Email non-viable for acquisition

Chris Marriott over at iMediaConnection talks about all the reasons email is a non-starter as a replacement for direct mail. This is something I have been telling clients for a while now. Chris mentions a number of reasons for why email is not an acquisition tool.

Today, banks can flood your mailbox with all the credit card offers they want, but they can’t flood your email box with the same offers. First, it’s not as easy to get your email address as it is your postal address. Second, even if a business has your email address, you can opt-out of that first prospecting email and be free forever from further offers. For these very important reasons, there is no direct linear progression from mail to email in the marketing world. Email is the most cost-effective retention, cross-sell and loyalty tactic in the universe, but it is not a viable acquisition tool in the way that direct mail is (though some would argue both are equally bad due to the sheer amount of wasted impressions).

The big reason he missed is complaints. It is difficult, if not impossible, to complain about direct mail. Even the opt-outs listed on the circulars do not work. For email, though, complaints are trivial. The ISPs have set up and manage a way for recipients to tell a sender they do not want any mail from that sender. Those complaints feed a scoring engine that allows the ISP to block mail that the recipients mark as spam. This feedback process makes it extremely difficult to use purchased email lists to acquire new customers.
Hat tip: BeRelevant

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Deeply held beliefs by many senders aside, Yahoo is not greylisting. Yahoo is using temporary failures (4xx) as a way to defer and control mail coming into their servers and their users.
I think much of the problem is that the definition of greylisting is not well understood by the people using the term. Greylisting generally refers to a process of refusing email with a 4xx response the first time delivery is attempted and accepting the email at the second delivery attempt. There are a number of ways to greylist, per message, per IP or per from address. The defining feature of greylisting is that the receiving MTA keeps track of the messages (IP or addresss) that it has rejected and allows the mail through the second time the mail is sent.
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