Permission, Part 2

Permission Part 1 I talked about the definition of permission as I use it. Before we can talk about how to get permission we need to clarify the type of email that we’re talking about in this post. Specifically, I’m talking about marketing and newsletter email, not transactional email or other kinds of email a company may send to recipients. Also, when I talk about lists I include segments of a database that fit marketing criteria as well as specific list of email addresses.
There are two ways that recipients give permission to receive newsletters or marketing email, explicit permission and implicit permission. Recipients give explicit permission to receive marketing email when they sign up for such email. Implicit permission covers situations where a user provides an email address, either during the course of a purchase, a download or other interaction with a company. There may be some language in the company’s privacy policy explaining that recipients may receive marketing email, but the recipient may not be aware they will receive email.
The easier situation is explicit permission. There are two basic ways a company can gather explicit permission to send marketing email: single opt-in and double (confirmed) opt-in.
Single opt-in: Recipient provides an email address to the sender for the express purpose of receiving marketing email.
Double (or confirmed) opt-in: Recipient provides an email address to the sender for the express purpose of receiving marketing email. The sender then sends an initial email to the recipient that requires a positive action on the part of the recipient (click a link, log into a web page or reply to the email) before the address is added to the sender’s list.
There can be problems with both types of opt-in, but barring fake or typoed email addresses being given to the sender, there is an social contract that the sender will send email to the recipient. I’ll talk about single and double opt-in in later posts.
Implicit permission covers a lot of situations where email is commonly sent in response to a recipient giving the sender and email address. In these cases, though, the recipient may not be aware they are consenting to receive email. This behavior may annoy recipients as well as causing delivery problems for the sender. Common cases of implicit permission include website registration, product purchase and free downloads.
More responsible companies often change implicit opt-in to explicit opt-in. They do this by making it clear to users that they are agreeing to receive email at the point where the user gives the company an email address. Not only is the information about how email addresses will be used in the company’s privacy policy, but there is a clear and conspicuous notice at the point where the user must provide their email address. The recipient knows what the sender will do with the email address and is given the opportunity to express their preferences. If users do agree to receive email, the company will send a message to that recipient with relevant information about how their email address will be used, how often they will receive email and how they can opt-out.
Explicit opt-in is the best practice for building a list, however, there are still companies that successfully use implicit opt-in to build marketing lists. Companies successfully using implicit opt in usually are collecting emails as part of a sales transaction. There is very little incentive for their customers to give them an email address not belonging to the customer.
Outside of purchasers, however, implicit opt-in leaves a company open to getting email addresses that do not actually belong to the person providing the company with the email address. This most often occurs when the sender is providing some service, be it software downloads, music or access to content, in return for a “payment” of a valid email address. In order to protect against users inputting other, valid addresses into the form, the sender must verify that the address actually belongs to their user before sending any sort of marketing email. The easiest way for senders to do this is to send a link to the recipient email. This link can be the download link, or the password to get to restricted content. Because the recipient must be able to receive and act on email, the only addresses the sender has belong to actual users of the site.
In some rare cases, implicit opt-in can be used to build a list that performs well. However, senders must be aware of the risks of annoying their customer base and the recipient ISPs. Mitigating these risks can be done, but it often takes more effort than just using explicit opt-in in the first place.

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Solving delivery problems

“The only solution to our delivery problems isn’t double opt-in, is it?” A question I get quite frequently from clients and potential clients. In the vast majority of cases the answer is no, confirmed (double) opt-in [1] is not the only solution to delivery problems. In fact, there are delivery issues that confirmed opt-in will do nothing to solve.
Many other delivery sites and deliverability experts will tell clients that the solution to their deliverability problems is to switch to confirmed opt-in as a method to collect email addresses. This overly simplistic solution only treats one possible source of delivery problems, the collection of addresses. It does not address data hygiene issues, technical delivery issues or complaints.
While address collection is important, the best address collection processes on the planet cannot fix sloppy data handling, failure to unsubscribe recipients, or non-existent bounce handling. All of these factors play a role in delivery. It is critical to identify the underlying source of delivery problems before advising anyone on how to fix it.
Over the course of the next few blog posts, I am going to take a look at the various issues that affect delivery: permission, data hygiene, bounce handling, complaints and authentication. I’ll talk about what is important and what senders need to look for and be aware of when they’re trying to troubleshoot delivery issues.
[1] There is some disagreement between senders and anti-spammers about the correct terminology to use. Senders use double opt-in to describe the process, anti-spammers use confirmed opt-in. I am using both terms here to mean the same process.

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Permission, Part 1

Before I can talk about permission and how a mailer can collect permission from a recipient to send them email I really need to define what I mean by permission as there are multiple definitions used by various players in the market. Permission marketing was a term coined by Seth Godin in his book entitled Permission Marketing.
The underlying concept beneath permission marketing is that all marketing should be “anticipated, personal and relevant.” Others have defined permission marketing as consumers volunteering or requesting to be marketed to.
When I talk about permission in the email marketing context I mean that the recipient understood *at the time they provided the sender with an email address* that they would receive email from that sender as a result.
Let’s look at some of the relevant parts of that definition.

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IP Reputation Portability

Matt posted a discussion of the portability of IP reputation over at his EmailKarma blog.
I have heard about Hotmail/MSN’s claim that if you add your new IPs to your SPF/SenderID record and send from your old IPs that your old IP reputation will transfer to your new IPs. I’ve not heard it working in practice, but it really can’t hurt to add your new IPs to your records as soon as you know what they are.

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