The article looks at opens, clicks and click through rates over 7 quarters (Q1 – Q4 2010; Q1 – Q3 2011) covering 330 million emails. I strongly suggest anyone interested go read the whole article.

The short version, though, is that the opt-in lists had more opens and more clicks than the opt-out lists. In some quarters it was double the number of opens and clicks.

This data is a strong indication that opt-in lists perform much better than even the best opt-out lists.

Are you sure?

I recently used the contact form belonging to a marketing company to inform them that someone had stolen my email address from their database and I was receiving spam to the address only they had.

They had an opt-out link on the form, allowing me to opt-out of personal contact and a demo of their product. But that opt-out didn’t translate to not adding me to their marketing list.

When I contacted the person who was talking with me about the address leak, he told me it was the contact form that led to my address ending up on their marketing list. I asked, just to make sure, if I did remember to check the opt-out link. He confirmed I had, but there was an oversight when they updated their contact page and there was no opt-out for marketing mail.

I believe that the majority of delivery problems for real companies that “only send mail with permission” come from these types of oversights. The biggest problem with these oversights is how long they can go on until companies notice the effect. With the overall  focus on aggregate delivery statistics (complaint rates, bounces, etc) oversights like this aren’t noticed until they cause some massive problem, like a SBL listing or a block at a major ISP.

The company involved in this most recent incident was very responsive to my contact and immediately corrected the oversight. But there are other companies that don’t notice or respond to the notifications individuals send. This leads to resentment and frustration on the part of the recipient.

Every company should have at least one person who can account for every address on their marketing list. Who is that person at your company?

The interesting bit is this:

3) Banning pre-ticked boxes on websites

When shopping online – for instance buying a plane ticket – you may be offered additional options during the purchase process, such as travel insurance or car rental. These additional services may be offered through so-called ‘pre-ticked’ boxes. Consumers are currently often forced to untick those boxes if they do not want these extra services. With the new Directive, pre-ticked boxes will be banned across the European Union.

Yesterday, a bunch of people noticed that Yahoo was blocking mail containing references to a protest against Wall Street. This understandably upset people who were trying to use email as a communication medium. Many people decided it was Yahoo (a tool of the elites!) attempting to censor their speech and stop them from organizing a protest.

Yeah. Not so much.

Yahoo looked into it and reported that the mail had gotten caught in their spam filters. Yahoo adjusted their filters to let the mail through and all was (mostly) good.

I don’t think this is actually a sign of filters being broken. The blocked mail all contained a URL pointing to a occupywallst.com. I know there was a lot of speculation about what was being blocked, but sources tell me it was the actual domain. Not the phrase, not the text, the domain.

The domain was in a lot of mostly identical mail coming out of individual email accounts. This is a current hallmark of hijacked accounts. Spammers compromise thousands of email accounts, and send a few emails out of each of them. Each email is mostly identical and points to the same URL. Just like the protest mail.

There was also a lot of bulk mail being sent with that URL in it. I’ve been talking to friends who have access to traps, and they were seeing a lot of mail mentioning occupywallst.com in their traps. This isn’t surprising, political groups have some horrible hygiene. They are sloppy with acquisition, they trade names and addresses like kids trade cold germs, they never expire anything out. It’s just not how politics is played. And it’s not one party or another, it’s all of them. I’ve consulted with major names across the political spectrum, and none actually implement best practices.

As I have often said the secret to delivery is to not have your mail look like spam. In this case, the mail looked like spam. In fact, it looked like spam that was coming from hijacked accounts as well as spam sent by large bulk mailers. I suspect there was also a high complaint rate as people sent it to friends and family who really didn’t want to hear about the protests.

To Yahoo!’s credit, though, someone on staff was on top of things. They looked into the issue and the filter was lifted within a couple hours of the first blog post. A human intervened, overruled the algorithm and let the mail out.

I bet this is one of the few times anyone has seen that Yahoo does outbound filtering. Given it’s a politically charged situation, I can see why they assume that Yahoo is filtering because of politics and censorship. They weren’t though.

More on politics, filtering and censorship.

They’re not blocking you because they hate you
It really can be your email
More on Truthout
Another perspective on the politico article

And I’m not talking about going to a particular retailer and saying “change my email address” I’m talking about using one of the companies that offer email change of address as a service. Where do they get their names and email addresses? I sure don’t know.

How many readers have actually purchased an email change of address service for one of your mailing lists? Do you know where the addresses came from?

I’m wondering how many people buy email change of address services, but have zero clue how to sign up for them. I mean, I know, you can go to FreshAddress or Experian and get ECOA services. But I don’t know how to tell either of them that I want to be included in their ECOA services.

So how do consumers get to be on a change of address list? And how opt-in is their participation?

One reason I ask is that a number of my clients have stumbled into serious delivery problems recently. Investigation generally points back to the ECOA service they used. So I’m wondering how actively and knowingly consumers are using ECOA services.

As an anti-spammer with the idea that it’s all about consent, I can see his point. Anti-spammers, for years, have chanted the mantra: “it’s about consent, not content.” Which is a short, pithy way to say they don’t care what you send people, as long as the recipients themselves have asked for it.

This is the perfect bumper sticker policy. As with most bumper sticker policies, though, it’s too short to deal with the messy realities.

I’m not knocking consent. Consent is great. Every bulk mailer should only be sending mail to people who have asked or agreed to receive that mail.

But if your focus is on delivery and getting mail to the recipient’s inbox and getting the recipient to react to that mail then you can’t just fall back on consent. You have to send them mail that they expect. You have to send them mail that they like. You have to send them mail they will open, read and interact with.

If your permission based recipients are saying they forgot that they signed up for mail, that is a sign that the sender’s program is futile. These are people who, at one point or another, actually asked to receive mail from a sender, and then the mail they receive is so unremarkable that they totally forget about the sender.

Maybe that’s another reason the question “are you sure you didn’t forget you opted in” from clients bothers me so much. If I signed up and forgot that points to problems in your program, mostly that it’s totally unremarkable and your subscribers can forget.

I get a lot of spam. I get a lot of spam to addresses that aren’t used to sign up for mail. But it seems inevitable that when I bring up examples of receiving spam I inevitably get asked, “Are you sure you didn’t opt-in?”

On one level I can understand the question when I send in a complaint to an abuse desk and they’re dealing with a customer who swears all their mail is opt-in. It makes sense when an ESP is working to identify what may have happened so they can correct their customers’ behaviour.

But when it’s a client who has hired me to investigate their email delivery problems and I provide examples of spam sent to me? Why, WHY would I lie to you? Why would I claim I’m getting spam if I wasn’t? What use is that? How does me forgetting I subscribed actually help fix your delivery?

And even if I did forget, shouldn’t that be a sign that maybe there is some issue with your mail program that people sign up and forget?

I am not sure what causes clients to think I would tell them they’re spamming me when they’re really not. I certainly do tell clients when I opt-in and enjoy their mail while offering advice on how to improve their marketing program. I’m not sure what’s going through their heads when I say, “Oh, you (or your affiliate) is sending me a lot of spam,” that prompts them to ask, “Are you sure you didn’t opt-in?”

How do you gently educate one’s customers or employer to use permission-based marketing?

Ken published the responses in his Tuesday newsletter. For a number of reasons I didn’t participate in the conversation, but I’ve been thinking about the question a lot. How do I evangelize permission? Do I evangelize permission?

I wrote down a few of the things I’ve done to where permission has been part of the conversation in the last 14 years.

• I’ve talked with hundreds of big and small companies privately about permission and sending only opt-in email.
• I’ve publicly commented on permission to the FTC.
• I’ve participated in private discussions between spammers and anti-spammers searching for that middle ground.
• I’ve participated in public discussions on policy and delivery.
• I’ve worked with dozens of Spamhaus listees to clean up their permission practices and get them delisted.
• I’ve worked an abuse desk for a large network provider.
• I’ve consulted for some of the worst ROKSO spammers out there.
• I’ve evangelized to large companies who think their mail can’t be spam.
• I’ve worked with small entrepreneurs who just wanted to use email to talk to their customers and investors.
• I’ve worked with companies that send me email to fix some of their minor bobbles in practice.
• I’ve blogged for years on email delivery and permission.

Permission weaves its way through almost every conversation I have about email and delivery. But it’s not the sole thing I focus on when dealing with customers. What I really evangelize, rather than permission, is that a successful email marketing program is based on sending mail people want. Having permission from the recipient makes it oh so much easier to send mail those recipients want and are actively engaged in.

When working with clients to fix a delivery problem or just teach them about mail delivery, I don’t say a lot about permission. I talk more about mail people want and mail people expect and mail people are engaged with. Permission is but a small part of accomplishing all of those things. Mailers who focus solely on the technical specifics of permission “They checked the box!” or “But they gave me their email address!” often face many of the same delivery challenges as mailers who buy guaranteed opt-in lists from the broker down the street.

Mail delivery is not just about the buzzword ‘permission’. Rather it’s about a much broader, much more complex model of the relationship between email senders, ISPs, recipients and the rest of the email ecosystem. ‘Permission’ is a part of that, but just a part.

Many people, including some of the Only Influencers participants, want a very simple description of the world and a list of rules to follow and checkboxes to tick that mean they’re doing things right. But reality is much more complex than that, and more complex than you can sum up in a couple of buzzwords or checkboxes.

What worked today won’t work tomorrow. Spammers are forever evolving new techniques to get past spam filters. ISPs are forever evolving new techniques to stop them.

One of the current driving forces for spam filter development is focused on the individual recipients. Recipient wants and needs are king in the world of ISP mail filtering. Much of that is driven by the underlying business models of the free ISPs. They are selling eyeballs to their advertisers and that relies on keeping as many eyeballs around for as long as possible.

An early version of the recipient driven filtering was “add to your address book” where individual users could over ride ISP delivery decisions by actively adding a From: address to their address book. The ISPs have been refining this over time. For instance, if you reply to an email in some clients, you are prompted to add that address to your address books. If you take an email out of your bulk folder and move it to your inbox then that address is automatically added to your address book.

But the refinements haven’t stopped there. ISPs are now making smart decisions about what emails a particular recipient will want to receive. This raises a number of challenges to senders. How do you send email to ten thousand or a hundred thousand or a million people and make it relevant to all of them?

Smart senders will take the individual delivery challenge in stride. They will change along with the ISPs, to send mail that their recipients want to receive. Change is inevitable and required.

Well. Maybe. But not always. Think about the person who shops online during the holidays. I visit a lot of places looking for gifts for other people. These aren’t places I’d normally shop for myself, and are not places that have things I’m interested in. This means I don’t really have, or want, an ongoing relationship with them.

So for those of you that think they’ve found a new customer because I made a purchase this Christmas, I’d just like to say: Not so much. I mean, yeah, you have the perfect gift for my mother this year. Or that appropriately tacky bit of Vette swag for my dad. But, really, I just want to buy the gift and have it shipped. I don’t want an ongoing customer relationship with you. In fact, I really never want to hear from you again.

Some online retailers are polite and treat purchasers with respect. They allow guest checkouts and don’t require tons of personal information and account creation for a purchase. They even let you opt-out of being added to their mailing list at the time of purchase. Other retailers require the full registration process (you need to know my marital status? so I can buy a gift for my dad? what?) and don’t offer an opt-out during the checkout process. Instead, you infer I want your mail and make me opt-out after the fact.

Making a purchase doesn’t constitute permission. Sometimes retailers can get away with it because when I’m making a purchase for me I might be interested in more mail from you. When I’m making a purchase for someone else, though, there is no long term relationship to be developed.

Sure, with the right campaign you may be able to convert one of those purchasers into a returning purchaser. But without a carefully planned and executed conversion campaign you may lose more future customers than you convert.