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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Relevance or Permission

One of the discussions that surrounds email marketing is whether relevance trumps permission or permission trumps relevance. I believe this entire discussion is built on a false dichotomy.
Sending relevant email is important. Not only do recipients expect mail to be relevant, but the ISPs often make delivery decisions on how relevant their users find your mail. Marketers that send too much irrelevant mail find themselves struggling to get inbox placement.
Permission makes sending relevant mail all that much easier. Sure, really good marketers can probably collect, purchase, beg, borrow and steal enough information to know that their unsolicited email is relevant. But how many marketers are actually that good?
My experience suggest that most marketers aren’t that good. They don’t segment their permission based lists to send relevant mail. They’re certainly not going to segment their non-permission based lists to send relevant mail.
Macy’s, for instance, decided that I would find their Bloomingdales mail relevant. I didn’t, and unsubscribed from both publications, after registering a complaint with their ESP. Had Macy’s asked about sending me Bloomies mail I wouldn’t have opted-in, but I probably wouldn’t have unsubbed from Macy’s mail, too.
So what’s your stand? Does relevance trump permission? Or does permission trump relevance? How much relevant, unsolicited mail do you get? How much irrelevant permission based mail do you get? And what drives you to unsubscribe from a permission based list?

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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.

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Broken signup processes

DJ Waldow wrote a post on explicit permission over on Mediapost. I think he hit on some interesting bits and wanted to comment on them. In order to comment on a Mediapost blog, you have to register.
I’ve thought about it before, but every time I start the process I get to the page asking for detailed demographic information and decide no. This time, I was inspired enough by DJ to get to the second page of the signup process. This requires me to identify what type of marketing I’m interested in and won’t let me past the page until I click something. I’m not interested in anything, so I close the webpage. I can always write my own blog post responding to DJ.
I return to my inbox to discover a welcome message from Mediapost. It seems I am now a member and will be receiving email and specials and all the stuff I didn’t want from them.
This isn’t unusual. There are tons of websites on the net that don’t require you to complete a signup process in order to be added to their database. One of the worst I experienced was 1-800-Pet-Meds. They added me to their database when I abandoned a cart (what I wanted required a prescription from them, whereas I could just go into my vet’s and pick it up, so I’ll just pay the vet’s prices). They added me to their mailing list and couldn’t unsubscribe me because I was not in their customer database. Everything was done with the magic order number, which I didn’t have because I never ordered with them. That was fun to sort out.
It’s a bad idea to add people who don’t complete the signup or purchase process to your mailing lists. If you’re worried about losing a potential customer, then you can send mail reminding them to complete the process (or purchase). If you’re very into customer service, you can ask them if they are interested in future specials from you: would you like to opt-in to our mailing list anyway? Or you can give them the opportunity to remove their information from your database.

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