Best practices: a meaningless term

Chad White wrote an article for MediaPost about best practices which parallels a lot of thinking I’ve been doing about how the email marketing industry treats best practices.

After several conversations recently about “best practices,” I’m convinced that the term is now meaningless. It’s been bastardized in the same way that the definition of “spam” has shifted to the point that it has very different meanings to different groups of people.

I have actually had clients tell me things like “we follow all the best practices” only to tell me later in the phone call that they go out of their way to ignore opt-outs. When a company ignores opt-outs as a matter of policy and then feels safe claiming they follow all the best practices then the term is totally meaningless.
Best practices as I tend to think of them are technical implementations of commonly accepted policies. It’s how you translate intention into action.
With email marketing, though, there are very few commonly accepted policies. In fact, I’d argue that there are no commonly accepted policies. There’s not even any real consensus on whether or not permission is necessary to send email.
If you can’t even agree on the first principles, like permission, then best practices is a totally meaningless phrase. In fact, in many cases when a client tells me they follow all the best practices it tells me nothing about what they are actually doing. Instead we have to go back and establish what they’re drawing the term best practices from.
All of these things that just confirm Chad’s observation that best practices is a totally meaningless term.

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“We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer speak. The speaker sees no value in any individual recipient, so instead of actually figuring out what about their mail is causing problems, they are going to drop 30% of their list. We talk a lot on this blog about relevancy and user experience. If a sender does not care about their email enough to invest a small amount of time into fixing a problem, then why should recipients care about the mail they are sending?
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“We found out a lot of our addresses are at non-existent domains, so we want to correct the typos.” “Correcting” email addresses is an exercise in trying to read recipients minds. I seems intuitive that someone who typed yahooooo.com meant yahoo.com, or that hotmial.com meant hotmail.com, but there is no way to know for sure. There is also the possibility that the user is deliberately mistyping addresses to avoid getting mail from the sender. It could be that the user who mistyped their domain also mistyped their username. In any case, “fixing” the domain could result in a sender sending spam.
Data hygiene is critical, and any sender should be monitoring and checking the information input into their subscription forms. There are even services which offer real time monitoring of the data that is being entered into webforms. Once the data is in the database, though, senders should not arbitrarily change it.

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Yesterday we talked about social networks that harvest the address books of registered  users and send mail to all those addresses on behalf of their registered user. In the specific case, the registered user did not know that the network was going to send that mail and subsequently apologized to everyone.
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