Tag Archive for 'Marketing'

Data Integrity, part 2

Published
by
laura
28Aug
in Best Practices
.

Yesterday I blogged about eROIs contention that consumers should not be wasting the time of lead gen companies by filling in fake data. There were lots of good comments on the post, and I strongly encourage you to go read them if you are interested in different perspectives on the data issue.

One of the arguments I was making is that people are only going to give accurate information if they trust the website that is collecting information. I do, strongly, believe this. I also believe very strongly that websites collecting information need to do so defensively. It is the only way you can get good information.

This ties in with an earlier post about a website that collects email addresses from any visitor, then turns around and submits those addresses to webforms. Hundreds of mailing lists have already been corrupted by this group. They are a prime reason companies must design address collection process defensively. There are people who do bad things, who will take an opportunity to harass senders and recipients. This company is not the first, nor will they be the last to commit such abuses.

Taking a stand against abusive companies and people may be useful, but that will not stop the abuse. It is much easier to design process that limits the amount of abuse. For lead gen, in particular, confirmed opt-in is one way to limit the amount of bad data collected. As a side effect, it also results in less blocked mail, fewer complaints and better delivery.

1 Comment

Who is responsible for data integrity

Published
by
laura
27Aug
in Industry
.

Yesterday, Ken Magill wrote about his experience with the Obama campaign’s open and unconfirmed marketing list. Ken, to see just how open the Obama subscription form was, subscribed using a valid email address but the name of Stupid Poopypants. As expected, mail to Ken from the Obama campaign was addressed to Stupid.

eROI uses this as an example of people who ruin their ROI by filling fake data into forms and ends their post by addressing Ken as follows:

I think that as someone that covers the industry and espouses the things that make us strong, tear us down, threaten our industry, and lift us up… you of all people should be helping us out and not hurting us.

I have known Ken for a while, and done a few interviews with him over the years. He has never pulled punches. Ever. It is not what he does. His job is pot-stirring. In this case he is stirring this pot by pointing out the poor subscription practices of the Obama campaign.

From my perspective, the problem is not that Ken gave the Obama campaign Stupid Poopypants as his name, the problem is that the Obama campaign is not doing any data verification. Ken did give the campaign a valid email address, but there was no reason he needed to do so. Anyone could have signed up Stupid Poopypants and put in Ken’s address.

Ken was pointing out the poor data collection process with this experiment and based on their post the point flew right over the heads of the folks at eROI. People are going to put fake data in forms online and there is not any way to stop them from doing this.

This process is much more a reflection on data collectors than on the individuals signing up. Senders and marketers online have spent a lot of time collecting information and sending marketing to people. At this point in time people do not want more marketing in their inbox, or on their phone, or in their postal box. they do not trust that a company will respect their opt-in preferences. So they provide false data. The subscriber does not trust the collector to respect the subscriber, and so the subscriber takes protective action against the collector.

If what eROI says is true, “data integrity is everything to our industry” then people collecting data should be prepared to actually spend a little effort to not let subscribers pollute their data. If eROI lets any moron on the internet put information in their form, and then expects the data to be good then I just have one question to ask eROI: Are you new to the Internet or something??

hat tip: Box of Meat

Followup posts: Data Integrity Part 2 and Yet More Data Verification

14 Comments

Addictive email marketing

Published
by
laura
05Aug
in Industry
.

Magilla Marketing had an article this week about Bob Richards, who paid $14,000 to an email appending company, only to discover that of the 118,000 email addresses he received over 85,000 of them bounced. Mr. Richards was also terminated from his email service provider due to bounces and complaints. He posted a complaint on RipOffReport.com, issued a press release and reported the appending company to the FTC and other law enforcement.

In his press release, Mr. Richards equates his vendor, and other vendors to email marketers, with drug pushers.

Drug users go to the pusher for their drug and the pushers keep the streets plentiful with drugs. Similarly, marketers go to list services for their drug and many of these list services sell tainted goods. And it’s these list services that fuel the spread of spam.

The end of Ken’s article does reinforce the drug comparison. After all the problems Mr. Richards had with emailing, he is not only considering sending mail again, but sending mail to addresses from the same vendor.

In an e-mail to Richards obtained by this newsletter, Cooper offered a $10,000 refund if Richards would rescind his complaints from the FTC and RipOffReport, among other things.

As of deadline, Richards said he would accept the offer if EmailAppenders removes all the hard and soft bounces and non-financial advisors from the list it supplied, and upon subsequently mailing it, Javelin gets a 90% or better delivery rate.

As was said on a delivery mailing list earlier today: “To use the analogy from article, he’s willing to try LSD instead of Heroin — as long as the pusher promises that it’s not tainted.”

2 Comments

Engaging recipients critical for delivery

Published
by
laura
04Aug
in Delivery Improvement
.

One of the issues I have touched on repeatedly is the changing face of blocking and filtering at ISPs. Over the last 12 - 18 months, large, end-user ISPs have started rolling out more and more sophisticated filters. These filters look at a lot of things about an email, not just the content or the sending IP reputation or URLs in the message but also the recipient profile. Yes, ISPs really are measuring how engaged recipients are with a sender and, they are using that information to help them make blocking decisions.

There were two separate posts on Friday related to this.

Mark Brownlow has a great blog post speculating about a number of things ISPs might be looking at when making decisions about what to do with an incoming email. He lists a number of potential measurements, some of which I can definitively confirm are being measured by ISPs.

  1. recipients never click on a link in the email
  2. emails are never moved to a folder or archived (”trash” or “junk” folders don’t count)
  3. recipients delete the email
  4. the emails are never rescued or opened when delivered to the junk folder
  5. recipients never scroll down the email
  6. recipients don’t forward the email
  7. recipients don’t use the interface’s print facility
  8. recipients over-use unsubscribe links
  9. recipients never unblock images or add sender to address list

Successful email marketing is no longer simply about permission. Senders must send engaging, wanted email. Not only does this improve recipient response and ROI, but engaging users is vital for getting delivery in the first place. As an aside, a buddy of mine who works at an ISP was very, very pleased with Mark’s post.

DJ over at Bronto blog posted Friday about a re-engagement campaign done by Shop.com. This was a 2 email campaign specifically designed to engage recipients. The takeaway:

Shop.org was so so close to a perfect execution of an email re-engagement campaign. Timing, subject line, copy, creative, calls-to-action, welcome message - all were brilliant. But…the initial dead links may have lost many. It’s hard to tell if this was a temporary issue or one that was going on for some time. How many potential reactivations did they lose? Overall, I’d consider Shop.org’s reactivation campaign a raving success. Well done Shop.org!

Engagement is no longer simply about getting a recipient to respond. Campaigns with engaged recipients are campaigns that have good delivery. Senders who ignore recipient preferences more and more see their mail trapped in a maze of delivery problems. Send good mail that recipients want and delivery problems melt away.

1 Comment

Marketers missing out

Published
by
laura
05Jun
in Best Practices and Industry
.

Many delivery blogs have posted about the recent ReturnPath study showing that marketers are missing prime opportunities to use email to develop a strong relationship with recipients. I finally manged to get a few moments to read through the study and comment on it. Over a few days in February ReturnPath researchers signed up at more than 60 major retailer brands. They then monitored the subscriptions to see how often and what kind of mail the retailers sent.

Overall, it seems the researchers were disappointed in how the retailers were using mail. Even the title of the whitepaper captures this feeling: “Creating Great Subscriber Experiences: Are Marketers Relationship Worthy?” The answer seems to be more no than yes.

From my perspective the data is not all that surprising. In many cases it seems bigger companies rely on the recognition of their brand to get them through minor delivery problems (like complaints) rather than good practices. Whereas a smaller company will have to work harder to develop a relationship, larger companies with wide brand recognition can fall back on their brand.

There were a few areas ReturnPath measured.

  1. How many companies sent welcome messages?
  2. How soon did recipients start receiving email?
  3. How did companies use information collected during the subscription process to personalize email?

Most other people commenting on the study have focused on the fact that 60% of mailers did not send a welcome message and 30% do not send any mail within the 30 days of the study. Basic, basic best practices here. Send a welcome message! This is a sender’s opportunity to touch the customer. Good marketers set recipients them up to expect future, high value messages. Really good marketers include information like how to modify subscription settings and what address future messages will come from - along with instructions on how to add that address to the recipients address book. ReturnPath points out Kraft as a good example of a mailer using that welcome message to start the relationship.

[Kraft's] welcome message included a personalized greeting and a recipe based on the subscriber’s expressed preferences. They also include “white listing” instructions along with information on what to expect from future emails.

In the 30 days of the study, 30% of the retailers failed to send any email. I can guarantee you that in 60 or 90 days, when the retailer finally gets around to mailing, a significant percentage of recipients will forget they signed up for the mail. Some of those recipients will hit the “this is spam” button. This is a missed opportunity and ReturnPath pulls no punches about how bad it is to ignore it.

They’ve asked you to market to them! They’ve made themselves vulnerable, and now they want acknowledgment, even gratitude. You can’t put off making a connection. If you aren’t well on your way to building a relationship within a month your subscriber may have forgotten that they registered.

One of the most interesting parts of the study to me, and one many others have not commented on, was the analysis of the information retailers collect and then do not use. Only 25% of the companies who sent routine emails within 30 days actually used the information they collected from the recipients to personalize the messages. The others did not even use subscriber names in outgoing mail.

Taken as a whole, marketers lost a major opportunity to engage their subscribers through early personalization. Fifty-six percent of marketers who sent welcome messages had the data to personalize them, but only 13 percent sent personalized welcome emails.

This is where the market is going. Senders MUST learn to step up and uphold their end of the sender - recipient relationship. Personalized email is a small way to connect with subscribers, even something as simple as a name will help the recipient feel as if the relationship is two way. Recipients want to know sender sees them as more than an email address, but actually as a valuable customer.

0 Comments

Disposable or Temporary Addresses

Published
by
laura
20May
in Best Practices
.

Mark Brownlow has a really good post up today about disposable and temporary addresses and how they affect marketers trying to build an opt-in list.

I use tagged addresses for all my signups, and have for more than 10 years now. It lets me track who I gave an address to and if this mail is contrary to what I signed up for or the address has leaked, I can shut down mail to that address entirely.

Tagged addresses also have another function. One of our local brew pubs has a rewards program, spend money there, get points. As part of the signup process, they requested an email address. All the email I have received from them has been clearly branded, well designed, they are an example of how to use email right. That is until last week. Last week I received an email to the tagged address from some survey company. The survey company provided no branding, nothing.

Dear Passport Member

As a valued member of our passport program, your opinion is extremely important to us.  We are constantly looking to improve our menu offerings, passport privileges and manner in which we serve our most treasured guests.

Simply fill out the following survey and we will award you a bonus of 200 points within 2 weeks of completion.  Deadline to complete the survey is May 19th.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts about our program and how we can serve you even better in the future.

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/XXXXXX

My first thought was that our local brew pub somehow leaked my information out and I was getting some weird phishing or tracking spam. After a bit of examination and looking at the survey (again, not branded and with HTML looking like it was done in 1997) I did realize that this was probably a real survey commissioned by the brewpub and outsourced to someone else who executed it badly.

Recipients signing up to lists with tagged or disposable email address can be some of the most savvy customers. If marketing and emails are done well, this kind of customer can be a bonus. If marketing and emails are done poorly, the subscriber will leave.

1 Comment

Recent comments

Published
by
laura
16May
in Industry
.

On my followup EEC post Tamara comments

The eec made a really bad and ugly mistake but you can take my word for it that they have learned from it and that it will not happen again. I am not going to blog about this because I really do believe in the value of the EEC and what it brings to the industry. It’s okay to call out a mistake, but do you really need to destroy an organization that is so worthwile?

Just to be clear I had not heard of the EEC before this and when the story broke I blew it off as no big deal, some organization did something stupid and spammed. It was only after I did a little research that I realized this was THE organization that was supposed to be leading the pack in email marketing. They are

[...] a global professional organization that strives to enhance the image of email marketing and communications, while celebrating and actively advocating its critical importance in business, and its ROI value.

And, yet, they send mail that was perceived by many of their recipients as spam. While I have not seen copies of the mail, two posters commented that the mail did not comply with CAN SPAM. One of those said there was no opt-out link. Putting aside any of the permission or relevancy questions, if this is true then it takes it from a bad idea to illegal activity. How does this organization maintain any credibility as a leader in the email marketing space?

As for the negative comments, I fully expect that if Word to the Wise pulled something like this, there would be a lot of negativity and people holding us accountable for our actions. I do not see with the EEC should expect anything different from their base.

There was a funny comment from EEC Member pointing out that the EEC had brought us standardization of the spelling of email.

On my Email non-viable for acquisition post, Josh disagreed. He says

I think saying that “email is not viable for customer acquisition” might be too broad of a statement. I wouldn’t have any problem with “Purchasing lists is not viable for customer acquisition.”

I think his point is well taken. There are places where you buy a mailing, or buy an advertisement and that does drive acquisition as well as sales. I am still wary of using email for acquisition as most of the companies who come to me with that business model mean purchasing lists or co-reg when they say acquisition.

There have been a number of comments about Postini. Jay Levitt had a couple of comments that sum up the frustration that many of us have had with Postini.

I too tried to get a human at Postini. I took three different back-channel routes to get there. They all landed at the same person - apparently the one guy who sends out “we’re not responsible no matter what” form letters to anyone who writes to Postini. He told me, and I can’t make this up:

Postini was scoring my e-mails as “spammy” because Postini had previously scored my e-mails as spammy.

Dennis also commented about Postini:

I was told that if you take a document originally typed on an application such as MS Word and then copy and paste this into the marketing e-mail it gives it funky html code that for some reason gives your e-mail a lower score in Postini.

Cutting and pasting from MS Word has a myriad of problems, not just Postini delivery. One thing I emphasize with my clients is that their email structure must be clean and standards compliant. So many spammers out there are using badly formatted HTML mails, that the ISPs are looking at the technical structure of your email and using that as part of their filtering decisions. This confirmation from Postini only reinforces that.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

0 Comments

Email non-viable for acquisition

Published
by
laura
13May
in Best Practices
.

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

2 Comments

EEC shows how not to send email

Published
by
laura
07May
in Industry
.

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.

5 Comments

Signup forms and bad data

Published
by
laura
16Apr
in Best Practices
.

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.

1 Comment