Comments on: Sloppy List Management Practices That Can Get Your Emails Blocked

By: Email Marketing for Small Businesses, Part 1: Building a Mailing List the Right Way | Getting Started

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:09:42 +0000

[...] these rules and your emailing list should not run afoul of the law or of [...]

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 03:45:37 +0000

A client of mine uses proper “opt-in” practices on their site to add subscribers. However, most of their subscribers come from hand-written forms customers fill out in their retail location. Since some folks’ handwriting is near unintelligible, they have an ongoing problem (understandably) with higher bounce rates from those due to errors in reading them when they get entered. Any possible suggestions you can make to improve this process? It’s got me stumped s far.

Also, they want me to switch their mailings to another ESP such as MailChimp that offers “pay as you go” pricing because their mailings tend to be heavy during some seasons (3 or 4 a month) and infrequent in other parts of the year (less than one a month). During the months of infrequent mailings, bounce rates also tend to increase of course. Again, any suggestions regarding this?

It’s currently a small (less than 3K) but steadily growing list. I want to head off any potential problems before I switch them to MailChimp…

By: Email Marketing for Small Businesses, Part 1: Building a Mailing List the Right Way | Outright's Entrepreneur Blog

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:20:34 +0000

[...] these rules and your emailing list should not run afoul of the law or of [...]

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 09 May 2009 10:22:50 +0000

Hi Joan, if you’re talking about a distribution list, the answer is no, because:

1) Each individual recipient wouldn’t be able to unsubscribe (actually one recipient could unsub the entire list);

2) Let’s say there are 500 people on your distribution list. If they all opened the email and clicked, it would show up in your stats as one person opening 500 times, clicking 1,000 times, etc.

3) We consider this improper use of bandwidth (we host all images, redirect tracking links, etc) and the system will shut down your account when we run our periodic scans for this.

Better to just import each email separately when setting up the list.

By: Joan

Joan — Sat, 09 May 2009 05:56:33 +0000

Can I include a list such as mycontacts-l@network.com in my list of recipients instead of the individual email addresses? These are members of our organization and not random or purchases email addresses.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:46:24 +0000

@Alison: In our world, some people say “rent” but they mean “buy.” And “Buy” is addressed above. Nasty, isn’t it? The “rent” that you speak of is actually a nice idea, and we’ve blogged about some great examples in the past (search for “Simple Shoes” on this blog). I personally don’t think that the “good” kind of renting is bad, when done correctly. I do advise people that if you rent, and you get signups from that rented list campaign, try to flag those new signups in your database, so you can trace back to the rented list. I’ve met people who really wished they could segment that way.

By: Alison

Alison — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:49:39 +0000

I notice you don’t address renting email lists. Any thoughts on this practice? Typically the email comes from the owner of the list, so there isn’t the same deliverability concern.