Michael Wilding

Tag: email marketing

  • Merry Christmas

    Merry Christmas

    I was up at 6:30am this morning in order to head to Marks & Spencer to pick up our Christmas food.

    We had an 8am to 8:30am slot, and it’s lucky I left early because when I arrived at 7:45am there were already people queuing out the door!

    It took me about 45 minutes to get our food and pay, and then I was on my way home.

    Which is lucky, because we’re heading down to London tonight for a Christmas Eve Eve party.

    Holly has done it with her friends every year since she was a teenager and now there’s husbands and children.

    I think we’re all set for Christmas, thanks entirely to Holly. It’s been easy for me this year, and I’m lucky to have someone who’s happy to take on all that planning.

    Anyhoo…

    I may send some emails over Christmas.

    I may not.

    It totally depends on how much eat, how much I drink and whether I’m still awake!

    Have a great Christmas.

    Michael

  • The Twirly Woos

    The Twirly Woos

    I spent this morning watching the Twirlywoos. If you don’t know what they are, then you’re missing out!

    This is what they say about them:

    “Whether they travel to the real world or on their big red boat they are always discovering something new and exciting with help from their friends who come to visit them.

    The episodes encourage children to think for themselves, gain confidence in perceptions of their own lives and develop their wonderful sense of inquisitiveness through each story.”

    I kinda enjoy watching them, but don’t tell anybody!

    However, it can be pretty hard to work while watching them, and watching Max walk round the living room in circles trying to pull everything off every service.

    Anyhoo…

    I’ve still not managed to recover from my mahooosive cock-up with the michaelwilding.com domain reputation on Google.

    If you’re new to my newsletter, in the process of setting up a new email server I wanted to test the speed, so imported a list of fake email addresses.

    However, I forgot to make sure that the email server deleted those emails without ever sending them out.

    The result… I sent hundreds of thousands of emails to test the speed of my new setup, they actually tried to get delivered, and Google marked my domain with a bad reputation for sending so many bad emails.

    Balls!

    Considering the vast majority of people on my mailing list use Gmail, you can consider this the mother of all f**k ups.

    Nearly a month later there has been no movement on my domain reputation.

    There’s no way I can change domain. So I have two new approaches to try and recover.

    The first is to use Amazon SES, alongside my new mail server, to send emails. I’ll send the first email out using my new mail server, and then re-send to non-openers in the evening.

    Why?

    Because when I send through Amazon SES I get delivered to the Gmail inbox. This means I should start to get some interaction with my emails on Gmail, obviously I get very little interaction because only a few Gmail users are seeing my emails, the interaction (I’m hoping) will begin to play in my favour with domain reputation.

    If that doesn’t work, I’ve heard on the rumour-mill that registering an account with GSuite for Business and making sure your sending domain is registered can make a big difference.

    I’ll try that if my Amazon SES approach doesn’t work over the next few weeks.

    Either way… I’ll make sure to let you know what finally resolved the issue when I manage to resolve it.

    Ciao,

    Michael

    P.S. I’m not sure whether I’m going to be sending emails tomorrow and Sunday, it depends a little bit on time. I’d like to, but we’re driving all over the place to see friends before Christmas. Keep your eyes peeled just in case.

  • The dictatorship of Facebook

    The dictatorship of Facebook

    Today’s email is late… why? Because I wrote it, it was pretty lengthy, and then I hit the close button by mistake without saving it.

    Man that’s irritating!

    I seem to do that at least once every few months.

    Hey ho.

    It just means that today’s email is running later than normal 🙂

    And to be honest, I was just having a rant.

    Because Facebook are being a bunch of a**holes.

    My personal Instagram account at https://www.instagram.com/mikeywilding/ has been around for ages. I only recently started putting photos up on it.

    Then… yesterday… I tried to reply to a comment from a friend and was told there was a URL in my profile that wasn’t safe.

    Eh?!

    I checked my profile and there was a link to www.michaelwilding.com

    But that has been there forever.

    The only change I made yesterday was putting michaelwilding.com on CloudFlare as a DNS server.

    That could be the reason, but it would be odd.

    For whatever reason Instagram (or should I say Facebook) have decided that my personal blog has malicious content.

    Any way to appeal it, or just ask a human being the reason?

    Nope.

    It’s their way or no way.

    And that really pees me off.

    However, that’s life, so I’ll get over it.

    The real interesting thing is whether CloudFlare is going to be worth using or not.

    Any thoughts?

    All the best,

    Michael

    P.S. I’ve recently started up with PPV advertising again for one of my businesses, but getting 24,000 views in a couple of hours killed my server response time.

    Which is one of the reasons I’ve started looking at using CloudFlare 😉

    I’ll keep you posted.

  • Short and sweet or long and hard?

    Short and sweet or long and hard?

    Do you like it short and sweet or long and hard?

    No, I’m not being personal, I’m talking about your emails 😉

    Here’s the scooby…

    There’s different schools of thought on whether an email should be short or long.

    Whether you should put links at the top, bottom or throughout.

    If you should have links to one locations or multiple locations.

    But very seldom do you ever see anybody who’s actually tested it!

    In my experience having links to one location decreases the click through rate, but increases the conversion. Having links to multiple locations increases click through but decreases conversion.

    Which means it’s also about the purpose of your emails and what you’re trying to achieve. i.e. interaction or sales

    Personally, the most important thing to do is to write in a way that is enjoyable for humans to read.

    You can get so bogged down in the tiny details trying to get it just right, watching words for spam filters that the email becomes boring to read. And that’s going to be the worst thing you can do.

    Anyhoo… I’ve just started playing with Email On Acid’s advanced analytics for email. You get heatmaps, engagement levels and all sorts of other stuff which should answer all these questions definitively.

    When I have answered them… I’ll let you know 😉

    Ciao,

    Michael

  • You are not alone…

    You are not alone…

    For some reason unbeknownst (if that’s a word!) to me, the lyrics from Michael Jackson’s Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’came unbidden into my head this morning.

    So… I thought I’d use them as the subject line on today’s email.

    It happens to tie in nicely with what I was thinking about social media.

    If you’ve been reading my newsletter for any length of time, you’ll know that social media is not my primary focus. I do bits and pieces on it, I know how to grow followings on most of them, but…

    …I’ve never been able to decide which to focus on for my own personal blog (i.e. the one you’re reading).

    And that all comes down to time and effort.

    Running a social media account properly takes a serious amount of time and thought.

    Which, if I’m honest, I just don’t have at the moment.

    You may have noticed (or not if you never go on Facebook) that my FB page has been lacking in updates recently.

    Why?

    Because it requires a lot more time and thought than other channels.

    For the last 18 months or so I’ve been concentrating on Twitter, and recently I started putting a bit more time into Instagram.

    But the truth is… I simply can’t decide which I want to use the most.

    What I should do, and what I would advise others to do, is to choose one and delete the rest, so there’s simply one focus.

    For me, that’s almost certainly (yes, I know that doesn’t make sense) going to be Twitter or Instagram.

    Truth be told, I’d probably prefer to go with Instagram, but since I have over 12000 Twitter followers, and it’s taken me 18 months to get them, it would be silly to close that account.

    So… you are not alone… I also struggle to decide on the best social media channel to use.

    Ah well, it’s Christmas soon so it’s not worth worrying about.

    Over and out,

    Michael

    P.S. Which social media channel do you focus on?