Check your assumptions

One of the things that prompted yesterday’s post was watching a group of marketers discuss how to get subscribers to give them their “real” or “high value” email addresses. Addresses at free email providers are seen as less valuable than addresses at a place of employment or at a cable company or dialup ISP. The discussion centered around how to incentivize recipients to give up their “actual” email addresses.
The underlying belief is that users don’t use free mail accounts for their important mail, and if a recipient gives a marketer a free mail account as a signup that they will not be reading the mail regularly. Better to get an email address that the recipient checks frequently so there is a better chance at a conversion and sale.
Perfectly acceptable marketing goals, but makes a number of assumptions that I am not sure are valid.
Assumption 1: An email address at a freemail provider is less important to the recipient than a different email address.
Wrong! A sender has no idea if a recipient uses a freemail account exclusively or has another real email address. Many people these days use gmail as their primary account and they don’t check the email account associated with their dialup or broadband provider. For instance I have an email account at AT&T associated with our UVerse TV and internet service, but have never logged in to do anything with email.
Assumption 2: A non freemail address gives better response rates.
Really? I haven’t seen data one way or another saying that different classes of email addresses give better responses. It may be true, but it may not.  Some users do have separate accounts for friends and family and marketing mail. In that case, are senders better off in the marketing account? Or in the F&F account where the user may hit the “this is spam” button just because that mail is in the wrong place?
Assumption 3: I’ve been invited in, I get free run of the place
Wrong! Just because you’ve been invited onto the front porch for a glass of lemonade, doesn’t mean you’re welcome in the bedroom. Marketing is all about pushing limits and getting more and more from recipients, but in email marketing the recipients get to hit the “this is spam” filter and stop delivery of that email. Limit pushing in email may result in all out blocks and zero inbox delivery, rather than causing a massive increase in sales.
Assumption 4: Incentivized permission is the same as real permission
Wrong! Just because a subscriber hits the “give me a coupon” or “enter me in the drawing” link does not mean they want mail from that sender. What it really means is the recipient wants a chance to win something or get $5 off their next purchase. Just because they closed the loop to get an incentive does not mean the sender gets a free pass through spam filters or is exempt from having their mail marked as spam.
The marketing relationship between sender and recipient is a lot more balanced than any other direct marketing relationship. The sender can’t ignore the recipients’ preferences over the long term without suffering delivery problems. Many email marketers, particularly those that didn’t start in email, forget that the relationship is different and marketers have to respect the recipient.

Related Posts

With great wisdom…

Guest Post by JD Falk
There was certainly some surprise in the room when I pointed out (yep, it was me) that Laura has been around since before there were ESPs. Part of it, I’m sure, was because Laura’s not particularly ancient — and part was because it’s a shock to realize that people sent and received email and everything was just fine long before the segment of the industry that you work in had even been imagined.
Since this was at MAAWG, there were quite a few people in the room who were involved before there were ESPs (I asked for a show of hands) — and it was interesting to see how many of them work for ESPs now. Commenting on Laura’s article “A very young industry,” Kent McGovern mentioned three — including Anne Mitchell, who made up the word “deliverability” not long after stepping down as the head lawyer for the first shared blacklist of email-sending IP addresses.
Just think about that. She was the head lawyer for the MAPS RBL before there was such a thing as deliverability. (I worked with her there; so did Laura.)
There are a lot of us who’ve been around that long, and most don’t work in the deliverability/marketing side of the industry. Nearly all of us have become cynical over the years; some were cynical to begin with. A few, sadly, have burned out entirely from the frustration of having the same arguments, same discussions, over and over and over.
I think some of the recent refrain calling for ESPs to pressure each other into better practices comes in part from that same frustration. Yes, bad practices are bad, but we’re also tired with teaching the same thing to people with the same title, and feeling like the message never gets through. Part of what we’re saying is “It’s your industry, you’ve learned this stuff, now you teach ’em.”
And when you do, it does work — far more often than when we say it, because you speak the same language. There’s now a generation (for lack of a better term) of ESP & deliverability staff who weren’t around before there were ESPs, maybe not even before CAN-SPAM, but have learned many of the same things and undergone similar transformation. Who’d have thought that Jaren Angerbauer — quite possibly the nicest guy in the industry — would ever start sighing at those young whippersnappers like a cynical old anti-spammer? And Jaren’s not only teaching deliverabilitators; he’s also teaching college students, ensuring that they’ll know far more when they enter the work force than you or he did.
We old-timers once struggled with the idea that we must reach out — even to people we disagree with — and teach what we knew, learning along the way to put it into terms that marketers understand. It’s so much simpler to add to a blacklist and throw away they key, declaring “not my problem anymore.” But we did start teaching, and look how far we’ve come; we’re still doing it, and look how much further there is to go.
Now it’s time for the next generation to do the same. Stop looking to us, or to the ISPs, to solve the problems of your industry for you; we’re busy dealing with spam, as we should’ve been doing all along. Your colleagues’ cluelessness is exactly as impermanent as your own was, and can be overcome in the same ways. Whether you have fifteen or ten or five or merely two years of experience, you’ve found your way to this blog and read down to this line, and attained some measure of wisdom, and you can ease the passage for others.
When someone at a marketing conference says something that you know isn’t true, that you know will result in poor deliverability and industry ire, call them on it. Engage them in a dialogue. Teach, explain, cajole, push — because with great wisdom comes great responsibility.
It’s your turn.
J.D. Falk is Director of Product Strategy for Receiver Products at Return Path, which is not an ESP.

Read More

You must be present to win

Guest post by Phil Schott
I often have the pleasure of putting my four year-old son to bed at night and I’m usually exhausted afterward. It’s a never-ending string of questions and admonishments that goes something like this,
“Daddy, is it a stay-at-home day tomorrow?
“No, Joe, tomorrow is a go-to-school day, it’s Tuesday. Joe, stop talking and go to sleep and please stop picking your nose.”
“Daddy, how long until the Easter bunny comes?”
“A few weeks. Now, go to sleep and stop picking your nose, Josef.”
“Dude, what did I say about picking your nose?”
“Sorry daddy, I can’t help it. It’s my job.”
“Daddy, When’s it going to be my birthday?”
“Joe, you’re not going to live to see your birthday if you don’t stop picking your nose and go to sleep.”
Lather, rinse, repeat for about 10-30 minutes every night. Same questions, same answers, always picking his nose.
In retrospect it seems funny and maybe sweet, but it never does at the time and the thought of doing it all over again tomorrow night makes me want to run out screaming.
However, I realize that if not me, who? Who’s going to tell Joe to stop picking his nose? Who’s going to answer his questions? I have to. It’s my job. If I want to be his dad, that’s what I’ve got to do. If not, then I don’t get to be his dad, I don’t get to be part of his life, and I don’t get to be part of my family.
There are folks in our industry just like Joe and me–those who never seem to get it, those who ask questions over and over, and those who tire of answering the same questions.
I’d like to thank those who answer those questions over and over. Folks like Al Iverson, JD Falk, Mickey Chandler, Greg Kraios, Ken Magill, Laura Atkins, Steve Atkins, Karen Balle, Annalivia Ford, and many others who deserve to be on this list.
I’ve only been in deliverability for a few years and I’d be nowhere if these folks hadn’t answered my dumb questions, posted their thoughts, shared their knowledge, and told me to stop picking my nose on occasion.
It pains me though to read from time to time the ranting of those in our industry who want to decry the dumb marketer, give up, and take their ball home. It’s a shame, but that’s their right and their decision. However, they then don’t get to be part of the community. They lose the effectiveness to tell a dumb marketer to stop picking his nose. They become a washed-up, has been, curmudgeon with no voice. Like with my four year-old son, if I want to be a part of the deliverability community I’ve got to stick it out and deal with it. You have to be present to win.
In her post, A very young industry, Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise quotes ExactTarget’s Joel Book as stating that less than 20% of those in email marketing have more than two years experience. Yes, it’s an industry full of four year-olds. If you’re one of those in the know are you going to bemoan this fact that’s beyond your control or are you going to work to make the community you’ve helped build a better place? You absolutely can choose to move on. We will miss you and I wish you the best of luck. But either keep helping out as you’ve expertly done or get out of the way. Don’t take cheap shots at those trying to do the right thing and trying to do some good work.
For those of you tired of answering the same inane questions you’re fooling yourself if you think the folks who really need to hear your message are reading. They’re not. And they’re going to keep on asking their inane questions until somebody helps them out. I choose to help them out. I choose to be part of the community. I choose to be present.
A big part of the issue is how daunting it can be to ask for help without the risk of appearing the fool. There are far too many folks in this business of deliverability who are more interested in proving how smart they are and selectively sharing knowledge than they are in helping raise the overall level of consciousness and enlightenment.
If you want the idiots and fools to go away then help them become something more. Help them like no one helped you when you started out. With much effort, time, and frustration, I could pick through five years of your blog posts to find the one bit of information I need, or you could give me the URL to the post that will reveal all. I’m not asking you to spoon feed me, I’m just asking for a little help. There’s no books on this stuff and you can’t go to school to get your BA in deliverability. All we’ve got is each other.
Phil Schott has been handling delivery and compliance for a major ESP for the last 3 and a half years.

Read More

More on opt-out for B2B marketing

There is still a bit of discussion going on around the HBR article on how B2B mail should be opt-out not opt in on various delivery blogs. Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog new daddy (congratulations!) DJ writes a post about why he thinks opt-out in any context is a poor marketing decision.
One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when they get unsolicited email from a company they have interacted with.

Read More