Should you respond to complaints

David Spinks asks on twitter:

Should you ever contact someone who made an abuse complaint about your newsletter to find out why

My answer was: It depends, but it’s too complicated to explain in 140 characters.

I don’t suggest responding to people who hit the “this is spam” button as a way of complaining. FBLs are complaints, but they are people who don’t necessarily want to engage with you. If they wanted to engage they would have contacted you.
It’s a little trickier when you get complaints directly from recipients. There are a number of reasons people might send you a complaint directly: to honestly engage in a discussion about your mail, to try and track down who might be selling or signing up their email address or to vent their anger at bulk mailers in general.
You can’t always identify which type of recipient just from their initial email, but there are some hints. Complaints cc’d to dozens of email addresses generally aren’t looking for a response, they just want those evil spammers disconnected. Responses to this group of complainers will often be published on mailing lists, newsgroups or on websites. Attempting to engage them usually ends badly for everyone but the complainer.  (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4)
On the other hand, there are folks who are contacting you because they think you care about your network and will want to stop abuse from happening. My complaints, for instance, are often only sent to places I think will care. I’m not going to waste my time sending in a complaint to some place that just deletes them. So they tend to be very short and it can be productive to engage with them.

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Email is not direct mail

Had an interesting talk with a colleague at a BBQ this weekend. He was at a large ISP and then moved on to do delivery at a large email marketing company. This marketing company was started by a very successful direct (snail mail) marketer. The CEO believed totally in testing and they measured everything. They knew what colors provoked a better response and which fonts were better received by recipients.
But this wasn’t always enough. They had some spotty delivery and my friend was hired to try and solve the delivery problems. He had some luck and did fix a number of things, but there was a deeper issue he couldn’t address: that email is not direct mail. The types of testing done is the type of testing for direct mail. They were so focused on getting the best response to a particular offer they refused to consider tweaking an offer from their “proven ideal” to stop triggering content filters at some large ISPs. So their ideal offers would sometimes end up in the inbox and sometimes in the bulk folder and sometimes just disappear.
With direct mail, the USPS is required by law to deliver mail to the addressee. Not only that there are a lot of barriers put up to prevent (or discourage) recipients to opt-out of receiving direct mail. This isn’t the case in email. Not only is their no requirement for an ISP to deliver email to recipients, there is actually a law that says that recipients must be able to opt-out from receiving future emails.
Direct marketers are used to having a lot of freedom and control over their mail. They can buy and sell address lists and send almost anything they want without having anyone tell them they can’t. That mindset translates badly into the email space where the ISPs and the recipients have a lot of control over their incoming email. It means that senders with the absolute perfect test copy see delivery problems because their perfect copy looks just like something a spammer would do and gets caught in content filters. It means they come into email and try to buy a list and discover that while it may be financially viable, they have to deal with angry upstreams, blocks at recipient ISPs and sometimes a Spamhaus listing.
Email isn’t the same as direct mail and attempting to map direct mail techniques onto email usually doesn’t work.

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Spamfilters: a marketer's best friend

I was cleaning out my spam folder this afternoon. I try and do it at least once a day, otherwise the volume gets so bad I don’t actually look at the mail I just mark it all as read. I realized, though, that spamfilters are actually a marketer’s best friend.
If there were no spam filters keeping all the crap people get out of their inbox (in my case over 1000 messages a day) then spam would overwhelm even the most dedicated email junkie. I couldn’t do my job without my spam filters, and in fact the recent rash of virus spew is ending up in my inbox and making finding real mail a problem. I do a lot of sorting before mail ever hits my inbox, and I’m still struggling to deal with the couple hundred “your order has shipped!” and “please her tonight!” emails that my local bayesian filters haven’t caught up to, yet.
Today’s stats:
Work inbox: 17 messages
Work spam: 419
95.9% spam
Personal inbox: 40
Personal spam: 975
95.9% spam
Without filters, I couldn’t accurately find that 4.1% of real mail that I get. Without filters, I couldn’t do my job. Without filters, I couldn’t find the real receipts from purchases I actually made. Without filters, I couldn’t read and respond to mail I wanted.
A mailbox overflowing with spam is unuseable, and email marketers should be thankful that providers work so hard to keep spam out. Otherwise, email wouldn’t be useful for anything.

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Appendleads is not unusual

I called out David Williams from appendleads.com yesterday for his spam. Sure he’s a spammer, his database is full of garbage information and his email violates CAN SPAM but he’s not that unusual in the realm of list sellers. He is very typical of the people I see offering lists for sale.
List sellers are the internet version of used car salesmen. Everyone knows they are slimy sales guys who will do anything to close the sale. They don’t have a real web presence, just visit appendleads.com and see what I mean.
And yet, people still buy lists from them! I have no doubt that my spammer friend has a nice little business selling email addresses. He sends out spam, he gets a few responses, makes a tidy profit and then sends out another spam, hooks a few more people and makes more money.
OK, so not all list sellers are like appendleads. Some of them go so far to build a website. But at the core they’re the same. They are selling data that isn’t clean, it’s not opt-in, it’s not been verified.
This is why so many of us harp on not buying lists. The sales guys talk a great game, but they aren’t selling what purchasers think they’re getting. They also don’t care. They have no incentive to clean up their data. They have no incentive to accurately represent what they’re selling. All of the risk is on the person that sends the email. Once they have their money, the buyer is on their own.
Can you ever successfully purchase a list? I’m sure some senders have. But that experience is closer to winning more than a thousand dollars in the lottery than an actual good business decision.

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