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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Do you know where your addresses go?

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Any time I need to sign up with a client, I create a new email address. Part of the address creation process involves making notes about where and when the address was used. When mail is received at any of the email addresses I have used, that email is appended with the data I provided at the time I signed up and forwarded to a mailbox on my main system. If an address ends up compromised or sold and getting too much mail, I can just turn it off. This system allows me to freely hand out addresses, without a large amount of mail ending up in my primary mail box.
Disposable addresses great way to monitor what my clients are doing with my email address. I have found, in at least 2 cases, that my clients are doing nothing wrong, but there are leaks in their process that lets email addresses get out to spammers. My reports of data leaking were the first they knew about any problems with their vendors or customers.
I strongly recommend any marketer who shares any data, include in that data test or seed accounts. Sign up for your own lists, using unique addresses, so that you can see what kind of mail your subscribers are receiving once they sign up at your site. If you are providing data to customers or vendors, include unique test data in each list. If you start getting unexpected mail to those addresses, you can track back to the specific vendor with the data problem.
Your email address list is one of the biggest assets your company has. Protect that asset by monitoring what others are doing with it.

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Over the last couple days multiple people have asserted to me that Yahoo is greylisting mail. The fact that Yahoo itself asserts it is not using greylisting as a technique to control mail seems to have no effect on the number of people who believe that Yahoo is greylisting.
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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