Put a fork in it

When FB messaging was announced email marketers had a total conniption. There were blog posts written about how FB Messaging was going to kill email as we know it.
Now, slightly more than a year later marketers have declared FB Messaging dead.
Sometimes I think people spend way to much time believing their own press. FB messaging was never designed as a marketing platform. I said as much back in November 2010 when it was announced.

[…] I really don’t think this is going to be a marketing platform. Zuc said during his talk that the messaging of the future is: personal, immediate, informal and short. None of this applies to marketing mail. I have no doubt many marketers are going to try and get into the FBox, but that’s not what it’s for.
Really folks, stand down and stop panicking. This isn’t going to kill email, it’s just another way to message.

Color me shocked that people haven’t flocked to using their FB messaging accounts for marketing and email marketing is still going strong. Oh, wait, I predicted that, too.

[E]ven 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.

Suffice it to say, I’m not impressed with the declaration that Facebook Messaging is dead. In fact, I’m mostly wondering who thought it was ever actually alive.

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How not to build a mailing list

I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

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Email marketing OF THE FUTURE!

ISPs are continually developing tools for their users. Some of the newer tools are automatic filters that help users organize the volumes of mail they’re getting. Gmail released Priority Inbox over a year ago. Hotmail announced new filters as part of Wave 5 back in October.
All of these announcements cause much consternation in the email marketing industry. Just today there was a long discussion on the Only Influencers list about the new Hotmail filtering. There was even some discussion about why the ISPs were doing this.
I think it’s pretty simple why they’re creating new tools: users are asking for them. The core of these new filters is ISPs reacting to consumer demand. They wouldn’t put the energy into development if their users didn’t want it. And many users do and will use priority inbox or the new Hotmail filtering.
Some people are concerned that marketing email will be less effective if mail is not in the inbox.

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