Word to the Wise

Seth Godin links to a post up over on The Long Tail about spammers who send PR mail to Chris Anderson, an editor at wired. Apparently lots of people send automated email to the editor of Wired hawking their latest and greatest product, service or photos.

In response to this overwhelming amount of mail, Chris has instituted a new email acceptance policy. He says

So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that’s why my email address is public).

He then publishes a (fairly long) list of email addresses who have violated this policy in the last 30 days. Many of those addresses are ones I recognize, others appear to be the result of blowback.

Even more interesting is the discussion in the comments. It seems that some people recognized their email addresses on the list that Chris published and were unhappy. Dan says

So, I’m on this list. dan at onewordphotography.com. I’m a freelance photographer in Canada and I shoot a lot of travel stock. I have your email address and 7000 others by buying a list of what they call “image buyers” from a company called Agency Access. They tell me they get these lists by compiling them from questionnaires etc at trade shows and industry events.

Now, over the years, I have tried calling many of my intended targets but, when your market is magazine and book publishers all over the world and you have 7 to 10000 potential targets this can get expensive and impossibly time consuming. As well, the vast majority of creative buyers don’t even bother returning your phone call. I’ve tried individual emails which gets an even lower response. So, I started sending out stock list updates via a mass emailing and the response has been nothing short of phenomenal. […] The bottom line is, as a single entity operating a creative business, marketing to potential buyers is necessary, time consuming, expensive and difficult to do on an individual basis. As well, when the “broad brush” (okay, I’ll call it spam) approach works as well as it does for me, it makes sense to keep doing it.

I spent $10,000 this year on lists, email software, promotional cards etc. to promote my business and my work. You’re on a list of people who buy creative work that is sold to photographers every day. If you don’t really buy photography, why not just hit the unsubscribe button? Why give out your email? I get about 150 emails a day and travel 200+ days a year which makes it very difficult to get back to everyone after sorting through the spam I get but, it’s an unfortunate part of the business and I unsubscribe to stuff that does not appeal to me. […]

Chris follows up to that comment explaining that no, he never did sign up. As you read through the comments there is discussion about convenience and costs and who should not have to pay, or work, to advertise effectively.

To my mind it is a much more interesting discussion than happens on many of the anti-spam mailing lists, because a) the senders are getting a voice and b) there is not as much dogma about what is and is not acceptable.

Is what Chris is doing acceptable? There are a lot of different opinions on this but here’s mine. Any individual has the right to block or not block email coming into their email address. Even if I have signed up for your email, I can still block you and that is just how it is. If I have not signed up to receive email from you, then you have no expectation that I will grant you the courtesy of unsubscribing. In this specific case, the address is a business address and I these cases I expect that the employer has a say in the filters that are run against mail coming into business addresses.

Publishing a list of email addresses on a webpage, knowing those addresses will be harvested by spammers is beyond what I would ever do. But I do know that spam is annoying, frustrating and infuriating; doing something so small to get back at them can be hugely satisfying.

Al has a post on the same article, talking about how this demonstrates that purchased lists are not a good thing.

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Charles Stiles, who managed the postmaster team at AOL and was laid off 2 weeks ago, is the new VP of Worldwide Business Development at Goodmail.

Ken Magill mentioned the possibility of Charles moving to Goodmail yesterday.

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Ken Magill over at DirectMag has an article deriding the reliance on ‘open rates’ as a metric for the success (or failure!) of marketing campaigns.

E-mail delivers a return on investment so high, it’s practically embarrassing.

It doesn’t require getting fuzzy with the metrics.
But as long as we continue to call the percentage of graphics displayed in a given campaign its “open rate,” we’re being dishonest with everyone who doesn’t know what the metric truly means. And as the national “open rate” continues to drop, the lie gets even bigger.

I have to wholeheartedly agree with Ken here. “Opens” have always been something easy to measure, but hardly anyone actually understands what it means. Open does not mean that someone opened the email, open just means that an image in the email was loaded from the sender’s server. There are a lot of reasons an image might not get loaded even when the email is opened and read by the recipient. Some people, like me, choose not to load images by default. Some ISPs block images by default. Some companies block images. A very small fraction of people use mail clients that do not render images at all. All of these factors will affect open rates.

Measuring performance, real performance, of email marketing is important. Open rates are really not a measure of performance.

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This really should be part seven of a twelve part series or some such as it deals with an aspect of DKIM that’s really important, but is way down in the details of implementation. (dkim.org is a reasonable place to start for a general overview of DKIM).

There’s an apparently endless thread on the DKIM-SSP spec development mailing list at the moment about the differences between two fields in a DKIM signature that could be used to tie a senders reputation to. Several ESP delivery folks asked me to explain what everyone was talking about, and this post is a first cut at that.

“i=” vs “d=”

There are two possible fields in a DKIM signature that could be used to identify the sender of a message, and so to tie a sender history and reputation record to. They are the so-called “i=” and “d=” field, from the syntax used to include them in the signature.

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One of the challenges of my job is to separate my personal feelings and experiences related to email marketing and spam from my advice to clients. I am here to make your delivery better, not to make everyone use email marketing the way that makes me the most comfortable.

That being said, I get a lot of spam across my various email addresses. If I have an extra few minutes I’ll sometimes send complaints, but more and more it is too hard, too complicated and / or the ISPs do not care anyway. In the last 2 weeks I’ve had 3 experiences with unexpected / unwanted email (aka: spam) where I did take action.

1. Bank of America.
2. Neolane.
3. Xign Corporation.

Bank of America
I would never have chosen to be a BoA customer, but they bought out MBNA a while ago and I ended up as a customer of theirs. I’m not happy with them, but there is inertia and a very high (unused!) credit limit involved. Bank of America decided that all their customers needed to receive emails when a new bill is prepared. Fair enough, a lot of people probably like this. I do not, and am slightly annoyed that I am receiving sensitive financial information by email when I did not request it, but it should be a simple issue to unsubscribe, right? Not so much, no.

The email I received says:

If you want to stop receiving e-Bill summaries via email, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to Online Banking.
2. Click the Bill Pay & e-Bills tab.
3. Select Automatic Payments.
4. Locate the payee for which you would like to cancel e-Bill summaries through email.
5. Select Add/Edit/View.
6. Remove the check mark from the box that reads I would like to receive e-Bill summaries via email. You will continue to receive e-Bills in your Online Banking Service.

I log in to follow the instructions but get stopped at step 5. BoA requires that I provide them with at checking account number and routing information in order to proceed. When I call the bank the phone folks are very helpful, but still, I should not have to call my bank in order to stop receiving email I never signed up for in the first place.

Moral of the story: Do not sign up customers for email and then prevent them from easily unsubscribing.

Neolane.com
They have managed to find an email address belonging to me. I’m not sure how as it is not published anywhere and I do not think I have had any contact with Neolane. They keep sending me notifications for webinars. I noticed that at the bottom of the email there was a copyright belonging to a company I have interacted with in the past. I contact someone I know over at that company and ask him if he knows how I signed up for this list. A flurry of emails later and he tells me that Neolane is a partner and is mailing to their own list and they will probably contact me. My contact also comments that his clicks and opens have been decreasing recently and he’s not been able to figure out why, but this may help explain it.

Moral of the story: Affiliates and partners mailing your content or even links to your site may cause you delivery problems.

Xign Corporation
Xign is an online billing and payment processor. They handle billing for one of our Abacus customers. I did sign up at the Xign website, but only because that was the only way to invoice the customer. I have received the occasional email from Xign about web outages and maintenance windows. I did not really want them, but could see how they were relevant to my registration on the website.

Last week, however, JPMorgan Xign decides to send me a blatant advertisement for their services, touting how much more efficient I will be if I just use their online invoicing system. I contacted their ESP and pointed out that while I had registered at the Xign website I was not a customer and really did not want this kind of email. I also suggested that the ESP might want to check the permission status of this list. The ESP responded quickly saying that no, really, this was not permission and they would have a chat with their customer before any other emails went out.

Moral of the story: Just because someone registers at your website does not mean they are your customer.

For the most part, these are exceptional examples. They are certainly not examples of companies blatantly and unrepentantly spamming. They are, however, examples of poorly implemented marketing or bad decisions made by the sender.

How well do you know your email marketing program? Could you be tripped up by similar issues?

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The recent layoffs at AOL did affect the AOL Postmaster desk, and information I have received is that there was significant loss. As a result of the staff decrease, some changes have been made to the whitelisting and FBL processes. In order for a FBL to be approved it must meet the new FBL guidelines. In a nutshell, anyone wanting to get a FBL from AOL must meet ONE of the following criteria.

• The reverse DNS for each IP shares the FBL domain.
• At least one authoritative nameserver for each IP shares the FBL email domain.
• The IP WHOIS information for each IP shares the FBL email domain in common. The domain may appear in any of the listed email addresses.
• The ASN WHOIS information for each IP shares the FBL email domain in common. The domain may appear in any of the listed email addresses.

These are not exactly new policies, some version of them have always been in place. The intent of the checks is to make sure that people only get the FBLs for IP ranges that belong to them. In the past, the checks were done by hand by the folks on the postmaster desk. With the massive decrease in staff, these checks have been automated.

A few people have complained about the new checks and the fact that their applications were denied. The good news is there are escalation paths and ways to get decision makers to take a look at the application. Also, the process is being tweaked so that everyone who should get a FBL does actually get one.

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Through my position here at Word to the Wise I’ve interacted with dozens of companies over the years. Some companies outsource the mechanics of email sending to email service providers, others buy a software or MTA solution from one of the many vendors out there. For both these groups delivery problems are usually issues with permission or user expectations. Technically there are few problems with sending, bounce handling, unsubscriptions and rate limiting. The commercial software, either as created by an ESP or a vendor, typically does these things well.

The last group, those who use a home built system, are a whole different story. They often do no bounce processing relying on the underlying mail transport agent (typically qmail) to do all that work. The problem is that a general mail transport agent handles bounces for a particular email send, but does not have any functionality to handle future emails to addresses that bounce. Consequently the list does not get bounce handled, dead addresses pile up and their delivery rates plummet.

A few weeks ago Derek talked about senders using homegrown email systems and the pitfalls therein. He has a good list of things companies should think of before deciding a home grown system is right for them.

First, there’s a platform’s subtle complexity. Sending an e-mail is a trivial task and it’s easy to think, “How hard can using an in-house system be?” But managing bulk e-mail delivery can be very hard. Million-to-one chances, things you’re never likely to see using your desktop software, show up every day and must be handled gracefully. Plus the major ISPs all have their own standards for acceptable bulk delivery. They have a multitude of concurrency and session limits, extremely variable response codes, and a plethora of other requirements, some of which contradict Internet standards.

A second challenge is scope. A good system must handle bounces, vacation messages, replies, click-throughs, opens, opt-outs, opt-ins, profile management, and forwards to a friend. It must be able to monitor deliverability and reputation and facilitate corrective action where necessary. And it must be capable of collating these results and presenting them in a meaningful manner in real time.

Third is moving goalposts. Once a system is built, it must be maintained. In this young medium, best practices are constantly evolving and your system must run just to stand still. Adding support for systems such as DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) takes significant time and expertise. We can expect this trend to continue with such requirements as support for SMS, RSS, behavioral targeting, and dynamic messaging.

Finally, there’s expertise. The same Forrester report indicates that most companies have fewer than four employees managing their e-mail marketing programs. The additional requirements of software, e-mail, and deliverability expertise will inevitably require the team to be substantially larger with a commensurate increase in cost. Staying abreast of current developments and industry best practices can be a full-time job.

I have worked with a clients to improve their homegrown MTA and it is possible. It is also expensive to repair the damage done by a home grown MTA, both in terms of the delivery hit and in terms of development effort.

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Sorry about the slowness, this server is the same one that is hosting thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com and it got posted to digg today.

If the traffic storm keeps up for more than a day or two we’ll make other arrangements for the blog.

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Cam Beck on Marketing Prefs has a post today about presenting users with confusing choices in an opt-in process.

Bank of America followed the letter of the law, but they did so with a method that can only be described as misleading since people typically don’t read those sorts of messages, and the action required to opt out changes from one email message to the next within the same form.

I’ve been in these sorts of debates before: The marketing managers are presumably concerned that their bonuses will be partially based on the number of people who sign up for emails. I can think of no other reason they are so adamant that they find some way to ensure people get marketing spam they don’t want.

Many years ago when I was handling abuse@ very large network provider, one of our very large, well known customers was having some problems with people complaining about spam. After much discussion between their executives, the abuse desk and our executives the customer agreed to uncheck the opt-in boxes allowing customers to actually opt-in to email.

Somewhere around six months later, the checkboxes were turned back on.

When we asked the customer about it, they said that not enough people opted in to the email when the boxes were unchecked by default, so they had to turn them back on.

My happy, customer-facing persona prevented me from jumping up and down and loudly pointing out that just because someone failed to uncheck a box did not mean they were actually consenting to receive email from this customer.

That was many years ago, on a very different Internet; before the days of feedback loops and whitelists. The ISPs did not have any way to measure user engagement or complaints. It did not matter if the consent was just a user missing or forgetting to uncheck an opt-in box, it was still consent — at least in the eyes of the marketer.

Many companies, including Bank of America, are still trying to confuse the consent out of recipients. That’s not really consent. The users do not really want your mail. They are not actively engaged in your mailings or your company.

Do you really want recipients who are only on your list because you made it too confusing for them to express their choice?

Hat tip: Matt

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Marketers measure a lot of metrics about the email they send. But are they measuring the right metrics?

Mark Brownlow talks about how marketers may not always know what their measuring. He also links to Email Insider where the Email Diva talks about what metrics can be measured. More importantly, she points out that asking questions and determining what you want out of your email marketing program is critical to determining what metrics you should measure. She says:

what are the goals of your email program? Do you want to build your brand, reach new customers, build relationships with current customers, drive repeat sales, drive traffic to partner programs, increase Web site traffic and/or drive Web site purchases?

Clarify the relative importance of these factors and identify the Key Performance Indicator that represents success for each.

I have worked with a wide range of clients over the years. From large brick and mortar stores that are using email marketing to drive customers to their stores, to small web-based retailers just trying to communicate with their customers. In too many cases, the people trying to deal with delivery issues have no idea what data their companies are measuring about their delivery. We spend a lot of time collecting the data needed to troubleshoot their delivery problems.

Recently I had a meeting with a partner company who described one of their customers that measures everything about email. This company can tell you what color emails work better than others, and even which color preferences correspond to which recipient ISPs.

Perhaps this level of measurement is excessive for many companies. But the reality is that email marketers should be measuring campaign effectiveness beyond clicks and opens.

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