Yesterday I had a call with a potential new client. She told me she had a list of 4M Yahoo addresses and she wanted to mail them twice a day. Her biggest concern was that this volume would be too much for Yahoo and her mail would be block solely on volume. As we went through the conversation, she commented that this list is also being used by someone else she knows and they were getting inbox delivery at Yahoo on every mailing.
From other bits of the conversation, I suspect that these are not the only two people using this list, but I have no feel for the volume. But how much email is each person on that list receiving a day?
I have a current client who is in a similar field to the above potential client. I signed up for their list back in December. Since then I have received 1728 emails to the address I used on their site. 4 of those emails have actually been from my clients, the rest were stolen by a partner of theirs and sold off to all sorts of mailers. Yesterday I received 40 emails.
I just cannot see how this is a valid, long term business model. The bulk of these mails are advertising payday and other kinds of loans. Some of them are duplicate offers from the same senders (judged by CAN SPAM addresses) using different From: lines. The mailbox these mails are filtered into is completely useless, it has been swamped by loan offers. I cannot imagine that anyone, even someone looking for a loan, is receptive to this much email. The only thing I can figure is that the mailers believe that if their email is the one at the top of the mailbox at the exact moment the recipient gets most desperate for money in their bank account tomorrow they will make the sale and get paid.
This model is going to be less and less viable as time goes on.
On the permission level, there really is no permission associated with that email address. Sure, I could call up the former client of mine who mailed that address today and challenge them to show me where they got the address and they would probably tell me they bought it from that company over there. But when I submitted my email address to my client’s site, I did not expect to receive offers for Mickey Mouse Collectible Watches. It certainly is not what I signed up for.
Not only is the permission tenuous, but ISPs are moving away from a permission based model for access to their subscribers. What they really care about now is how recipients react to email. An email marketing model based on getting as much email in front of the recipient as possible will be harder and harder to be profitable as ISPs get better at measuring how much their subscribers want email. The mailers who get good delivery are those are able to make the mail interesting, wanted and relevant to recipients.
It is difficult for me to imagine a case where you can make 2 emails a day relevant to 4 million recipients.
How much mail?
H
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You leave us hanging…
Did this prospect become a client? I truly hope not, and that you took a stand in not enabling this practice.
Maybe it’s obvious to long-term readers, or those who know you – I just started getting the RSS, so I have to ask.
“inbox delivery at every mailing”? I’m having a hard time imagining this scenario, unless the ‘someone else she knows’ is the ‘legitimate’ listowner that’s selling the list to her.
If you sign up for trade rags, you’ll get the regular trade-rag listmail. If the trade rag sells their list (most do) you wind up getting swamped with offers from their ‘valuable marketing partners’, although why they expect subscribers to “Internet World” are interested in hearing about vacations in Belize once a week is totally beyond me. I live pretty well, but even so, I can’t really take a vacation once a week. And I’m pretty certain that I’m not alone in this.
But twice a day? I predict that’ll result in somewhere between 3 and 18 hours of spamfoldering with intermittent 4XXes, followed by a lot of 550 or ‘connection refused’.
“ISPs are moving away from a permission based model for access to their subscribers”
Huh. I don’t think we ever on one?
Senders trying to tell us that they had permission and expecting us to believe it and do something for them as a result, sure. But I wouldn’t call that a model of anything other than pointless phone calls.
Or is this another one of those things where other ISPs have finally realized that we’ve been doing it right all along and are finally trying to catching up?
For some ISPs, to get access to FBLs and whitelists you have to check the box that says “I only send permission based emails.” Senders took this to heart and believe if they have any figleaf of permission that means they will get into the inbox.
At the moment, the pendulum is swinging towards numbers and performance, it’s all a numbers game and no one in the sending side of things really talks about permission anymore. If you meet the ISPs metrics, then you get good delivery. There are two disparate reasons for the language change and the fact that no one really talks about permission anymore. Often “clean” and “good” senders will not mention that they may not have permission to send the email; everyone expects that good senders all have permission. The other is the emphasis on metrics. Typically, you can only meet the metrics if you have permission, have set expectations correctly and are sending mail.
I think the language change is unfortunate, but I also expect it to be transitory. Mark Brownlow talked about permission over on his blog today at http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/iland/2008/03/permission-is-dead-long-live-permission.html
It is difficult for me to imagine a case where you can make 2 emails a day relevant to 4 million recipients.
Easy: Porn.
The mailers who get good delivery are those are able to make the mail interesting, wanted and relevant to recipients.
I was just remarking to someone today that legit “adult” mailers are hardly ever in my sights. People who sign up for porn want their porn, and do not complain about it.
Sure, the letter of the law has to do with permission. And I know that you know and understand this, but most of the marketing industry tends to forget that ISPs have to make sure mail from everywhere is delivered properly. The concept of getting permission only really applies to marketing mail, but mailing statistics are universal.
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