Word to the Wise

Chris Marriott over at iMediaConnection talks about all the reasons email is a non-starter as a replacement for direct mail. This is something I have been telling clients for a while now. Chris mentions a number of reasons for why email is not an acquisition tool.

Today, banks can flood your mailbox with all the credit card offers they want, but they can’t flood your email box with the same offers. First, it’s not as easy to get your email address as it is your postal address. Second, even if a business has your email address, you can opt-out of that first prospecting email and be free forever from further offers. For these very important reasons, there is no direct linear progression from mail to email in the marketing world. Email is the most cost-effective retention, cross-sell and loyalty tactic in the universe, but it is not a viable acquisition tool in the way that direct mail is (though some would argue both are equally bad due to the sheer amount of wasted impressions).

The big reason he missed is complaints. It is difficult, if not impossible, to complain about direct mail. Even the opt-outs listed on the circulars do not work. For email, though, complaints are trivial. The ISPs have set up and manage a way for recipients to tell a sender they do not want any mail from that sender. Those complaints feed a scoring engine that allows the ISP to block mail that the recipients mark as spam. This feedback process makes it extremely difficult to use purchased email lists to acquire new customers.

Hat tip: BeRelevant

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The FTC announced today they will be publishing clarifications to CAN SPAM in the near future. According to the FTC

The new rule provisions address four topics: (1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender; (2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements; (3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and (4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

Once the rules are published, I will be sure to link to them and comment on them here. From the FTC press release, it seems that the rules are reasonably sane and any current mailer following best practices will already be in compliance.

Hat tip: MailChimp

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Ben over at MailChimp has an article talking about a recent experience with Postini and an actual bug that causes Postini to interact badly with another spamfilter and block non-spam.

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Venkat posts today about the ruling in the Asis v. Azoogle case. I have not yet had a chance to read the whole ruling, but in talking with Mickey over at SpamSuite it seems to expand the Gordon ruling a bit.

Mickey posts on Intellectual Intercourse about spam received from a recruiting agency trying to get him to hire one of their clients. This spam was amusing in that it contained reference to a bill that Mickey helped defeat years ago.

Box of Meat blog links to a CSO online article graphically demonstrating a botnet. The representation is really helps to understand the scope of the problem.

On Bronto Blog DJ posts about resurrecting old addresses. He has it right when he says: “If you continue to send email to customers that is random and unexpected, there will be consequences.”

Matt at ReturnPath has a couple posts about who should get delivery services and how ReturnPath chooses customers. This is something I end up dealing with occasionally. There are not specific types of companies I refuse to do consulting for. I will generally provide consulting on best practices to any business segment. My one restriction is that I will not provide ISP relations (ie, contacting the ISPs) for companies that do not send opt-in email. This has caused consternation with some potential customers.

Mark Brownlow at No Man is an iland suggests renaming “open rate” as “render rate” in an effort to make it much clearer what “open rates” really measure. Expect to see render rates referred to here on this blog in the future.

Josh talks about suppression list abuse on Deliverability.com. For those of us who use unique addresses for every signup, it quickly becomes clear that there are leaks in the suppression process. I have also seen problems with leaks from subscriptions, so do not think the problem is just in suppressions.

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The Email Experience Council is the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association. They recently sent out a mailing that demonstrated what not to do when sending email, including:

• sending out multiple copies of an email to the same recipients
• sending offers from a third party to recipients who did not opt-in for third party mail
• sending mail from a unrecognized address
• sending an offer of no interest to many of their recipients

In addition to the email mistakes, they also made some serious marketing mistakes, such as

• leaving out the branding
• leaving out personalization

The execution of this mailing was abysmal.

I have no direct experience with the EEC, but if they are truly leaders in the email industry, then they will use this experience with email gone horribly wrong as an example. There are lessons here, for the EEC and for all email marketers. Ideally, those lessons will be learned and shared in detail so that other marketers will not repeat these mistakes.

Other articles on this: BeRelevant, Ken Magill, EmailKarma, EEC.

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JD posed a question in my post about Postini and trying to sort out a customer getting marked as spam by their filtering mechanism and I think it bears more discussion than can be done in comments.

And sure, it’s a best practice for filtering companies to respond politely to requests from filterees. But is it a requirement? Do senders have a right to demand explanations?

There is not really an easy answer for that. My first response is “of course not!” but then I think about some of my clients who really have been trying to do the right thing and how we work through issue after issue and finally fix everything I can think of, but they still have delivery problems. These are not spammers, they are sending mail to people who have asked for it and by all measures do actually want it, but some mail is being blocked for reasons neither my client or I can figure out. In those cases it would be really nice if someone from the group doing the blocking would take 10 minutes to point me in the right direction and show me what I missed.

I have been doing this long enough to know that spamfilters are not 100% accurate. I know there are times when a specific block is outside the scope of what email the filter designer, or user, expected to block. Look at what happened when Yahoo started using the PBL a few months back. There was a bug in the implementation that neither Yahoo nor Spamhaus expected and that caused mail from IPs not listed on the PBL to be blocked because of the PBL. With a valid report of the problem, I could contact both Spamhaus volunteers and someone at Yahoo to point out there was a problem with the implementation. Yahoo and Spamhaus figured out the issue and fixed the problem and Yahoo is no longer blocking IPs not on the PBL for being on the PBL.

I do believe that there are times when feedback from senders and blockees is beneficial and can help improve the overall filters. I have clear evidence this is the case.

On the flip side, I also have been in the email business long enough to know that more than 99% of senders just want their mail delivered and do not care about anything other than getting into the inbox. They believe every block is a mistake and the ISP / spamfilter is wrong or broken. They are not interested in actually making sure the implementation of the filter meets the design goals, usually they do not care what the goals of that filter are. They are just interested in delivery of their mail. This creates a signal / noise ratio into the filters or ISPs that is so weighted to the noise side, there is almost no value to the filter or ISP in even having a channel for the small amount of signal.

The reality is that most senders do not spend a lot of time looking into a block before contacting the ISP. They use the ISP points of contact as a way to avoid doing hard work internally. This transfers lot more work onto the ISPs and makes them less conducive to working with any senders at all.

I also think there are slightly different obligations on commercial spamfiltering companies and ISPs in regards to listening to senders. Commercial spamfiltering companies are further removed from the end user than the ISPs are. In many cases the end user has no idea that the spamfiltering at their ISP has been outsourced to a commercial company and they have no internal resolution path. They can contact their ISP, but that is only useful if the ISP has an escalation path back to the filtering company. I think that this distance, and the fact that the spamfiltering companies are profiting directly from blocking mail, means that spamfiltering companies have more of a responsibility to be accessible to the people they are blocking. The irony is that the spamfiltering companies are generally less accessible to senders than ISPs are.

Overall I do not think that good spamfiltering happens in a vacuum, and that reliable reports from senders about inaccurate filtering help improve blocking schemes. Senders are not in a position to be making any demands of ISPs and filtering companies, however, I do believe that the end user experience would be better if there were more communication between senders and recipients. The problem is that the history of communication between the two groups has been contentious at best and there are only so many times the receivers are going to spend time listening to the senders, again.

I guess it boils down to no, senders do not have a right to demand explanations, but things might be better if more ISPs and spamfiltering companies engaged with non-spamming but blocked senders more often. Sorting out those non-spamming but blocked senders from legitimately blocked senders is the real trick and I expect if receivers could do that reliably, there would be no false positives.

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I have recently become aware of 2 new blog communities based around email marketing.

One is a feedburner community Email Marketing Expert

The other is Box of Meat

Enjoy.

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I’ve been working on a document discussing laws relevant to email delivery and have found some useful websites about laws in different countries.

US Laws from the FTC website.

European Union Laws from the European Law site.

Two documents on United Kingdom Law from the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Data Protection Laws.

Canadian Laws from the Industry Canada website.

Australian Laws from the Australian Law website.

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Denise Cox has a list of 10 things your signup page should have over on her blog.

The AOL postmaster blog has its first post up talking about bounces.

BeRelevant has a great blog with lots of suggestions email best practices.

Mark Brownlow had a great post this weekon moving the unsubscribe button to the top of your newsletter to make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. The comments are a must read as well, including one commenter that saw the number of ‘this is spam’ hits go down when he moved the unsubscribe link to the top of the email.

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On one of my mailing lists there was a long discussion about the Q Interactive survey. Some of the senders on the list were complaining that unless ISPs provide FBLs they should not use complaints to make filtering decisions. The sender perspective is that it isn’t fair for the ISPs to have data and use it without sharing it back so that the senders could remove complainers.

This deeply, deeply misses the point.

The ISPs are in the business of keeping their users happy. Part of that is measuring how users react to mail. This includes providing “report spam” or similar buttons when they control the interface. Some ISPs have chosen to share that data back with senders. Some ISPs have made the choice not to share that information back.

But even the ISPs that share FBL data with senders do not expect that the only thing a sender will do is remove the email address. ISPs expect senders to actually pay attention, to not send mail that their recipients do not want. They expect that ESPs are going to notice that one customer has consistently high complaint rates and actually force their customer to stop sending mail that recipients think is spam.

Senders should keep track of complaint rates. Measure them per send. Do not waste time whining that this ISP or that ISP will not set you up with a FBL. Take the data from those ISPs that do have FBLs and measure it. It is extremely unlikely that a mailing will have grossly different complaint rates between ISPs. You have all the data you need in order to evaluate how your recipients are perceiving your email.

ESPs and senders who think that their only response to FBL complaints should be to remove that email are the ones most likely to have filtering and blocking problems. The ISPs are giving them valuable data that they can use to evaluate how their emails are being received. Instead of being ungrateful, wagging fingers and blaming the ISPs for not giving them the data they want, senders should spend more time focusing on what they can discover from the data that is shared with them.

A FBL email is more than an unsubscribe request, senders should stop focusing on the unsubscribe portion of the FBL process and focus more on the recipient feedback portion of it. What can you learn about your mail from a FBL?

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