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.”

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Do you know where your addresses go?

Being a deliverability consultant, I end up signing up for a lot of lists and providing email addresses to a lot of different websites I may not normally trust with my email address. The only way to manage the resulting volume of email is using a disposable address system. There are a number of commercial versions, but we built our own system.
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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Engaging recipients critical for delivery

One of the issues I have touched on repeatedly is the changing face of blocking and filtering at ISPs. Over the last 12 – 18 months, large, end-user ISPs have started rolling out more and more sophisticated filters. These filters look at a lot of things about an email, not just the content or the sending IP reputation or URLs in the message but also the recipient profile. Yes, ISPs really are measuring how engaged recipients are with a sender and, they are using that information to help them make blocking decisions.
There were two separate posts on Friday related to this.
Mark Brownlow has a great blog post speculating about a number of things ISPs might be looking at when making decisions about what to do with an incoming email. He lists a number of potential measurements, some of which I can definitively confirm are being measured by ISPs.

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Disposable or Temporary Addresses

Mark Brownlow has a really good post up today about disposable and temporary addresses and how they affect marketers trying to build an opt-in list.
I use tagged addresses for all my signups, and have for more than 10 years now. It lets me track who I gave an address to and if this mail is contrary to what I signed up for or the address has leaked, I can shut down mail to that address entirely.
Tagged addresses also have another function. One of our local brew pubs has a rewards program, spend money there, get points. As part of the signup process, they requested an email address. All the email I have received from them has been clearly branded, well designed, they are an example of how to use email right. That is until last week. Last week I received an email to the tagged address from some survey company. The survey company provided no branding, nothing.

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