Permission is not a legal concept

One trap I see companies fall into when looking at opt-in and permission is they seem to think that permission is a blanket thing. They believe permission can be bought and sold by the companies that collected email addresses.

Legally, they may be correct. But in practice senders cannot decide that they can sell the permission of their recipients to another entity. As Al said today, you cannot buy an existing business relationship. When commenting on that post over on twitter, Evan Burke had a series of very insightful tweets on the issue.

Evan is exactly right.

Coincidentally, I had a potential client call me this morning to discuss the delivery problems they were having with a list. At the end of the call he also mentioned that they had a list of 7 million addresses that had been sitting around and they wanted to incorporate it into their list. I was open minded about the chances to recover the list, until he dropped that the list was 10 years old. I have to admit, I probably was not the cheery, positive, put a friendly face for the potential client consultant in responding to that.

But, really, there’s no way someone who opted in 10 years ago is going to remember they opted in to receive mail from whatever list has been found.

One thing that senders, list sellers and lawyers have to remember is that recipients are the final arbiters of permission. They know what they agreed to and if they don’t think this list, or this brand, or this sender has permission they will respond with spam complaints. The result is decreasing reputation for the sender followed by increasing delivery problems. Just because the sender thinks they have permission doesn’t mean the recipients agree with them.

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That's spammer speak

I’ve been hearing stories from other deliverability consultants and some ISP reps about what people are telling them. Some of them are jaw dropping examples of senders who are indistinguishable from spammers. Some of them are just examples of sender ignorance.
“We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer speak. The speaker sees no value in any individual recipient, so instead of actually figuring out what about their mail is causing problems, they are going to drop 30% of their list. We talk a lot on this blog about relevancy and user experience. If a sender does not care about their email enough to invest a small amount of time into fixing a problem, then why should recipients care about the mail they are sending?
A better solution then just throwing away 30% of a list is to determine the underlying reasons for  delivery issues, and actually make adjustments to  address collection processes and  user experience. Build a sustainable, long term email marketing program that builds a loyal customer base.
“We have a new system to unsubscribe people immediately, but are concerned about implementing it due to database shrink.” First off, the law says that senders must stop mailing people that ask. Secondly, if people do not want email, they are not going to be an overall asset. They are likely to never purchase from the email, and they are very likely to hit the ‘this is spam’ button and lower the overall delivery rate of a list.
Let people unsubscribe. Users who do not want email from a sender are cruft. They lower the ROI for a list, they lower aggregate performance. Senders should not want unwilling or unhappy recipients on their list.
“We found out a lot of our addresses are at non-existent domains, so we want to correct the typos.” “Correcting” email addresses is an exercise in trying to read recipients minds. I seems intuitive that someone who typed yahooooo.com meant yahoo.com, or that hotmial.com meant hotmail.com, but there is no way to know for sure. There is also the possibility that the user is deliberately mistyping addresses to avoid getting mail from the sender. It could be that the user who mistyped their domain also mistyped their username. In any case, “fixing” the domain could result in a sender sending spam.
Data hygiene is critical, and any sender should be monitoring and checking the information input into their subscription forms. There are even services which offer real time monitoring of the data that is being entered into webforms. Once the data is in the database, though, senders should not arbitrarily change it.

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Political Spam

At Adventures in Email Marketing, there is a post up this morning about political spam. It seems Anna discovered that providing her email address on her voter registration card not only results in political groups sending her email to that address, but also that political email does not have to follow the rules of CAN SPAM. The article ends with a few questions and makes some suggestions.

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Buying Data

Over on Spam Resource Al posted about data sellers and the ESP that supports them. As part of the post, he lists the pricing for email address lists.

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