToS).

We talk a lot about email opt-in here, and you may be wondering “what does opt-in mean?” If you are not sure about the exact definitions of the various levels of opt-in when it comes to building email marketing lists or other types of email lists, or the definition of spam, here is a quick review of what each of them mean. Because there is some confusion about what each of them means, especially where one method of list-building may have more than one name, we’ve created this resource explaining the generally accepted definitions of Double Opt-In, Confirmed Opt-In (COI), Single Opt-In, Opt-In, Opt-Out, and Transactional email for you.  These are the definitions that the inbox providers, ISPs, and spam filters use, and so it’s important for you, as an email sender, to know them.

Email marketing is a great way to reach your audience and customers. But when using email in marketing it’s also really easy to exaggerate, or even lie. The best email marketing never exaggerates, in fact it’s a great example of a place you should underpromise and overdeliver. The problem for email marketers and email marketing is that they may have quotas they are trying to meet, or a performance review coming up, and so are pushing the envelope a bit and overpromising. But there may also be another factor at hand: People find it much easier to lie in email.

Many of our customers come to us concerned about one thing above all else: getting on an email whitelist. However having a good email reputation is actually much more important. But lots of people still talk about trying to get whitelisted, and they are looking for information about how to get on an email whitelist. And indeed, getting whitelisted used to be the holy grail of email deliverability.

If you want to improve email deliverability it’s important not to neglect how your email looks, including the formatting! We’ve talked more than once here about how not just your content, but even the formatting of your content, can make a big difference to your email deliverability. It can either improve email deliverability, or it can hinder it. It’s something on which we cannot put too fine a point, as some people just don’t get it, others don’t believe it, and still others feel that it shouldn’t matter, gosh darnnit, especially if their list building practices are kosher and their users really want their email.

ISPs are allowed to bounce your email for any reason, or even no reason at all. We’ve touched on this briefly before, but we think that it’s time to make it crystal clear: ISPs do not have to accept and deliver your email. Or any email. Including, yes, again, YOUR email. Even if your email is double confirmed opt-in with a cherry on top, an ISP is under no obligation to accept or deliver your email.

Including attachments in email without first communicating to the recipient that you will be doing so can really get your email into trouble. This is true for all types of email, including transactional email, one to one email, email marketing, and other bulk email.

The title of this article, “Not all double- or confirmed opt-in requires a confirmation email” may seem at first like an oxymoron. But it’s not.

At its most basic, double or confirmed opt-in means that after someone requests to be put on your mailing list, you check with them and essentially ask “are you sure? Did you really mean to subscribe to this mailing list? Do I really have your permission to add your email address to my list?”

It’s important not to confuse email marketing best practices, and email best practices in general, with email “common practices”.
In fact, this can be a very dangerous, slippery slope on which to pin your email deliverability and indeed your email reputation. In fact at one point in time there was a meme going around suggesting exactly that, that it’s “important to follow email marketing common practices.” No, no, NO! To suggest that best practices aren’t really best practices, but only ‘common practices’, reduces them to “not necessarily required” practices.

What is the ROI for COI (the return on investment for confirmed opt-in)? Many email senders are reluctant to move existing lists to a confirmed opt-in (sometimes called “double opt-in”) model for fear of losing many of their existing users, and reducing the size of their mailing lists. When called upon to confirm or reconfirm a mailing list – say, for example, when moving their mailing list to a new email service provider (ESP) – they balk, and will even go to a second tier ESP that doesn’t require reconfirmation.

Here are the answers to the two most common questions we get about the law which allows you stop spam text messages being sent by an SMS spammer by making the SMS spammer pay you. This is your right under Federal law, specifically the TCPA (TCPA stands for the Telephone Consumer Protection Act). SMS marketing has become the darling of the marketing community, but if you haven’t consented to receive their marketing text messages, and if your mobile number is on the Federal Do Not Call list, they are violating Federal law (the TCPA).

We are often asked how we can be so much lower cost an alternative to Validity, and it’s because we do things like giving you email deliverability check information that you can do yourself to improve email deliverability, instead of charging you a bunch to do it for you. Actually today we’re going to give you two email deliverability self-help tips. One of these is actually super-easy and seems obvious, yet we regularly get a surprised look from customers when we ask them whether they have done it already.

Let’s play a game that we like to call “Can I Use This List?” or “Can I Put This Email Address on My List?”. Here are fifteen scenarios in which someone may come across or into possession of somebody’s email address, or a mailing list, and you have to decide whether or not it is ok to use the email address or list. Which ones are fair game to use? The answers may surprise you!

There’s a lot of misunderstanding around domain reputation when it comes to email sending and email deliverability. Domain reputation is a thing, and it does relate to email and email deliverability, and it is important. For example, it is absolutely the case that if example.com starts spamming, inbox providers are going to start putting email from example.com into the junk folder, or maybe even block it altogether. But still, domain reputation is not what a lot of people think that it is.

Did you know that there are a lot of regular words that can help push your email to the spam folder if everything else isn’t squeaky clean? Remember George Carlin’s “7 words you can’t say on tv”? Well there are a whole lot more words that you can’t say in email without risking your email being a candidate for further scrutiny and possibly going to the spam folder. In fact one of the things that is most surprising to many email senders is just how many words there are that, when in their email, and if their email doesn’t otherwise adhere to best practices, can trip up the spam filters. They are even more surprised when they learn what some of those words are, because they are very common words, words that seem (and often are) innocent, and yet the spam filters will take note of them, and if your email contains enough of these words, or has these words along with some other factors, they may reroute your email to the spam folder. This is of course why we always advise senders to follow all best practices (only add email addresses to your mailing lists with the consent of the email address holder, regularly remove bouncing and even unresponsive email addresses from your primary mailing list, etc..).

Did you know that it’s a violation of LinkedIn’s policies to send cold LinkedIn outreach messages? A lot (and we mean a lot) of businesses use LinkedIn as their personal cold lead generation playground, but that is not at all what LinkedIn is intended to be, and LinkedIn’s posted policies, and their very definition of spam, make that clear.

The Everything Email Marketing blogcast is provided by Get to the Inbox by ISIPP SuretyMail, your outsourced email deliverability team, and the original email deliverability company and consultants, since 2003. For more information about how we can help you get to the inbox go to GetToTheInbox.com

When a Spamhaus check reveals that you are on a Spamhaus blocklist (also known as a blacklist), what should you do? The Spamhaus Project maintains a few different blocklists, such as the Spamhaus SBL and the DBL, and for each Spamhaus blocklist removal entails a couple of steps which may differ between the lists, but which are similar and not difficult. Note that most of these blocklists are DNSBLs (DNS-based blocklists), which means that what gets listed on them is IP addresses, specifically IP addresses demonstrated to be the sources of spam.

Email tester and email list cleaning and validation services are frowned on by inbox providers and ISPs, and many consider their use to be a sign that you may be a spammer. The rise of list cleaning (also known as “list hygiene”) and email tester services, by which we mean email address validation and verification services, has tracked in tandem with the rise of new ways to detect spamming activities, including adding email addresses to mailing lists without consent. It’s this last bit, the “adding email addresses to a mailing list without consent” that is the sticking point, and it is that activity which list hygiene services are, for the most part, intended to facilitate. Which is why they are disdained by the email receiving industries (inbox providers, ISPs, and spam filtering services). There’s a reason that they are called “list cleaning” services; and if you are building your mailing list with consent then your list won’t be dirty and need cleaning.

There is a hidden legal danger in not confirming email addresses, and yes, even in the United States. We talk a lot about email deliverability (because hey, we’re the original email deliverability company and consultants). And in that context we always explain how using double opt-in (i.e. confirmed opt-in) helps immensely with deliverability by reducing spam complaints and increasing interaction rates. But now we’re going to talk about something that people rarely think about: not confirming someone’s email address before you use it or add it to a mailing list can have serious legal consequences for you having nothing to do with CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL or any email-specific law. It can also have serious consequences for others, consequences that in turn can come back to you in serious, unexpected, but entirely avoidable, legal ways.

Just as with any other industry, the email deliverability and email marketing industries have their own jargon, and lots and lots of acronyms.  For those who don’t eat, sleep, and breathe email deliverability, the jargon can be confusing enough, let alone when things are reduced to a few letters.  So here is a glossary of email deliverability and email marketing acronyms.

We are often asked how to revive, warm up, and reengage an email list that has not been emailed to in a long time. In order to do this you will want to conduct what is known as a “re-engagement campaign”. This is exactly what it sounds like: you already have the email addresses on your email list, and at some point they all gave you permission to put them on your mailing list (right?), so presumably at some point you were engaging with them, but you have not engaged them for some period of time. Here’s how to warm that list back up and turn those people into a warm, responsive email audience.

It’s really important that you warm up an old, neglected email list correctly, because it’s really easy to do it wrong, which can get you and your email into a lot of trouble, and will cause your email to end up in the spam folder. And not just the email that you send to that old list! Sending too much too soon, or too enthusiastically, to that old list can cause other email that you send to start landing in the spam folder as well! It’s so important to remember that your email sending reputation is, ultimately, a universal email reputation. What do we mean by “universal reputation”? There are many different ways that the inbox providers, ISPs, and spam filters identify an email sender, and they cross-reference and aggregate all of the information about your email sending practices, from a variety of sources. And that’s not all: they also share this information with others in the email receiving industries. So it’s not like you can silo your sending to one list and keep it from affecting your email reputation elsewhere.  Here's how to do it right.

We are often asked “Do I really need a dedicated IP address?” So just what is a dedicated IP address, and why should you have one? In the context of email sending and email marketing, a dedicated IP address means an IP address through which you and only you send email. It means that nobody else can send email out from that IP address, just you. On the other hand, a “shared IP address” means that you are not the only one who is sending email out through the shared IP address, others are as well.  In this episode we explain all of the differences, and why we recommend that you have a dedicated IP address.

Remember Lily Tomlin’s switchboard operator, Ernestine? Or, the Hooterville switchboard in Green Acres? When Oliver Douglas wanted to talk with Sam Drucker, he picked up the phone, and told the operator “Connect me to Sam Drucker”, and the operator translated that to “connect Oliver to Sam’s telephone number.”  

rDNS, or “reverse DNS”, allows the process to go the other way – when your computer connects to our computer to deliver an email message, it allows our computer to look at your computer’s IP address, and see what domain name your IP address claims to be.  Where DNS is like that switchboard operator, rDNS is like caller i.d.. Just as when you call us, our caller i.d. system takes your telephone number, and translates it to your name to be displayed on our caller i.d. box, so the rDNS system takes your computer’s IP address, and translates it to your computer’s domain name.

We are often asked by email senders just why we urge people to use confirmed opt-in (or “double opt-in”) whenever possible. After all, they 'know' that they are being ethical and only adding to their mailing lists people whom they believe really want their mailings.  So why should they have to go through the added “hassle” of using confirmed opt-in? Why should they put their recipients through that hassle? (Yes, some email senders have actually convinced themselves that users would rather be put on a mailing list without their permission than have to go through the “hassle” of clicking on a link to confirm their interest.) 

Here are the compelling reasons that you should use confirmed (double) opt-in when adding people to your mailing lists, including because not doing so can result in your email being blacklisted.

Sending email “from” an email address that doesn’t really exist is a spectacularly bad idea. In fact, it may even qualify as the Epic Fail of “from” email address ideas.  Because for one thing, people will reply, and they, and their ISPs and spam filters, are going to get ticked off when it bounces.

And for another thing, it reduces your credibility to less than zero. It shows that clearly you are someone who spoofs email addresses (which is hey, what spammers – and usually only spammers – do). And that for some reason – even though in your mind it may make perfect sense – for some reason you are hiding your true sending identity. Even if your subscribers really already know your true identity, it stil looks as if you are hiding it.

You should never use a brand new IP address to send out all of your email marketing and other bulk or mass email mailings.  Here's why.

Did you know that setting up an automated “I’m out of the office” vacation autoresponder message can hurt your email deliverability? In fact, there are a few different ways that those automatic vacation reply messages can hurt your email delivery, and for that reason, we advise you not to use them at all or, if you must, to use them very carefully.

There’s a reason that email hygiene services are so popular: following regular email list hygiene best practices not only keeps email deliverability from tanking, but will also boost your list’s performance to the moon! Regular mailing list maintenance gives you amazing open and click-through rates, and not just because you’ve removed the dead wood. So many email senders who know that they should follow email hygiene best practices often just can’t bring themselves to abandon inactive subscribers. However, once you realize just how incredibly responsive a leaner, meaner list can be you’ll not only want to perform mail hygiene maintenance regularly, you’ll actually look forward to it, because it’s the secret sauce that will keep you ahead of your competition. We call this secret sauce “compounded deliverability”.

Tim Cook’s remarks at the 2021 WWD, leading up to the unveiling of the new Mail Privacy Protection and Hide My Email features threw email marketers into a tizzy.  And ever since that bell was rung, which can’t be unrung, we have received a lot of frantic messages and emails desperate to know how Mail Privacy Protection and Hide My Email features are going to impact email marketing. Here’s why we think that you don’t need to worry about them too much, most specifically as they relate to tracking open rates.

Did you know that your mailing list's MR is way more important than LS (List Size), open rate, or even CTR?  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'?  You will be after you listen to this episode!

Whither goest Mailchimp? Often an email company being acquired leads to abuse handling and opt-in standards declining, and so to an associated decline in reputation and deliverability. So first, let us say this right up front: we ❤️ Mailchimp. And so we have mixed feelings about the upcoming Intuit takeover of Mailchimp. On the one hand, it’s always nice, as a company, when you are recognized for the value you add, and when you are courted and betrothed. On the other hand, generally speaking, when an email company gets acquired, their abuse handling and their standards regarding to what best practices new customers must adhere generally tank (leading to that decline in their reputation with inbox providers (and deservedly so) and sometime even leading to blacklistings (ditto)).  Listen to our thoughts on the Intuit acquisition of MailChimp.