The dark side of email marketing

Everyone I talk to when dealing with issues inevitably has to tell me they are legitimate email marketers. They’re not spammers, they’re just business people. I often find it difficult to fathom why they need to tell me this. It’s not like email marketers are criminals or anything.
Two recent stories reminded me how evil some folks are. While I’ve not had any direct contact (that I know of) with any of the players on this end of things I have zero doubt that if they called me they would tell me that they were legitimate email marketers.
In one case, a members of a spam gang kidnapped the teenage daughter of someone investigating their activities. The gang held her for more than 5 years in horrific conditions. Yesterday Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error” posted on Boing Boing that his friend got his daughter back. It is a heartbreaking story and incredibly sobering.
In another case, the Russian police arrested a man who ran spammit.com, a clearinghouse for viagra sellers to find spammers to send their mail. Reports say that mail volumes dropped by a fifth after the site was taken offline.
There is real evil in the email marketing industry. Sure, they’re spammers and we can all stand up and say they’re not legitimate. But, this is what the ISPs and Spamhaus and law enforcement are dealing with on a regular basis.

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Spam isn't a best practice

I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices.
Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have customers sending spam. In either case, I’ve been thinking a lot about best practices and what we all mean when we talk about best practices. In conversing with various people it’s clear that the term doesn’t mean what the speakers think it means.
For me, best practice means sending mail in a way that create happy and engaged recipients. There are a lot of details wrapped up in there, but all implementation choices stem from the answer to the question “what will make our customers happy.” But a lot of marketers, email and otherwise, don’t focus on what makes their recipients or targets happy.
In fact, for many people I talk to when they say “best practice” what they really mean is “send as much mail as recipients will tolerate.” This isn’t that surprising, the advertising and marketing industries survive by pushing things as far as the target will tolerate (emphasis added).

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Buying Lists

One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM.
As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me.
I can report nothing has changed. He’s still violating CAN SPAM. He’s still claiming I have no right to post, share, spindle, mutilate or fold his spam. Well, in the interest in something, I thought I’d share the whole post this time. Just to warn folks from attempting to purchase services from appendleads.com (nice website, by the way).

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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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