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.”

Related Posts

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.

Read More

EEC shows how not to send email

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:

Read More

Marketers missing out

Many delivery blogs have posted about the recent ReturnPath study showing that marketers are missing prime opportunities to use email to develop a strong relationship with recipients. I finally manged to get a few moments to read through the study and comment on it. Over a few days in February ReturnPath researchers signed up at more than 60 major retailer brands. They then monitored the subscriptions to see how often and what kind of mail the retailers sent.
Overall, it seems the researchers were disappointed in how the retailers were using mail. Even the title of the whitepaper captures this feeling: “Creating Great Subscriber Experiences: Are Marketers Relationship Worthy?” The answer seems to be more no than yes.
From my perspective the data is not all that surprising. In many cases it seems bigger companies rely on the recognition of their brand to get them through minor delivery problems (like complaints) rather than good practices. Whereas a smaller company will have to work harder to develop a relationship, larger companies with wide brand recognition can fall back on their brand.
There were a few areas ReturnPath measured.

Read More