Permission-ish based marketing

My Mum flew in to visit last week, and over dinner one evening the talk turned to email.

We don’t get much spam on Yahoo, mostly because we don’t give our email address out much. The only spam we really get is from <stockbroker website>, and that all goes to the spam folder. We use the site for checking stock quotes – it’s free, and we never see any of the spam they send.

A typical email marketer would look at that and object loudly to her use of the “S word” to describe their email – it’s mail the subscriber signed up and gave permission for, and they have an ongoing relationship with the sender, and they haven’t unsubscribed, and, and, and…
But a delivery expert will point out that none of that matters one jot. Sure, the sender has a figleaf of permission, because they convinced the recipient to “subscribe to their mailings” (even if that was via the threat of withholding a free web service if they didn’t sign up). And that does provide some legal protection.
But as far as delivering email to recipients inboxes, let alone receiving any ROI for an email campaign, it’s pretty much irrelevant. The recipient perceives the mail as spam, and describes it as such to other people – “<stockbroker company> sends spam” is not the image you want to have. The subscriber doesn’t read the email, doesn’t want the email, certainly doesn’t pull it out of the spam folder and may well be hitting the “this is spam” button for messages that end up in the inbox.
You’re certainly not getting any benefit at all from that subscriber, and their relationship to the mail you’re sending them – not opening or interacting with it, categorizing it as spam, etc – is teaching their ISPs spam filters that your mail is unwanted spam. The reputation of your domain, your content and your sending IP addresses will suffer, and your delivery rates to all your subscribers will suffer.
If you’re forcing someone to give you permission, it’s not permission-based marketing.

Spammers and the law
Evangelizing Permission

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One of the more challenging things I do is work with companies who have poor reputations that they’re trying to repair. These companies have been getting by with poor practices for a while, but finally the daily delivery falls below their pain threshold and they decide they need to fix things.
That’s when they call me in, usually asking me if I can go to the ISPs and tell the ISPs that they’re not spammers, they’re doing everything right and will the ISP please stop unfairly blocking them. Usually I will agree to talk to the ISPs, if fixing the underlying problems doesn’t improve their delivery on its own. But before we can talk to the ISPs, we have to try to fix things and at least have some visible changes in behavior to take to them. Once they have externally visible changes, then we can ask the ISPs for a little slack.
With these clients there isn’t just one thing they’ve done to create their bad reputation. Often nothing they’re doing is really evil, it’s just a combination of sorta-bad practices that makes their overall reputation really bad. The struggle is fixing the reputation requires more than one change and no single change is going to necessarily make an immediate improvement on their reputation.
This is a struggle for the customer, because they have to start thinking about email differently. Things have to be done differently from how they’ve always been done. This is a struggle for me because I can’t guarantee if they do this one thing that it will have improved delivery. I can’t guarantee that any one thing will fix their delivery, because ISPs measure and weight dozens of things as part of their delivery making decisions. But what I can guarantee is that if they make the small improvements I recommend then their overall reputation and delivery will improve.
What small improvement have you made today?

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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.
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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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