Social media connections are not opt-ins

It seems silly to have to say this, but connecting on social media is not permission to add an address to your newsletter or mailing list or prospecting list or spam list. Back in 2016, I wrote:

[Scraping addresses from LinkedIn] is really rude. Just because someone accepted your contact request on LinkedIn, doesn’t mean they want to be added to any mailing lists you may have. Let’s be honest, some people have hundreds or thousands of LinkedIn contacts. They’re not going to want to get mail from all of them.
This behavior risks your ESP account. I know of ESPs who have disconnected customers for importing all their LinkedIn contacts. Harvesting Addresses from LinkedIn


In that blog post I wrote a number of suggestions for how to screen LinkedIn connections before sending them mail.

  1. Not everyone will necessarily be happy to receive this mail from you. Consider how closely you are connected with the person. Ask yourself: Would this person appreciate a commercial email from me or my company? If you don’t know the person well enough, then it’s likely that the answer will be no. Put a little time and energy into making sure that your message is going to be wanted. If that means dropping people you’re not sure about off your contact list, then do it.
  2. Consider sending out personal mails, not importing the email addresses into your CRM system or sending them out through your ESP. Don’t make the message look like a mass mailing. This is a social network, make your contact actually social.
  3. Think about what YOU are bringing to the relationship with the recipient. Are you actually offering them any value? With the Christmas card I received the  message was “Our company is wonderful! We love ourselves. And we think we’re so great we’re going to send out this card telling you how we’re not sending out Christmas cards this year!” In Al’s case the message was adding him to a mailing list. In both cases, neither of us cared. There was nothing in it for us.
  4. If you want to announce a product and or service use the tools provided by the social networking service. LinkedIn has InMail, which allows recipients to set their contact preferences and mail through their system.
  5. If recipients object to your email, arguing with them is never helpful. You’re not going to convince them the mail is wanted, you’re just going to convince them that you’re an unrepentant spammer. Apologize, learn from it, move on.

Those are all still reasonable suggestions, ones that I’d offer to anyone who asked. But all those suggestions do is minimize the chance that the sender will get into trouble for sending spam. The fact is harvesting addresses and sending mail to them is spamming. Even if it’s B2B mail it’s still spam. Because it’s spam, even if you do everything I recommend you risk having some of those recipients object to the mail. Folks who object may complain to your ESP, they may disconnect from you on LinkedIn, they may block all future mail from your company, they may even convince their company to never do business with you. All of these are actual consequences I’ve seen happen.
When the sender is using a reputable ESP, the risks are even bigger. I also know of multiple cases where complaints resulted in the ESP disconnecting the customer for AUP violations. This is not something you want to happen.
B2B spam is still spam, and it’s not OK. Don’t be a spammer. Social media is called social for a reason.

Still with the Microsoft problems
Collecting email addresses

Related Posts

Appending in a nutshell

A few months ago a colleague sent me, and every other person on his overly large LinkedIn list, an email looking for some help hiring. It starts off with “Greetings LinkedI Connections” and ends with… an unsubscribe link.

Read More

Spamming ESPs

In my mailbox there is a definite uptick in spam from ESPs advertising their services.
Today’s email was from a company that has the following in their anti-spam policy:

Read More

July 2017: The month in email

August is here, and as usual, we’re discussing spam, permissions, bots, filters, delivery challenges, and best practices.

One of the things we see over and over again, both with marketers and with companies that send us email, is that permission is rarely binary — companies want a fair amount of wiggle room, or “implied permission” to send. There are plenty of examples of how companies try to dance around clear permissions, such as this opt form from a company we used to do business with. But there are lots of questions here: can you legitimately mail to addresses you haven’t interacted with in 5 years? 10 years? What’s the best way to re-engage, if at all?
We frequently get questions about how to address deliverability challenges, and I wrote up a post about some of the steps we take as we help our clients with this. These are short-term fixes; for long-term success, the most effective strategy is sending email that people want and expect. Engagement is always at the core of a sustainable email program.
We’ve also discussed the rise of B2B spam, and the ways in which marketing technologies contribute to the problem. B2B marketers struggle to use social and email channels appropriately to reach customers and prospects, but still need to be thoughtful about how they do it. I also wrote about some of the ways that marketing automation plugins facilitate spam and how companies should step up to address the problem. Here’s an example of what happens when the automation plugins go awry.
I wrote a few posts about domain management and the implications for security and fraud. The first was about how cousin domain names can set users up for phishing and fraud, and the second was a useful checklist for looking at your company’s domain management. We also looked at abuse across online communities, which is an increasing problem and one we’re very committed to fighting.
I also highlighted a few best practices this month: guidelines for choosing a new ESP and active buttons in the subject line for Gmail.
And finally, we celebrated the 80th birthday of the original SPAM. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know why unwanted email is called SPAM, but just in case, here’s a refresher….

Read More