How not to build a mailing list

I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

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AOL EWL: low complaints no longer enough

This morning AOL announced some changes to their Enhanced White List. Given I’ve not talked very much about the AOL EWL in the past, this is as good a time as any to talk about it.
The AOL Enhanced Whitelist is for those senders that have very good practices. Senders on the EWL not only get their mail delivered to the inbox, but also have links and images enabled by default. Placement on the EWL is done solely on the basis of mail performance and only the best senders get on the list.
The new announcement this morning says that AOL will take more into account than just complaints. Previously, senders with the lowest complaint rates qualified for the EWL. Now, senders must also have a good reputation in addition to the low complaint rates. Good reputation is a measure of user engagement with a particular sender.
This change only reinforces what I and many other delivery experts have been saying: The secret to good delivery is to send mail recipients want. ISPs are making delivery decisions based on those measurements. Send mail that recipients want, and there are few delivery problems.
For a long time good delivery was tied closely to complaint rates, so senders focused on complaints. Spammers focused on complaints too, thus managing to actually get some of their spam delivered. ISPs noticed and started looking at other ways to distinguish wanted mail from spam. One of the better ways to separate spam from wanted mail is to look at user engagement. And the ISPs are measuring engagement and using that measurement as part of their decision making process. Send so much mail users don’t read it, and your reputation goes down followed by your delivery rates.

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Is it really permission?

There’s a great post over on the AOL Postmaster blog talking about sending wanted mail versus sending mail to people who have <a href=”https://web.archive.org/web/20100210070640/http://postmaster-blog.aol.com:80/2009/12/03/p/>grudgingly given permission to receive it.

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Data Integrity, part 2

Yesterday I blogged about eROIs contention that consumers should not be wasting the time of lead gen companies by filling in fake data. There were lots of good comments on the post, and I strongly encourage you to go read them if you are interested in different perspectives on the data issue.
One of the arguments I was making is that people are only going to give accurate information if they trust the website that is collecting information. I do, strongly, believe this. I also believe very strongly that websites collecting information need to do so defensively. It is the only way you can get good information.
This ties in with an earlier post about a website that collects email addresses from any visitor, then turns around and submits those addresses to webforms. Hundreds of mailing lists have already been corrupted by this group. They are a prime reason companies must design address collection process defensively. There are people who do bad things, who will take an opportunity to harass senders and recipients. This company is not the first, nor will they be the last to commit such abuses.
Taking a stand against abusive companies and people may be useful, but that will not stop the abuse. It is much easier to design process that limits the amount of abuse. For lead gen, in particular, confirmed opt-in is one way to limit the amount of bad data collected. As a side effect, it also results in less blocked mail, fewer complaints and better delivery.

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