A Marketer’s Field Guide to Cloudmark Email Filtering

Most marketers are not familiar with Cloudmark because they don’t host mailboxes nor do they operate under a recognized domain like hotmail.com or yahoo.com. However, they do provide anti-spam, phishing and virus protection to email providers covering over 1.6 billion mailboxes worldwide and are therefore a significant factor in getting your email delivered to your subscribers.

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12 Days of Christmas: Leverage Your Good Reputation with Certification

Many marketers consider the holiday season the most important time of the year and rely on holiday sales to get their business in to the “black.” The pressure of the season may entice some marketers to cut corners and embrace questionable sending practices such as purchasing email lists, excessively increasing frequency and volume and sending to subscribers from their suppression lists. These bad practices can cause an increase in complaints, unknown users and spam traps which are all main contributors to getting your email filtered in to the junk folder or blocked by the ISPs. It’s also a great way to get on to Santa’s “naughty” list which can negatively affect your deliverability and response rates during the most important time of the year.

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12 Days of Christmas: Don’t Stuff the Inbox with Fruitcake

On the third day of Christmas, my subscribers gave to me… 300 spam complaints! Ugh, that’s like getting a lump of coal in your stocking and something you definitely want to avoid this holiday season. An increased complaint rate will negatively affect your sender reputation, resulting in poor inbox placement rates for your email program. So instead of just asking Santa to keep your complaint rates low, take hold of the sleigh’s reins to ensure your subscribers get what they want and don’t put you on their naughty list.

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12 Days of Christmas: Scrooge Isn’t The Only Complainer At Christmas Time!

For any email marketer, having a good sender reputation is the first building block in ensuring that your marketing emails achieve delivery to your subscribers’ inboxes. Sender reputation is used by ISPs, spam filter vendors, and corporate domain administrators as …

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12 Days of Christmas: Learning from last year

It’s that time of year once again – the holiday shopping season that is make or break for many marketers. We’re here to help with a series of 12 blog postings that focus on helping you not only get the most out of Q4 but pave the way for success in 2012.

At the beginning of 2011 did you take a close look at what worked in your email program during the 2010 holiday shopping season? If you did, it’s time to go back and carefully review your findings. If, like many, you ploughed right into 2011 without a look back, we recommend doing a methodical review of your campaigns from the 2010 holiday season.

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Hotmail Launches Another Major Upgrade: What You Need to Know

Hotmail recently pushed another major update to help their users deal with the high amount of email they signed up for, called graymail, that will be slowly rolled out through the end of the year. While these tools will a major time saver for most Hotmail users, it could spell deliverability problems for your own email program. Here is a breakdown of the changes and what you should start thinking about now.

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Matt Blumberg Elected as Chairman of DMA Board of Directors

Return Path would like to congratulate our CEO Matt Blumberg on his election to Chairman of Board of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) as announced by the DMA at the association’s annual conference in Boston this week.

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Email + Social: Appetizing Integration

To get the creative juices flowing, let’s take a look at two examples of marketing campaigns from this spring and summer that leveraged an email and social media integrated model. Warning: Beware the power of suggestion. If you were planning on a salad for lunch, don’t read on.

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Word of the Week – Malware

Malware, the combination of Malicious and Software, includes things like viruses, spyware, and Trojan horses that attempt to do something, in simple terms, really, really bad, like steal passwords and hijack personal computers to use in a botnet. Fraudsters try to get people to unwittingly install malware through web sites or by opening attachments in emails. This week saw a rise in email malware attacks that should put everyone on notice.

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The Online Trust Alliance Forum: The Training You Need to Bullet Proof Online Security and Trust Practices

Join us at the Online Trust Alliance’s 6th annual Online Trust Forum (with a special discount for Return Path readers)

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