The full report is well worth a read, but the take home messages are clear.

First, your email program can play a critical role in alerting your subscribers to changes in operations, winding down operations or liquidation sales.
Oddly, bankrupt retailers usually give anonymous website visitors more information that they give to email subscribers. This is a huge missed opportunity to drive sales, and it’s also disrespectful to your brands’ most loyal customers. The time during which you’re liquidating or exploring your options is a poor time to alienate dedicated subscribers.
And second, and even more importantly, brands that appear to be headed for extinction often find a second life. Examples include the rebirth of Pets.com as a community site run by PetSmart, the takeover of CompUSA.com by TigerDirect parent Systemax, and the rescue of RedEnvelope by new owners. Because of this, maintaining email relationships with your best customers is critical to preserving the value of your brand as much as possible during a transaction.

One thing that was clear to me while I was looking at the report, is that the companies who did things badly weren’t thinking about email marketing as one of their assets during the shutdown process. In one case, the company never even mentioned they were going out of business in their email marketing, the mail just stopped one day. This same company prominently mentioned the going out of business on their website, so it was clearly a failure of the marketing department to communicate over email.

As an aside, Smith-Harmon have their own email marketing program well managed. When I downloaded the report, I agreed to receive email from them. Within 5 minutes of me signing up for the program I received a welcome message welcoming me to the program, giving me some real content and not relying on images. Kudos to them for walking the walk.

I am sure, if asked, all the advertised companies would say they have no knowledge of spamming by their vendors. I’m sure they would say that their vendors tell them I opted in to the email and must have just forgotten. I am sure that this isn’t really spam.

Except it really is spam. Real companies with real brands do use the services of spammers. When caught they loudly protest their innocence and talk about rogue affiliates. In the best cases they will “fire” the affiliate and then look the other way when the affiliate signs back up.

Spam is sending mail to people who never requested it. Hiring someone to do it for you doesn’t mean you aren’t a spammer. With the economy tanking and companies trying to maximize their bottom line, more and more name brands seem to be jumping on the spam bandwagon. It is not an unexpected development, but it will mean more aggressive spam filtering and more difficult email delivery for everyone.

There are a hundred ways to skulk around, to collect email addresses, to write clever privacy policies or to argue about whether opt-out (“you can always unsubscribe!”) is a valid way to build a brand. None of those schemes work. What works is exactly one way: making promises and then keeping them. Every person who unsubscribes or deletes or just stops reading your mail is a person lost, a negative word-of-mouth opportunity waiting to happen. [...]

A spam campaign feels like a smart idea, but over time, the more you use it, the less your brand is worth. A permission campaign, on the other hand, only grows in value, until it gets big enough that you can build an entire business around it.

Long term value for a email marketing program comes from sending relevant wanted mail. Sending mail people didn’t ask for and don’t want damages a brand. All the semantics in the world doesn’t change the fact that recipients don’t like or trust a sender.

Permission and relevance don’t just impact a sender’s reputation with end users. Many large ISPs listen very closely to their users when creating reputation metrics. Poor reputation with end users results in poor reputation and consequently poor delivery. Some senders attempt to argue with ISPs that their mail can’t be spam for any number of reasons. But the determination if a mail is or is not spam is not for either the sender to make. And if a recipient thinks that Brand X is spamming them that will negatively impact that brand.