Mark Brownlow took my post about best practices and expanded on the theme. He is absolutely right and I encourage everyone to go read his article.
The takeaway here is not to rush out and start ignoring best practices. Without the background understanding, that way lies email marketing hell.
But if you can gain (or hire) a more nuanced understanding of issues, you might be able to break selected rules to the benefit of both you and your subscribers.
Exactly.
The WSJ reports that politicians in Maine have figured out that the new Maine law prohibiting collecting information from teenagers without parental permission is badly written and has a lot of problems.
The Attorney General has decided not to enforce the law as it stands. The law does contain private right of action, so there may be private suits filed against companies.
I can’t necessarily fault the state senator who drafted the legislation for her intentions.
Last week I commented on negative branding in email. One of the comments on that post was an advertisement for a company called WrapMail. In the course of attempting to determine if this was spam or a real comment, I checked out their website. While the comment itself may not be spam, and it may not be providing services to spammers, the entire business model strikes me as a delivery nightmare.
Briefly, once you sign up with this company, you set your mail client to use their SMTP server. As all of your mail goes through their server is it “wrapped” with a HTML template of your choosing. All of your email is now branded with that template, allowing you to formally advertise your business even during the course of standard business communications.
There are multiple ways this can negatively impact a specific brand.
Stephanie Miller from RP blogs at EEC about a UK consumer survey with the take home message: “consumers notice what email marketers do. When we send something interesting and relevant at a good pace, they are happy to stay active with our programs. When we don’t… well, then we’ve lost them, perhaps for good.”
Read More