Category Archives: Deliverability

Everyone is doing predictions this time of year and I felt obliged to join in on the fun. As we begin another year, it’s important to study the trends in email so we can connect with customers in the most meaningful way.  Below are five top trends that I think will drive email strategy and innovation in the New Year. Transactional email explodes. I’m not just saying this because we’re in the business of delivering transactional email. Studies show that 56% of organizations plan to increase their email budgets in 2013. Since our inception, we have watched transactional email scale at…

If you currently have an effective online marketing plan in place for your business, you are probably well aware of the importance of overall email deliverability. You may have already conquered the vital steps of developing a very compelling product or service offer and creating an excellent list of potential customers, but, your email message is useless if it ultimately fails to reach the inbox. Accurate monitoring of your overall email deliverability rate is very challenging to do, as there isn’t an exact method to use that can guarantee each and every message will be correctly tracked. However, you can…

Email has traditionally been linked with its paper counterpart. It is actually one of the oldest recognizable features of internet communication (the use of the “@” symbol dates all the way back to 1972!) and from the start was a way for people to message inter-personally across an organization or across the world. Many have predicted that with the rise of text messages and the rise of social media email would start to go the way of snail-mail. However, the trends show that this is not the case. What is to explain this? Here are several reasons. Email as an…

When you’re building a new app from the ground up, everything is shiny and new.  As a startup, you talk for hours with your co-founders about your vision, how to get customers and which features to roll out.  You spend every waking hour together writing code.  Finally you’re ready to push to production.  Maybe you’ve been developing on your local box, a virtual machine or colo’d a server in a data center.  The magical day comes when you launch your product to the world! Then reality sets in and you experience growing pains.  webcast with Engine Yard focused on the technical…

The unsubscribe metric is a necessary evil. While you’d love your subscribers to stay on your list forever, that is an impossibility. Though you loathe to look at your unsubscribe rate, you know it’s far better to make it easy for recipients to remove themselves from your list, than force them to mark you as spam and negatively affect your email deliverability.  Unfortunately, when you run those pesky reports, you invariably are faced with an unsubscribe percentage that you aren’t quite sure what to do with. Are your unsubscribe rates normal, or way above industry averages? Find out where you…

The debate around HTML vs. plain text email still continues especially with the rise in mobile device use. Plain text email however, is probably the most prevalent in transactional email where companies send very personalized, 1:1 messages in response to key actions that their customers take, such as order confirmations, account notifications and friend requests. Nowadays, many companies are expanded their transactional email to include more marketing based content since transactional email tends to have the highest open rates. But at the end of the day, the battle between HTML and plain text is really one (or won) between imagery…