Addictive email marketing

Magilla Marketing had an article this week about Bob Richards, who paid $14,000 to an email appending company, only to discover that of the 118,000 email addresses he received over 85,000 of them bounced. Mr. Richards was also terminated from his email service provider due to bounces and complaints. He posted a complaint on RipOffReport.com, issued a press release and reported the appending company to the FTC and other law enforcement.
In his press release, Mr. Richards equates his vendor, and other vendors to email marketers, with drug pushers.

Drug users go to the pusher for their drug and the pushers keep the streets plentiful with drugs. Similarly, marketers go to list services for their drug and many of these list services sell tainted goods. And it’s these list services that fuel the spread of spam.

The end of Ken’s article does reinforce the drug comparison. After all the problems Mr. Richards had with emailing, he is not only considering sending mail again, but sending mail to addresses from the same vendor.

In an e-mail to Richards obtained by this newsletter, Cooper offered a $10,000 refund if Richards would rescind his complaints from the FTC and RipOffReport, among other things.
As of deadline, Richards said he would accept the offer if EmailAppenders removes all the hard and soft bounces and non-financial advisors from the list it supplied, and upon subsequently mailing it, Javelin gets a 90% or better delivery rate.

As was said on a delivery mailing list earlier today: “To use the analogy from article, he’s willing to try LSD instead of Heroin — as long as the pusher promises that it’s not tainted.”

Engaging recipients critical for delivery
Strategic email marketing

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Recent comments

On my followup EEC post Tamara comments

The eec made a really bad and ugly mistake but you can take my word for it that they have learned from it and that it will not happen again. I am not going to blog about this because I really do believe in the value of the EEC and what it brings to the industry. It’s okay to call out a mistake, but do you really need to destroy an organization that is so worthwile?

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The Email Experience Council is the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association. They recently sent out a mailing that demonstrated what not to do when sending email, including:

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One thing I frequently mention, both here on the blog and with my clients, is the importance of setting recipient expectations during the signup process. Mark Brownlow posted yesterday about signup forms, and linked to a number of resources and blog posts discussing how to create user friendly and usable signup forms.
As a consumer, a signup process for an online-only experience that requires a postal address annoys and frustrates me to no end. Just recently I purchased a Nike + iPod sport kit. Part of the benefit to this, is free access to the Nike website, where I can see pretty graphs showing my pace, distance and time. When I went to go register, however, Nike asked me to give them a postal address. I know there are a lot of reasons they might want to do this, but, to my mind, they have no need to know my address and I am reluctant go give that info out. An attempt to register leaving those blanks empty was rejected. A blatantly fake street address (nowhere, nowhere, valid zipcode) did not inhibit my ability to sign up at the site.
Still, I find more and more sites are asking for more and more information about their site users. From a marketing perspective it is a no-brainer to ask for the information, at least in the short term. Over the longer term, asking for more and more information may result in more and more users avoiding websites or providing false data.
In the context of email addresses, many users already fill in random addresses into forms when they are required to give up addresses. This results in higher complaint rates, spamtrap hits and high bounce rates for the sender. Eventually, the sender ends up blocked or blacklisted, and they cannot figure out why because all of their addresses belong to their users. They have done everything right, so they think.
What they have not done is compensate for their users. Information collection is a critical part of the senders process, but some senders seem give little thought to data integrity or user reluctance to share data. This lack of thought can, and often does, result in poor email delivery.

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