I recently had another article of mine posted in an industry pub. This time it was an article about standards for html email rendering published in Marketing Profs. Ooooh Exciting! Right? Ok, I get it, it’s not really that exciting. But it is important.

Here’s an analogy, because I’m a big fan of those, imagine if every type of car ran on different gas. I’m not talking about different octane, like 87, 89, 93, I’m talking about different types of gas. It would make the cost of gas so much higher because each gas company would have to make so many different types of gas. That would be silly, so much wasted time and effort. If there were just one type of gas then the companies could optimize their process to create one better grade of gas at a cheaper cost.

Well, right now email marketer have to do something similar. They have to try tailor their messages to work in all sorts of different email clients: Yahoo!, Outlook2003, Hotmail, AOL, and two of the worse Outlook2007 and Gmail. If emails rendered the same in more of these clients it would make things a lot more simple.
The impetus for this article was the email standards site, email-standards.org. A great site and a great movement. BTW, I love their project to get GMail to notice them, project grimace, which I contributed to!

I’m a recent convert to Netflix, I think I’ve mentioned that a few times before. My recent blog series on their email marketing program (that’s three links for three posts) can attest to how much I think they are getting it right.

I’ve also recently gotten Watch It Now up an running as it’s own activity on my sweet Harmony 880 (review coming, I swear) – which is telling for how often I watch from that ever growing library.

However, on Monday they had a bit of a stumble. There were reports of the site being down, I think one report was “Netflix is down, I don’t know what movies I like.” Very cute. Apparently it was due to an errant maintenance session.

Well, it wasn’t just the site, their shipping system went down with it. So movies didn’t go out. Definitely a bit of an annoyance, especially when you are trying to plow through all of season II and III of Battlestar in time for the premier of season IV next week. But I’ll truck on, I really wasn’t that affected, I mean, it’s just movies.

But apparently Netflix wasn’t gonna chance the outrage, they quickly sent out a mea culpa. They said oops and took a few bucks off my bill. 5% off isn’t much, but it’s the thought that counts. Email is, of course, the medium of choice for something like this, and I bet Netflix didn’t think twice about how to convey this message. Again, it’s simple and well done, like all of their emails.

Well done guys.

I just got back from a great conference, Email Evolution, out in San Diego. Ever since joining Bronto Software, myself and DJ Waldow have really been getting involved with the email marketing community out on the internet. DJ especially has been ferocious in his efforts to add something to the already amazing resources that are out there.

We’ve really worked to push Bronto to commit to providing a valuable resource for marketers in general, not just our customers – and it is something that Bronto has now achieved through the combined efforts of our team.
Well this week we finally got to meet up with a number of the other bloggers and industry experts that we have been trading links and blog posts with for the last year or so. (Such as Chad White, Tamara Gielen, and Dylan Boyd just to name a few)
It was fantastic.

This is a really enthusiastic community, after having spent just a few days with everyone it is easy to see that we aren’t driven by competition with each other, but rather cooperation and a genuine love of email marketing.

I just got a little more PR for myself and Bronto yesterday. An article I had written this summer finally got some airtime. This time over at DMNews, the article was on the main page yesterday, along with a shot of my mug. This one is a fun review of bounce messages, likening them to ice cream flavors. I think it’s worth a read, if only just to see mention of Moose Tracks and Ben & Jerry’s in an article about the technical aspects of managing rejected email messages. Check out the article – 31 Flavors of Bounce Messages – the article isn’t up anymore, but you can check out the original blog post at Bronto.

I was pretty psyched (and I still am a bit) when this got picked up. I hadn’t been blogging here long when I wrote this article, but I thought I would go out on a limb and write something different, just to see if it would get noticed. I guess it worked.

As the title states, it’s nothing more than that, but I’ll take what I can get.

So here’s the deal, a blog post I wrote got picked up (and then re-written by me) to be featured in imediaconnection, an interactive media and marketing site. The article is titled The best way to expand your email list, which was their choice, not mine. This article is about using the forward to a friend functionality to grow your list.

I’m not sure I’d endorse it as the best way to grow your list. I do think it is a great way to add like-minded people to your list, but it’s effectiveness does limit it’s overall usefulness.

As I said in my last post, this is all part of the continued up tick in PR for Bronto, and I’m happy to ride that wave and contribute to the growth.

Update: More plugs (just cause I can) – my article got mentions from a few of the people that I admire most in the email blogosphere – Tamara Gielen (at the top) and Mark Brownlow (down at the bottom).

At bronto we’re pretty hip to the interwebs and all that happens there. We’ve been using youtube to host videos on our site as well as flickr for pictures. But this is the first time that we’ve used a youtube video as the subject of our blog. Or at least the first time it’s been filmed specifically to speak to the audience (a youtube video of us celebrating may have made it to the blog before). This is a great video of DJ and Kimberly debating the pros and cons of recent subject lines of major online retailers, good stuff.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWIIPoOOynk [/video]
This is really part of the push that we’ve made at Bronto to make the blog more engaging. It’s something that I saw needed to happen when I came to Bronto. DJ was definitely of like mind, and was just waiting for some one else to support him. We’ve been pushing hard, and with the addition of Kimberly we’ve definitely got the momentum that has moved Bronto’s blog into the limelight as a top notch source of email marketing advice.

To prove that, we’ve been cited on several industry blogs recently, including Chad White’s Retail Email blog over at the EEC and Mark Brownlow’s No man is an iland blog. Now we just need to keep rolling with the inertia we’ve gathered, I think we can hold it together.

I know I’ve been doing a bad job lately with posting. I’d like to say I’ve just been busy, but really, I’ve just been lazy about updating posts.

On to a post… my beloved Canon S400 has been raised from the dead. Jill got this for me for my birthday back in 2003. Being a huge geek it was a shock that I didn’t already have a digital camera, and it quickly became a best friend, always with me. It has had it problems over the years (they are bad with sand), but the warranty was always there to fix them. Late last summer, around it’s three year anniversary, it started to have weird memory card errors and eventually it succumbed to an E51 message. Lucky for me, about a month ago I stumbled across a recall notice on Canon’s website.

Here’s the annoying part, Canon knows I have an S400, I’ve had it serviced by them twice and provided them with phone and email contact info. They have NO reason not to contact me and tell me about this recall. This is a perfect example of where they could have just emailed me to let me know about this recall.

Since getting my canon I bought one for Jill because I liked it so much. I can’t say we are die-hard canon fans, but I would look to them first if I need another one. Something like this definitely rocks my faith a little. Had they notified me, it would have definitely solidified them as a great company in my book.

Of course the other downside is that they failed to return my CF card with my camera. They’re not too expensive, but it’s still a hassel and makes this whole experience that much more annoying.

*sigh*

I was just poking through my gmail spam folder and noticed that a few of my newsletters had dropped through. That’s not altogether surprising, but I did notice that Vonage was getting in there more often than it made it to my inbox.

A quick look through the content of one of them revealed a few things:

• Large, colorful fonts – we’re talking orange here
• Large footers – that’s a lot of small point font
• at least 7 exclamation points!! (at least there weren’t two at a time)
• A bit image heavy

While none of these are dead spam give aways, they all would add to the score. All in all, still not enough for me to say it was overly spammy. One of the other messages was very tame, with lots of text, no crazy formatting, and almost no !’s. Guilty by association? Maybe, these things are kind of a crap-shoot. I would guess the answer is yes, since my monthly bill got spam foldered too, and that was just plain text.
It just goes to show that we have a long way to go. It’s really hard to be sure that you aren’t missing stuff in your spam folder, and it’s hard for companies to send you interesting emails without getting marked as spam. oh email, why are you so fickle?

BTW, eBags, ProFlowers, and Home Depot each had an email in the spam folder as well.

Update:  I just ran across this page exposing some evil behind Vonage’s Refer a Friend program. Apparently google was smarter than I thought!

I listened in on a webinar from ReturnPath today. They’re a great company who help others get their email out. Not in the same way as we do at Bronto, they focus more on helping companies deal with deliverability problems, renderability, and more (well we do that too, but that’s their specialty). One good thing that came out of it was a good summary of reputation tracking sources. Most of this wasn’t news, but it was the impetus I needed to throw a few of them up here for those out there who haven’t investigated their rep. This is really only useful to those of you who send email on a corporate level, but it’s still interesting to see how your doing…

SenderScore.org – this is ReturnPath’s own tool. They couple it with some services to help improve and maintain your reputation, but it also serves as a good resource to monitor your overall score.
Postmaster.live.com – Microsoft’s Postmaster site, a lot of good info here, especially check out their Smart Network Data Services (SNDS).
DNSStuff.com – They have a lot resources around DNS lookups, SPAM DB, Reverse DNS and more. Very techy.
Senderbase.org – This is IronPorts network, Ironport sells spam filters that work together collectively filter spam. This network harnesses the knowledge of that network, but I’m not sure that you can really get much of value for your own reporting aside from whether you are on any real time black lists.
cbl.abuseat.org/ – This is a composite black list site, you can use this to see if any of your IPs are currently on their list. BTW, this is by far the least profesional of the sites. I defintely spotted blinking red text on their page. What the hell is that?!
SpamCop – This is network that maintains blacklists, much of the list used to be comprised from spamtrap email addresses, though now I believe they get a lot more out of reported spam as well.

Spam is something I have to think about a lot. Well, we all think about it, it’s always there. But I think about it a lot more than just when I check my inbox, I spend a good bit of time every day ensuring that my customers aren’t doing it. It’s not that they’re spammers, they just don’t always know the best way to get email marketing done.

But enough about that, let’s get to the goods. For those of you out there who are sick of spam you may find some release in watching this video. This guy has set up a computer, printer, and shredder to receive, print, and shred spam all day long. It looks like it would be quite satisfying, although it is a waste of paper (he does recycle!)

Check out the whole story and explanation of setup, more video at the site: Spamtrap | billshackelford.com