Archive for the 'Best Practices' Category

McCain Campaign Spamming

Published
by
laura
22Oct
in Best Practices
.

As I mentioned in my post on spam from the Obama campaign, there have been reports of spam coming from the McCain campaign. However, the McCain campaign does not seem to be sending the volume of mail that the Obama campaign is, and so they are not as visible.

A recent post over at Denialism Blog shows that the McCain campaign has some of the same problems as the Obama campaign. Chris talks about the unsubscribe options he is presented when trying to stop the spam he is receiving. He suggests the campaign adds another option:

I never signed up for your stupid email list. I never supported you, except when you passed McCain-Feingold, and I’d vote for Tina Fey before Sarah Palin. Please take me off your list.

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Same old stuff

Published
by
laura
21Oct
in Asides and Best Practices
.

Al talks about the “new” email preference service run by the DMA. Except it is not actually new nor is it really used.

1 Comment

Email and the Obama Campaign

Published
by
laura
20Oct
in Best Practices
.

Late in the summer there were people talking about the spam coming from Senator Obama’s presidential campaign. At that time, most of the discussion was focused on the open subscription form on their website and that there were some individuals who had been fraudulently signed up and were now receiving email from the campaign.

Last week, the Senator’s campaign again became a topic of discussion among some anti-spam groups. The maintainer of one of the more respected public blocklists and members of his family received mail from Senator Obama’s presidential campaign at their personal addresses. Because the mail was unsolicited and met the qualifications for listing, the sending IP addresses were listed on the blocklist. In response, the campaign’s ESP started moving the Senator’s mail to other IP addresses, resulting in those IPs also being listed on the blocklist as well.

I talked with the blocklist maintainer and I believe that his address, and those of his family members, were added to the Senator’s mailing list as the result of an email append. All of them are registered Democrats and they all live in a battleground state.

This may have made for good campaign strategy, not being an expert I cannot comment on that. It is, however, very poor email marketing strategy.

First, the campaign decided to appropriate permission to send email. There is not ever permission associated with an email append. Just because you have a name and a street address does not mean that you have permission to send email. In very, very limited circumstances, an opt-in append (click here to continue receiving email) may be acceptable. However, that is not how appending is normally done.

There is no pretense of permission to send email. Just because someone is registered to a particular party does not mean they want to receive email from that party.

Second, when the campaign started seeing delivery problems they started sending off different IP addresses. Moving IPs around is out and out spammer behavior, no questions asked.

Now, I know this is a very hotly contested election and I know that some people believe that any method of getting the word out is good. I also expect that there may have been some positive reaction from recipients. The overall reaction, based on the IPs changing, may not have been so positive.

Do I really believe that Senator Obama is a evil and willful spammer? No, not really. But that does not change the fact that the Obama campaign seems to be sending email without the permission of the recipient and seem to be attempting to evade blocks by moving IP addresses.

From a marketing perspective, the campaign may be using email effectively and doing everything right. But from an email delivery perspective, they are getting many, many of the basics wrong and are looking like spammers in the process.

Other news and blogs that talk about spam from the Obama campaign:

3 Comments

Vetting customers: an intro

Published
by
laura
14Oct
in Best Practices
.

I promised a couple weeks ago, pre-MAAWG, to write about screening new customers. Things have been a bit busy and I have not had a lot of time for the blog. However, today there has been a long conversation on one of the spam related mailing lists relating to ESPs and customer screening. This conversation inspired me to write this introduction to customer vetting.

I have designed customer screening programs for a number of clients as well as actually had an active role in some of those processes. I also screen my own customers and have taught other people how to vet customers.

When designing a vetting process a company must target the process to the size and revenue potential of their customers. If an ESP has a small number of customers, each having a very large recipient base, one single bad customer has the potential to affect the overall reputation of all the ESP customers. With large number of customers sending to very small recipient bases, then one single bad customer is not going to affect overall reputation as dramatically as larger senders will

Because the larger customers have an actual impact on reputation, it is really important to vet the customer. It’s going to cost money and some time, but responsible ESPs have to do it. Really good customers are going to be vetting the ESP at the same time. They don’t want to go with an ESP that has a poor reputation. It is much like dating, each party is assessing the other party and the suitability of a longer term relationship.

For the tiny mailers, though, there is a very small chance that one, single bad customer sending a single bad mailing will destroy the overall delivery of an ESP and ruin their reputation at large receivers. In this case, it makes a lot more sense, both financially and in terms of resource allocation, to screen the email address list rather than the individual customer. This can be mostly automated, with clearly bad lists being prohibited from being mailed and suspicious lists being kicked to humans for decisions.

Let’s be honest, anyone who comes to an ESP with a list of under 20K names is not a big time spammer trying to steal their reputation. Those are the easy ones to deal with, screen the list, limit the number of addresses that can be uploaded upload and limit, even if just by price, the number of mails that can be sent out during any period. Some ESPs really do cater to the small, community group market and they do tend to screen lists not customers.

For larger customers ESPs have a greater challenge. They must identify the real, legitimate mailers that have permission to send mail and identify the ones that are spammers attempting to steal an ESPs reputation. Spammers attempting to steal an ESPs reputation go out of their way to subvert the screening process. One of the hardest things about screening customers is getting the subversive ones to give an ESP enough information to make an informed decision about that customer. I will not lie, a subversive potential customer is expensive to screen, but that investment protects a sender’s reputation and the reputation of their other customers.

Another thing to remember about vetting is that no vetting process is going to be 100% accurate. ESPs with a good process can screen out 80 - 90% of the bad guys before a single email is sent. Most responsible ESPs do that and then stomp wildly on that remaining percentage that are evil or malicious.

4 Comments

Email marketing tips from The Onion

Published
by
laura
13Oct
in Asides and Best Practices
.

Bonnie talks about insightful email marketing tips taken from an article in The Onion.

0 Comments

Another opt-in in the wild

Published
by
laura
10Oct
in Asides and Best Practices
.

The EEC has an article today about a poorly done opt-in email that DJ Waldo received. How close is that to what you send?

0 Comments

Transactional emails

Published
by
laura
08Oct
in Best Practices
.

Tamara has an excellent collection of musts related to transactional email. I would add a few more, specific to traveling (hotel and plane reservations) that occurred to me recently as I was bombing through airports trying to read hotel and airline confirmations on my iPhone.

  1. If this is a hotel confirmation, link directly to your hotel website. My confirmation from Best Western listed the name of the hotel I was staying in, the date I was arriving and my confirmation number. It did not provide: a phone number for the hotel, a link to Best Western’s website, or a link to the specific hotel’s website. I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the hotel’s phone number to confirm the airport shuttle, all with a tiny little iPhone screen.
  2. Do not add me to your marketing list without asking. Just because you have my email address for confirmations does not mean I want to continue receiving mail from you.
  3. If you are an airline, and you are providing me with flight details, please provide me with a link that will let me view my reservation without having to enter magic tokens or confirmation numbers. Trying to manage copying a 10 digit confirmation number from mail client to web browser on an iPhone requires a pen and paper. Again, not very handy when traveling.

For me, as a delivery and email consultant, it is always enlightening to interact with email as a consumer. I strongly recommend any sender do the same.

2 Comments

Buying Data

Published
by
laura
03Oct
in Best Practices
.

Over on Spam Resource Al posted about data sellers and the ESP that supports them. As part of the post, he lists the pricing for email address lists.

Check out The Data Supplier. One billion email addresses – only $795. Comes with:

15 Million Companies Emails
3 Million Fresh Bulk Emails
8 Million Worldwide Emails
9.4 Million Misc Emails
250K Germany Emails
1 Million Yahoo Emails

Think about that for a minute. One billion email addresses for less than 800 dollars. Think about the average marketing program, responsible senders invest money in address collection. How much verification can be done? How careful can the sellers be with permission? How much is that list actually worth?

For the marketer who purchases that list, dealing with the bad delivery, blocks and complaints is going to cost much more than the $800 spent on the list. Recently, I attended a talk discussing the cost of a blocklisting to their company. The numbers, well into seven figures, astonished even me.

Sending mail to a list of one billion addresses, purchased from anyone, will cause massive delivery problems, spam blocking, and decreased delivery.

4 Comments

Appropriating reputation

Published
by
laura
22Sep
in Best Practices
.

One of the thing savvy spammers are doing these days is appropriating the reputation of someone else. Reputation appropriate takes many forms. Some spammers hijack windows machines, turn them into bots and send spam through major ISP smarthosts. “Legitimate email marketers” buy service from mainstream ESPs to send their permission-challenged email that they cannot get delivered through their own IP space.

There are different strategies for companies to prevent bad groups from appropriating their  reputation. For the ESP, the prime defense against reputation appropriation is screening new customers and new lists.

When screening potential customers, there are three broad categories that customers fall into. One is the legit prospect that is exactly whom they represent to you, these are the easy guys. Another is the naive mailer, who really does not have any clue about email but wants to move into the digital age. This mailer is often extremely small, but knows nothing about email. The final category is the subversive prospect. This is the company who knows exactly what they are doing, and who is actively working to hide their practices from the ESP. They are attempting to subvert the process.

Over the coming weeks I will be talking more about screening new customers and how to distinguish the naive customer from the subversive one.

2 Comments

Yet more data verification

Published
by
laura
01Sep
in Best Practices
.

Friday Al posted about data verification, building on discussions last week about Mr. Poopyhead’s article on open signup forms. He has a very insightful analogy, that I like and I am going to steal (emphasis from the original).

Running a web form, especially one that requires that an Internet user provide information before handing over something, whether it be a login to a website, a free download, or a subscription to a political newsletter, is a bit like putting a box in the middle of the sidewalk, somewhere up the block, and writing “Please put my free kitten here!” on the side of the box. You might end up with something in it, but it most certainly is not going to be that kitten you were hoping for. No matter how hard you wish, there is no agreement between you and the people who stumble across that form that they must behave, and must act a certain way. And, if you’re a savvy marketer, if you know how email works, you already know that certain people who stumble across your form are NOT going to behave. (Unless you’re just going to blindly assume that whatever you received must be a kitten, because that’s what the box is for. Duh!)

The solution is to make people give correct data before they get the prize, login, reward or free stuff. This can be accomplished by using confirmed opt-in. Al has concrete reasons why this is a win for marketers so go read his post.

0 Comments