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Aug
16
A Marketer’s Field Guide to AOL Inboxes
You’ve got mail! After more than a decade, AOL is still a major webmail player in the United States. Most reports rank AOL #4 in total mailboxes behind Microsoft Hotmail Live, Yahoo! and Gmail respectively. The company has a global reach but its presence is about half of the other major players if you count their number of worldwide mailboxes.
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Categories: Best Practices Commentary Explanation View Comments
Aug
10
KISS (The Email Marketing Version)
Director, Response Consulting
I was recently reminded of one of the first marketing lessons I learned over 12 years ago: KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). With technology so rapidly changing, it’s gotten easier and easier to overwhelm ourselves and our subscribers with communication: Newsletters! Triggered Alerts! Facebook Offers! Twitter Tips! So, I took this reminder as a point of inspiration to create an email marketing version of the long-time marketing rule.
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Categories: Best Practices Explanation Return Path View Comments
Jul
28
A Marketer’s Field Guide to Gmail Inboxes
Gmail has had a relatively short life compared to the other large webmail providers such as Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL. Gmail launched in beta in 2004, became available to the general public in 2007 and officially launched out of beta in July 2009. According to our research Gmail closed 2010 with 193 million users, which is less than Yahoo! and Hotmail, but it is adding new users at a much faster rate than these two providers.
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Categories: Explanation View Comments
Jul
12
A Marketer’s Field Guide to Microsoft Hotmail Email Inboxes
Microsoft is the largest email provider in the world hosting over a billion mailboxes with 350 million active users. More than 8 billion emails are handled each day with 30-35% of those emails making it to the inbox. 1 Microsoft’s brands and domains include Windows Live Hotmail (hotmail.com), MSN (msn.com) and Windows Live (live.com). The most popular domain of the three is by far Hotmail.
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Categories: Explanation View Comments
Jun
23
A Marketer’s Field Guide to Yahoo! Inboxes
Yahoo! Mail was one of the first free webmail providers to hit the market and is one of the three largest providers in the world with 280+ million users. If you include some of the smaller providers that utilize the Yahoo! infrastructure such as AT&T and BellSouth there are 320+ million users. Even though they are one of the oldest and biggest ISPs in the market they have continued to attract and cater to a relatively young social audience compared to other free webmail providers. Yahoo!’s anti-spam team is also one of the most active and responsive groups in the industry when it comes to clear communications and responsiveness to senders.
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Categories: Explanation View Comments
Jun
23
A Marketer’s Field Guide to ISPs and Deliverability
Email marketers are intensely focused on ROI for their marketing dollars. Maximizing the number of clicks, opens and conversions is the primary method that ROI is measured for most marketers. However, maximizing all of these response metrics requires that your email is delivered to your subscribers’ inbox by the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This metric is commonly referred to as deliverability or inbox placement rate.
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Categories: Explanation View Comments
Apr
29
A follow-up on Marketing Sherpa’s webinar “Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for Handling Complaints and Boosting Reputation”
Director, Professional Services
Return Path and Marketing Sherpa joined forces to present a webinar on how to deal with complains. The turnout and questions were great. So great in fact, that we ran out of time to answer them all. Along with Marketing Sherpa co-presenter Adam Sutton, we decided to answer the questions in a two part blog series. Here’s the first.
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Categories: Explanation How-To Return Path View Comments
Dec
22
The Case of the Missing AOL Mail Server: Four Steps for Marketers
Director, Professional Services
Blame it on the first total lunar eclipse and winter solstice in 400 years, but AOL’s MX servers mysteriously went missing for approximately four hours after midnight. You’ve probably already read my colleague JD Falk’s article on this exact topic already which also provides a fantastic technical primer of MX records and how they operate. What this all means to you as the marketer or sender is that when attempting to deliver mail to an AOL address, your mail server couldn’t find the AOL mail server record, and potentially never successfully delivered mail to your recipients. An MX record is short for Mail eXchange record and it tells your mail server where to connect and send mail through in order to reach your intended recipients. However if an MX record is missing, the sending mail server will receive an error that says something to the effect of “sorry, I couldn’t find any host by that name” or “name or service not known.” In short, your mail couldn’t be delivered. In AOL’s case, the MX record was missing for almost 4 hours (12AM – 4AM EST) which means if you tried to deliver mail during that time to AOL, you weren’t able to. Here are four things to check…
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Categories: Explanation News View Comments
Nov
19
“Delivered” Depends On Context
When an email sending system reports that a message has been ‘delivered,’ that may not be an accurate portrayal of the final destination of the message. To understand why that is, and why ‘delivered’ has been the term of art for so long, we just need to look at the email delivery process.
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Categories: Explanation View Comments
Aug
31
What’s an FBL?
In spite of the best efforts of anti-spam staff, end users — the account holders, recipients of email — still receive spam. And users want to complain about it, preferably to someone who’ll do something to make it stop. So, somewhere in the later 1990s, mailbox providers created an easy way to complain directly to them.
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