Nothing is forever, even email

Yesterday I talked about how important it was to send welcome messages when you discover old email addresses. Today on the Return Path Blog, Tami Monahan Foreman shares an example email that does just that, but not as well as one might hope.

You are receiving this email because sometime during the past 20+ years you have registered with PACE, or one of our affiliated companies, to receive free information and offers concerning child custody matters […]

Tami is appropriately amused by the statement that she opted in in the past 20 years, despite never having custody issues nor ever hearing of this company before. I just can’t fathom the email planning session. Did no one consider that the maximum time for a custody dispute is 18 years? Were these senders even thinking about what they were saying?
And, yes, I realize that this may have been a B2B targeted (or not so targeted) mailing for court officers, social workers and others who mediate custody disputes. In that case it’s even worse, how many people have had the same job over the last 20 years? How many municipalities and courts even had email in 1991?
Clearly there was not a lot of thought put into the target of the email. And this is what, more often than not, defines email marketing in the minds of many people outside thsi industry.

Marketers — THIS is what you are up against. For all the good you are trying to do, many, many consumers and even more people at ISPs think THIS represents the thinking of too many folks who claim the title “email marketer.” — Tami Monahan Foreman

The attitude of ‘once and opt-in always an opt-in’ is all too familiar to me. Recently I had a client explain to me, in all seriousness, that he truly believed that he was still entitled to mail email addresses that opted in 10 or more years ago. Even though the recipient opted in to a company that was eventually purchased by his company. Even though there had been zero contact in the last 10 years. If he wanted to send those people mail, then it was opt-in and no one could stop him. Unfortunately for him, neither Spamhaus nor the ISPs agreed with that point of view and much of his mail was having some fairly serious delivery problems.
I know that the last thing any email marketer wants to do is remove an email address from a list. But sometimes you need to think about what you’re doing and not mail someone just because at some point in the past you think they might have maybe opted in

Conversational foreplay
Fines for not honoring unsubscribes

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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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Email as social media

Rachel Luxemburg, a good friend of mine who runs the Community team over at Adobe, tweeted a link to Successful Social Media is More Than A Campaign. I was reading that article and realized quite how much of it applies to email. In fact, a couple of Amber’s specific recommendations are directly relevant to email.

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Some thoughts on permission

A lot of email marketing best practices center around getting permission to send email to recipients. A lot of anti-spammers argue that the issue is consent not content. Both groups seem to agree that permission is important, but more often than not they disagree about what constitutes permission.
For some the only acceptable permission is round trip confirmation, also known as confirmed opt-in or double opt-in.
For others making a purchase constitutes permission to send mail.
For still others checking or unchecking a box on a signup page is sufficient permission.
I don’t think there is a global, over arching, single form of permission. I think context and agreement matters. I think permission is really about both sides of the transaction knowing what the transaction is. Double opt-in, single opt-in, check the box to opt-out area all valid ways to collect permission. Dishonest marketers can, and do, use all of these ways to collect email addresses.
But while dishonest marketers may adhere to all of the letters of the best practice recommendations, they purposely make the wording and explanation of check boxes and what happens when confusing. I do believe some people make the choices deliberately confusing to increase the number of addresses that have opted in. Does everyone? Of course not. But there are certainly marketers who deliberately set out to make their opt-ins as confusing as possible.
This is why I think permission is meaningless without the context of the transaction. What did the address collector tell the recipient would happen with their email address? What did the address giver understand would happen with their email address? Do these two things match? If the two perceptions agree then I am satisfied there is permission. If the expectations don’t match, then I’m not sure there is permission involved.
What are your thoughts on permission?

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