We all know SPAM isn’t just limited to email anymore, especially if you’re a frequent Twitter user. And although Twitter has gotten better in its SPAM catching and annihilation practices, SPAM still manages to show up in the darndest places. Like next to the live stream of your TechCrunch event, let’s say.
A lot of companies (apparently) look at their email marketing stats and say, “Hmm, we should jack up our send frequency and milk more out of this subscriber list!” I mean, how many times have you signed up for a retailer’s email list, and it all started out okay with monthly(ish) emails and specials, then over time, it turns into daily blasts to your inbox? That initial feeling of, “Hey, now I get these neat offers from my favorite store” always seems to turn into, “When the hell did I sign up for this junk?!?”
Okay, in some cases, the frequency just increases as the company’s experience with email marketing increases (in other words, “now we have more to say”). But you can’t just go from casual email newsletters to daily hyper-marketing. Not without the right approach.
Here’s an example of the right way to increase your frequency…
Someone pointed me to this blog post form Reddit about their recent outage. Mainly because I kinda follow the topic of outages.
I thought they handled it well, but that’s not why I’m writing. Those guys know what they’re doing. I’m writing because while reading through their technical details, I stumbled upon this snippet about email deliverability…
That title up there is a quote from an article by Michael Arrington from TechCrunch: I pissed off a spammer today. (h/t to @wise_laura for the link)
This isn’t the first we’ve seen of PR email spam…
So you’re the IT guy at some company, and the marketing team is bugging you to put together “an email blaster thingy” so they can send email marketing campaigns. First of all, if they actually used the word “blast” you need to immediately revoke all their internet access, and go ahead and punch them in the gut. As head of IT, you’re pretty much obligated to do that. Or, if you’re a more peaceful kinda nerd, you can simply print out this guide, and drop it on their desk: [Spam lawsuits: what's the worst that can happen?]
Okay, back to the topic at hand. If you’re the stubborn or paranoid kind of IT person who really, really, really wants to build your own email delivery engine, and you don’t want to use a service like MailChimp, that’s cool. But setting up a mass email infrastructure (with great deliverability) is hard, and there are things you’ll need to know about selecting your MTA, pitfalls in cloud-computing IPs, selecting the right hardware, proper bounce handling, ISP rate limiting, security concerns, abuse monitoring, blacklists, reputation services, and on and on.
You’ll need to get your hands on some kind of super-secret, industry-insider, reveal-all kind of guide. Our new Deliverability Engineer, Brandon, just wrote that guide…