Emailpocalypse

Apparently emailpocalypse is coming on Monday. That’s when Facebook is going to release their email platform (the one no one knows anything about) and it’s going to DESTROY EMAIL MARKETING AS WE KNOW IT.
Are you ready?
I think my favorite doom and gloom scenario is: Facebook will throw out the book on email deliverability because it will likely be the first mass-user email platform that is whitelist-based. In other words, you will NOT be able to send to a user unless they have given you explicit permission to do so.
THE HORRORS! Marketers are going to have to get PERMISSION TO SEND EMAIL. OH NOES! The SKY! It is falling! Recipients are going to have to actually invite marketers in! They can’t just take permission, they have to be granted it.
Oddly enough, a lot of the folks who are having conniptions are also people who have been preaching permission for years. Really, if they’re already getting explicit permission, then this is no different. It’s just an email platform.
And even if Titan is somehow a total game changer and is going to require explicit permission, it’s not going to destroy email marketing. Everyone who has a facebook account already has another email account. Marketers who can’t get explicit permission to mail to the facebook account can certainly keep sending “permission” email to their other email accounts.

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Confusing opt-in and opt-out

Harvard Business Review posted a blog earlier this week suggesting that all businesses should treat email marketing as an opt-out process. Unfortunately, the post seemed to me to conflate and confuse a number of things.
She mixes in potential customers providing business cards to an exhibitor at a trade show with current customers that are using a product. She promotes businesses using opt-out as a default communication practice, but then talks about giving customers preference centers to manage the contact.
Overall, it was a very confusing article.
For instance the author says:

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Just stop spamming!

Al posted a clip from the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar on SpamResource (slightly NSFW) that resonated with me this week.
If you meet me on the street and ask me what my job is I’ll tell you that I work with companies who send bulk email to make sure that they’re not sending spam. I do this by educating clients into good practices and teaching them how to send mail people want to receive. What this statement doesn’t tell people is that usually clients find me because they have been suspended by their ISP for spamming or blocked by some receiver.
Clients who find me because they can’t send mail usually hire me to solve their immediate problem. And I do give the the best advice I can to resolve their problem. But fixing today’s problem isn’t enough, you also need to fix the processes that caused the problem. To me, a critical part of my job is to set clients up for long term success by creating procedures that will get them delisted and keep them from being relisted in the future.
Sometimes, though, I have those moments Al is talking about. When clients don’t actually want to fix their problems, they just want to argue. They want to argue about the definition of spam. They want to argue about permission. They want to argue about how awful their ISPs are for suspending their account. They want to argue about CAN SPAM. They want to argue about free speech. They are angry and they want to fight.
My role is to listen to them, then guide them down a constructive path. I do turn out to be the sounding board for a lot of customers, sometimes they just need to know someone is listening to them. Once they get it all out we can move on into solving the problem.
But, boy, are there the occasional conversations where I just want to scream, “JUST STOP SPAMMING!”

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Spam is not a marketing strategy

Unfortunately, this fact doesn’t stop anyone from spamming as part of their marketing outreach. And it’s not just email spam. I get quite a bit of blog spam, most of which is caught by Akismet. Occasionally, though, there’s spam which isn’t caught by the filter and ends up coming to me for approval.
Many of these are explanations of why email marketing is so awesome. Some of them are out and out laugh inducing. One of my favorites, and the inspiration for this post.

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