I disagree. Appending, and other non-permission based sending cause a lot of costs to trickle down on the ESP. Many of the large ESPs have teams of 8 or 10 people working to manage delivery, deal with blocks and keep the mail flowing. In fact, I once had a client say “We want to be as clean as ExactTarget” only to choke when I told them how many people are on the compliance and delivery team at ET.

That’s not even looking at the cost of a SBL listing. One company estimated the cost of a slightly less than 24 hour block at over $1,000,000 in lost opportunity costs and in actual staff costs to deal with the listing. I know of one Fortune 20 company who had to re-engineer their entire customer and prospect databases due to a blocklist. And, yeah, that one was actually due to an append. They did an append and the append not only added a “new” address to a record where the person had previously opted out, but that person worked at a major spam filtering company. They experienced a whole world of very expensive pain.

Many ESPs are actually making a sound business decision by refusing to deal with non-permission mail, whether it be a purchased list or an appended list. The sender does not have permission to send to the addresses. That causes all sorts of delivery problems, which costs the ESPs lots of money and staff time to deal with. Most marketers won’t actually pay for the resources they use when appending or buying lists. Then they blame the ESP when their mail ends up in the bulk folder or is blocked outright.

I don’t think many marketers fully integrate the cost of dealing with a poor list into their decisions. My tweet from earlier today “If you have to “ignore all the costs associated with complaints” to find a positive ROI on opt-out mail, is there really a positive ROI? is a paraphrase of one of the things I heard.

ESPs can’t avoid those costs, they’re stuck with them. Lowering those costs by requiring senders to only send to recipients who have given permission is a smart business decision. Marketers don’t pay those costs, but if they even acknowledged them I suspect that there would be a whole lot less sloppy email marketing.

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?

Despite the evidence that correctly setting expectations results in better delivery and higher ROI on lists some senders go out of their way to hide terms from recipients. I’ve heard many of those types of comments over the years.

If we tell recipients how often we’re going to mail them, we don’t think they’ll opt-in.

If you mail people, even those who have opted in, more than they want to be mailed, then they’re going to complain or ignore your mail. And that results in poor delivery. If you’re mailing so much even you think it’s going to drive subscribers away then maybe you need to re-think your email program.

They opted in at one point, and even though they opted out, we thought that they’d be interested in these other things we’d like to sell them.

No, the recipient opted out. An opt-out should be persistent. You cannot arbitrarily decide to opt your unsubscribes back into a new list. That’s going to cause you problems, either with your ESP or your subscribers or both.

We don’t care if the addresses don’t belong to the people who submit them, we’ll just mail those addresses anyway.

If you mail addresses that belong to people who never opted in to your mail, then you’re spamming. There are certain lists that are targets for this kind of abuse, usually partisan or highly political lists. That just means that the senders need to be even more careful about their subscription policies and setting expectations. Failure to do so results in delivery problems at major ISPs.

Setting expectations and listening to recipients is a vital part of successful delivery. Your recipients are your best allies in getting mail delivered to the inbox. Trying to deceive them or second guess their desires leads to diminished returns. Not only are you spending more money and time in strategy, but the more complex the system the less likely it is to be right.

Be clear. Be honest. Be recipient friendly.

Many of these are explanations of why email marketing is so awesome. Some of them are out and out laugh inducing. One of my favorites, and the inspiration for this post.

email marketing is great specially if you have a large list of email address of potential customers`”-

I mean, I know that spammers just fire up their comment spam engines and don’t bother to actually read the blog or even look at the content. But I still get somewhat offended? peevish? amused? when the blog spammers try and spam their email spam engines and large lists of “opt in” email addresses on my blog.

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of spam. I am going to just mindlessly blast out a message in the hopes that somehow, somewhere, someone will get my message and send me money.

My frustration is that so many legitimate email marketers also send out email in a single ‘batch and blast’ with the hope that a few recipients will make a purchase. These marketers treat recipients as a commodity that exist solely for the marketer to exploit for money. They hate the fact that recipients have a way to complain about email. They complain about ISP standards that are too high and prioritize what recipients want to receive over what marketers want to send.

This isn’t what email is about. I don’t think I’ve made any secret about how much I value email and everything it’s done for me. Email is the original social network and one that, without exaggeration, changed my career path and my life. I want the people who come after me to have as good an experience. I want them to be able to use email for everything they want to do with it: communicate with friends, interact with companies, learn about stuff and share everything they want to in the way they want to.

If you want to be successful, long term, as an email marketer then you need to start listening to what your recipients want and stop thinking mindless blasts are the secrets to success.

One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when they get unsolicited email from a company they have interacted with.

We decide who we think may want to hear from us. The decision is not scientific, we just look at their profile and add them if we see fit. If someone in Sales gets a contact name and someone in Marketing ends up contacting that person, we’ve usually done our homework and know a bit about why we’re attempting to contact said person.

Fundamentally, though, it’s not about the sender. It’s all about the recipient.

It’s certainly possible that the company above actually considers the recipient and really are trying to send mail only to those folks who want it. But, the vast majority of companies who preach “opt-out” aren’t putting that much time or thought into the decision of whether or not to send mail to a particular recipient. If they get an email address, they add that address to marketing lists and commence sending mail.

One to one mail is OK and can be done on an opt-out basis. This is particularly true when a potential customer gives you an email address and asks for more information. But bulk email on an opt-out basis quickly overwhelms the recipient and their mailbox. An overflowing mailbox does not lead to receptive customers. Respect your contacts, respect their time and their space and don’t add them to newsletters or email marketing lists without their permission.

She mixes in potential customers providing business cards to an exhibitor at a trade show with current customers that are using a product. She promotes businesses using opt-out as a default communication practice, but then talks about giving customers preference centers to manage the contact.

Overall, it was a very confusing article.

For instance the author says:

Many B2B marketers abide by a [opt-in only] policy, but they don’t have to — and shouldn’t. In fact, I’d argue, your business customers generally would prefer the reverse: an opt-out arrangement in which you send them messages unless they say “stop.”

Of course, the author then completely negates her own point by pointing out how businesses collect email addresses from customers and provide preference centers so that the recipients can control the communication center.

[T]he gold standard of business communications permissions today is to offer a choice to customers, like a web-based form that allows them to indicate their preferences. Let them choose the media channels they prefer and how often they want to hear from you. Allow them to change their preferences at any time. And above all, comply with their requests.

I dunno, that sounds pretty opt-in in practice to me. Once you get to the point of collecting email addresses from actual, paying customers, and implement them a preference center then I’m finding it hard to see how that is opt-out.

What a lot of other readers focused on and objected to is her example of collecting business cards at a trade show.

Consider this scenario: Say you attend a trade show and exchange business cards with an exhibitor. Does that exhibitor have permission to contact you by email? Of course. You fully expect to receive email (or phone, or postal mail) follow-up. That’s how you stay informed, build relationships, and do your job.

Many of us have had horrible experiences with over aggressive marketers collecting business cards and then adding us to marketing lists. A followup email or phone call is absolutely expected. An invite to join a mailing list? That’s not opt-out and is a fine practice. Adding every business card you find to your marketing list? That’s a major no-no and the only practice I’d consider opt-out here.

I am pleased to see the number of email marketing folks that commented at hbr.org, and on DJ Waldow’s post at Bronto blog arguing that opt-out was bad and even B2B marketers needed to use opt-in. But when I went back to the article to draft this post I couldn’t find where the author actually talked about opt-out marketing except when she said all businesses should use opt-out marketing. All of her examples involved users giving vendors their email addresses. How is that opt-out?

Anyone who doesn’t want our mail will opt-out.

Most people don’t opt-out.

Therefore, most people want our mail.

This clearly fallacious reasoning is something I deal with frequently with my clients, particularly those who come to me for reputation repair. They can’t understand why people are calling them spammers, because their unsubscribe rates and complaint rates are very low. The low complaints and unsubscribes must mean their mail is wanted. Unfortunately, the email marketers’ syllogism leads them to faulty conclusions.

There are many reasons people don’t opt-out of mail they don’t want. Some of it may be practical, the mail never hits their inbox, either due to ISP level filters or their own personal filters. Some people take a stance that they do not opt out of mail they did not opt-in to and if they don’t recognize the company, they won’t opt-out.

In any case, low levels of opt-outs or even this-is-spam hits does not mean that recipients want that mail. The sooner marketers figure this out, the better for them and their delivery.