Word to the Wise

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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One thing I frequently mention, both here on the blog and with my clients, is the importance of setting recipient expectations during the signup process. Mark Brownlow posted yesterday about signup forms, and linked to a number of resources and blog posts discussing how to create user friendly and usable signup forms.

As a consumer, a signup process for an online-only experience that requires a postal address annoys and frustrates me to no end. Just recently I purchased a Nike + iPod sport kit. Part of the benefit to this, is free access to the Nike website, where I can see pretty graphs showing my pace, distance and time. When I went to go register, however, Nike asked me to give them a postal address. I know there are a lot of reasons they might want to do this, but, to my mind, they have no need to know my address and I am reluctant go give that info out. An attempt to register leaving those blanks empty was rejected. A blatantly fake street address (nowhere, nowhere, valid zipcode) did not inhibit my ability to sign up at the site.

Still, I find more and more sites are asking for more and more information about their site users. From a marketing perspective it is a no-brainer to ask for the information, at least in the short term. Over the longer term, asking for more and more information may result in more and more users avoiding websites or providing false data.

In the context of email addresses, many users already fill in random addresses into forms when they are required to give up addresses. This results in higher complaint rates, spamtrap hits and high bounce rates for the sender. Eventually, the sender ends up blocked or blacklisted, and they cannot figure out why because all of their addresses belong to their users. They have done everything right, so they think.

What they have not done is compensate for their users. Information collection is a critical part of the senders process, but some senders seem give little thought to data integrity or user reluctance to share data. This lack of thought can, and often does, result in poor email delivery.

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Many of my clients come to me when they end up with delivery problems due to the actions of affiliates. These can either be listings in some of the URL blocklists (either public or private) or escalations of IP based listings. In many of the cases I have dealt with affiliates, the affiliates have sloppy mailing practices or are out and out spammers.

Recently the FTC settled with Cyberheat over their liability for the behaviour of their affiliates. In this settlement Cyberheat is required to monitor their affiliates as follows:

• Contractually requiring the affiliate to identify any subaffiliates it intends to us
• Providing each affiliate a copy of the Order
• Obtaining from each affiliate an express agreement to comply with the Order and the CAN SPAM Act
• Contractually requiring each affiliate that intends to use email marketing to provide Cyberheat, at least 7 days before the campaign, the email address from which the email will be sent, the subject line, the proposed dates the email will be sent, the email addresses to which the email will be sent, and a certification regarding how the addresses were obtained
• At least 3 days prior to an email campaign being conducted, Cyberheat must review the campaign for compliance with the CAN SPAN Act and provide written acknowledge that it has reviewed the campaign and that it complies with the CAN SPAM Act, and
• Requiring each consumers that signs up for Cyberheat service to identify the manner through which they heard of the service. If they heard of the service via email, Cyberheat must monitor the affiliate that sent the email for continued compliance with the CAN SPAM Act.

These conditions are very similar to the conditions I helped some clients establish when they ended up on the SBL due to the behaviour of their affiliates. We did set contractual limits on what the affiliates could do, and require they comply with an AUP. We also set out a vetting process to verify that the affiliate would not send spam. Questions all affiliates had to answer included:

1. Company name, address, domain, opt-in policies
2. Main website
3. Outgoing mail IP(s)
4. Domains used in email
5. Where do they get their email addresses?

Each candidate must pass the at a minimum checks:

• Check the opt-in policies as listed on the website.
• Check mail IPs on spamhaus and other blacklists
• Check rDNS on IPs
  • Is their reverse DNS set up
  • Is it reasonable
  • what is rDNS of nearby space
• Check whois record
  • How new is the record
  • Is there valid contact information in the record?

Additionally, a unique address will be signed up at every affiliate.

One of the difficulties my client and I discovered while vetting affiliates is that many affiliate programs hide their mailing IPs and will refuse to reveal any information about where the mail comes from. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to determine if they are associated with any reports of spam.

I have yet to find the silver bullet for determining the cleanliness of an affiliate program. I think it is clear, though, that the FTC expects companies to know who their affiliate mailers are and to not patronize affiliates who are sending spam.

Hat tip: Venkat

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Being a deliverability consultant, I end up signing up for a lot of lists and providing email addresses to a lot of different websites I may not normally trust with my email address. The only way to manage the resulting volume of email is using a disposable address system. There are a number of commercial versions, but we built our own system.

Any time I need to sign up with a client, I create a new email address. Part of the address creation process involves making notes about where and when the address was used. When mail is received at any of the email addresses I have used, that email is appended with the data I provided at the time I signed up and forwarded to a mailbox on my main system. If an address ends up compromised or sold and getting too much mail, I can just turn it off. This system allows me to freely hand out addresses, without a large amount of mail ending up in my primary mail box.

Disposable addresses great way to monitor what my clients are doing with my email address. I have found, in at least 2 cases, that my clients are doing nothing wrong, but there are leaks in their process that lets email addresses get out to spammers. My reports of data leaking were the first they knew about any problems with their vendors or customers.

I strongly recommend any marketer who shares any data, include in that data test or seed accounts. Sign up for your own lists, using unique addresses, so that you can see what kind of mail your subscribers are receiving once they sign up at your site. If you are providing data to customers or vendors, include unique test data in each list. If you start getting unexpected mail to those addresses, you can track back to the specific vendor with the data problem.

Your email address list is one of the biggest assets your company has. Protect that asset by monitoring what others are doing with it.

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Mark Brownlow has an interview with the author of Email Marketing For Dummies. It is a great summary of the book and gives some good hints to anyone interested in starting to use email as a marketing and customer retention tool.

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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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Matt talks about a new marketing report from the ThinData Newsletter.

The Newsletter offers the following recommendations on using viral marketing as part of your next email campaign.

1. State Your Purpose. Be very clear about your intentions with your viral program and about what you plan to do with the email addresses that you will be collecting.
2. Respect Personal Information. Keep in-mind that the addresses you collect are not subscribers until they choose to subscribe themselves. To comply with the rules set out by Canada’s privacy legislation (PIPEDA) you should not retain this information or assume you can send any follow-up emails to them.
3. Clearly Identify Yourself to Referrals. When you send a triggered message to the email addresses entered by the original referral source, use your email address as the from address address as opposed to the referral source’s email address (see example below). In this way, you are demonstrating that you respect the referral source’s email identity.
4. Reduce Risks of Abuse. Use a CAPTCHA in the form that collects the email addresses. A CAPTCHA – which is short for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart” – helps to dramatically reduce the potential abuse that spammers can inflict on you or on the owners of the emails you have captured.
5. Answer the Question: What’s In It For Me? Go beyond sending the referred friend a link. Rather, describe concisely why they are receiving the email and the value of taking action.

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