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What we’d like to see twitter do
Why does twitter not brand it’s Welcome or follow emails?
So far twitter has avoided the advertising route, but why not do something like the below? At the bare minimum we’d like them to brand their emails and provide some thing more than just an alert. In this example we’ve included some links to other people my new follower follows.
@twitter We’d love to help send… Continue reading
Welcome emails – your first hand shake with your new user
You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
So why send a poorly formatted welcome email. If you don’t engage the user now at this touchpoint where they are expecting your email, how do you expect to engage them when you send your marketing message.
The two biggest problems with welcome emails:
- Not engaging
- Doesn’t make it to the inbox
Both result… Continue reading
Best practices for peer initiated emails (invites)
When sending invitational emails that are “peer initiated” you need to be very careful as you can quickly degrade you delivery due to either abuse by your users or getting carried away with trying to grow your audience.
Since CAN-SPAM essentially says peer initiated are OK (albeit this was before web mail address books were being scraped as a daily basis), we’ve asked our clients to follow our best… Continue reading
Identifying your email opportunities
When was the last time you looked at your site and evaluated when and what you were sending?
Do you send an authentication email AND a welcome email or are they one and the same?
Do you send an email to a new user that hasn’t signed in again for a month?
Does your reset password email just contain a single link? Your touchpoints with your users… Continue reading
How to avoid phishing
If you are not technically savvy it’s hard to figure out if an email from paypal or chase is really from who it says it is. If in doubt just make sure that you type the address in yourself. You should be able to remember most of your banking urls, and just open your browser and go there. Don’t follow that lovely link that may save you 1 click or… Continue reading
Gmail Vs Hotmail spam filter
Poor Hotmail gets a lot of flack for poor SPAM filtering, while GMail gets all the compliments (although less so recently). Google must have some fancy algorithm for finding SPAM – or do they?
Well, it’s actually the fact that GMail has a big edge, a huge edge even. Up until very recently GMail was used primarily by techies, techies that unsubscribe from email they subscribed to and flag real SPAM as SPAM. See the subtle difference?… Continue reading
Missed opportunity – Reset that password
Last week I attended two conferences on email, all very exciting stuff! It still amazes me that everyone is still focused on marketing emails and not transactional email marketing.
Seriously, come on people!
How many of you spend more than two hours writing and designing your monthly newsletter? A newsletter that will get an open rate of under 20%.… Continue reading
Google analytics in email…
One of the more simple and unused features of google analtyics is the utm_source and utm_medium GET parameters. If you use Google analytics on your site then these are available to you know with NO changes of any code.
Let’s say you send out an email to your friends about your new blog, if you send them to your site with a link that has the above paremeters you… Continue reading
Getting your authentication and welcome emails in front of the user
It’s very important that your authentication and welcome emails get in the inbox and in front of the user. What are the stats you use to define the growth of your site? I’m sure that registered users is often one of those stats. What if your authentication email never made it to your brand new user?
It’s vitally important to realize that if you are just sending email from… Continue reading
API Library updates
To make intergrating us a simple as possible we’ve added libraries to work with our API.
Current approved libraries include:
We also have the following in beta release (send us an email to get a hold of them):
- Python
- Java