Experian CheetahMail believes that opt-out email appending is no longer an acceptable practice, and that marketers should no longer use of this practice to acquire customer email addresses. EmailResponsibly
In my experience, appending causes major delivery problems. Of course, every time the issue comes up some marketer tells us who think it’s a bad idea that they successfully used appending and it worked and all the delivery problems are a figment.
Maybe the supporters will believe Ben and Experian / CheetahMail that appending is not a good thing to do. After all, Ben was a large proponent of the practice many years ago and Experian still sells appending services in some countries.
Sending mail without permission, which is what appending usually is, will cause delivery problems. Stick to real permission, not vague promises.
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Why is Email Appending wrong ?
If you sign up for a newsletter and opt-in to receive third party mailers then getting a third party promotion is not unsolicited. If Experian had their own list of such “opted-in” users and sent them the promotions .. would it amount to spam ?
It is very simple. If I am a customer of X or sign up for the mailers of X, without providing my e-mail address, then I am not requesting the e-mail from them.
There is a difference between receiving a paper newsletter in the mail and an e-mailed newsletter. If the company believes their paper newsletter justifies the payment of postage and costs of printing, I am more willing to risk the investment of my time in reading it. If the company does not spend money, bt sends me the e-mail, they have determined it is not worth spending the money to print and mail the information, therefore why should I spend my time to read it?
Phone solicitors call my company every day, and many of ask for e-mail addresses to send the information. We tell them our policy is to only accept solicitations by mail, since not providing the solicitation by mail, but only by e-mail, indicates that the selling company does not believe that their offer is worth the paper it is printed on.
Ram: As far as I could tell, no email append provider has such a list. It was always a stretch to call that kind of list of email addresses “opt-in.” Clearly, the people complaining about the resulting mail didn’t feel it was opt-in.
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