If you let others in the industry do it and keep working with them (cleaning your lists through them, schmoozing with them at conferences) then you’re shooting yourselves in your own feet. With something rather heavy caliber.

srs

This is the same lesson that RealNetworks taught for, what, eight or nine years now? and it’s still being learned: iTunes requires that you enter an email address to download. Just yesterday nothanks@example.invalid downloaded a copy at my house. If you’re forcing someone to enter an email address to do something unrelated to email, the users are going to assume (correctly!) that you’re just doing lead-gen for something they don’t want, and they’re going to pollute your data. This is not new news, this is expected behavior.

Um, yes. Even if your own practices are perfect, every marketer who abuses consumers makes it harder for well-meaning marketers like you to gain & keep those same peoples’ trust in the future. You can only poke someone in the eye so many times before they try to get out of the way.

It’s long past time for the marketing industry — and particularly those who work with email — to take a firm, united, public stand against your colleagues’ horrible practices. They’re the ones you should despise, not the people who’re simply reacting to being abused.

I just wanted to say I enjoyed posting this comment by entering my info into your two required fields.

I almost entered valid info, but I just don’t trust you yet.

George Orwell wrote, more than half a century ago, that “advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.” In the years since, the swill has turned into something much more noxious.

Dylan’s comments are typical of the marketers’ belief that the world owes them a hearing. It doesn’t, and I for one will do everything in my power to pollute the data of any marketer who intrudes unasked on my use of the internet. As far as I’m concerned, any marketer who runs an open and unconfirmed signup process is no better than the sleaziest penis enlargement spammers.

If he and his fellow marketers can break out of their coccoon of self-righteousness, they’d recognise that my extreme views are becoming more and more typical of internet users. That’s why AdBlock Plus is the most popular addon for the Firefox browser, and why protection of mailboxes is such a growth industry.

Whether I think something is OK or not does not change the reality. The reality is people don’t trust marketers and lead gen companies. The reality is they are going to put bad data into forms. The reality is that marketers must defend against that.

I didn’t say I supported it, nor did I say it was OK. I just said it is out there. I also think there is a major difference between me signing up with valid contact information, but “Stupid Poppypants” as my name and signing up with valid contact information.

That’s the real killer for delivery and for ROI: invalid contact information. When someone gives you another person’s contact information as part of the signup process, you have actually lost 2 opportunities. You have lost the ability to convert the original signup, and you have now sent spam to the second signup, thus losing them as a potential customer. If this happens enough times, the sender is going to find their mail blocked.

Have you had so many poor experiences with marketers that you do not trust any of them?

No, there are marketers and marketing companies I trust. The difference is they earned my trust over time. I did not start out trusting them, experience indicates that marketers are a lot more likely to lie to me and abuse my information than they are to respect me and my information. Therefore, I am protective of my information until I am convinced this marketer can be trusted.

Expecting the consumer to care about your lead-gen process is disingenuous at best. The consumer only cares about not getting harassed. As a consumer I can say I have passed up on many “goodies” because I was entirely unwilling to jump through the absurd set of hoops and put off by the data requirements presented to get whatever it was I was interested in.

As someone in the industry I can say that all the marketers that have used poor data collection and management processes, that do not clearly set expectations at time of sign up, that have abused their consumers’ trust (how’s about 16 emails a day because you signed up for ONE thing?), and that care more about having Lots Of Addresses In Their Databases than the quality of their lists have ruined it for the infinitesimally smaller number of marketers that do it right.

I am of the considered opinion that consumers’ current behavior is what marketers trained them to do, and complaining about their behavior is counterproductive. Marketers need to clean their own houses before lobbing rocks at their long-suffering victims.