Delivery versus marketing

I’ve been thinking lately that sometimes that what works for marketing doesn’t always work for delivery.
For instance in many areas of marketing repetition is key. Repeat a slogan and forge an association between the slogan and the product in the mind of the consumer. More repetition is better. Marketers can even go so far as using the same ad to drive consumer action. Television advertising is a prime example of this. Companies don’t create new content for every advertising slot, they create one or a few ads and then replay them over and over. The advertiser doesn’t even really care if the consumer consciously ignores the ads. The unconscious connection is still being made.
In the world of email delivery, though, having many or most recipients ignore advertising is the kiss of death. Too many unengaged users and filters decide that mail shouldn’t go into the inbox. These don’t even have to be ISP level filters, but Bayesian filters built into desktop mail clients.
Sending repetitive ads over email may be an effective marketing strategy, but may not be an effective delivery strategy.
Am I off base here and missing something? Tell me I’m wrong in the comments.

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The legitimate email marketer

I cannot tell you how many times over the last 10 years I’ve been talking to someone with a problem and had them tell me “but I’m a legitimate email marketer.” Most of them have at least one serious problem, from upstreams that are ready to terminate them for spamming through widespread blocking. In fact, the practices of most companies who proclaim “we’re legitimate email marketers” are so bad that the phrase has entered the lexicon as a sign that the company is attempting to surf the gray area between commercial email and spam as close to the spam side of that territory as possible.
What do I mean by that? I mean that the address collection practices and the mailing processes used by self-proclaimed legitimate email marketers are sloppy. They don’t really care about individual recipients, they just care about the numbers. They buy addresses, they use affiliates, they dip whole limbs in the co-reg pool; all told their subscription practices are very sloppy. Because they didn’t scrape or harvest the email address, they feel justified in claiming the recipient asked for it and that they are legitimate.
They don’t really care that they’re mailing people who don’t want their mail and really never asked to receive it. What kinds of practices am I talking about?
Buying co-reg lists. “But the customer signed up, made a purchase, took an online quiz and the privacy policy says their address can be shared.” The recipient doesn’t care that they agreed to have their email address handed out to all and sundry, they don’t want that mail.
Arguing with subscribers. “But all those people who labeled my mail as spam actually subscribed!!!” Any time a mailer has to argue with a subscriber about the validity of the subscription, there is a problem with the subscription process. If the sender and the receiver disagree on whether there was really an opt-in, the senders are rarely given the benefit of the doubt.
Using affiliates to hide their involvement in spam. A number of companies use advertising agencies that outsource acquisition mailings that end up being sent by spammers. These acquisition mailings are sent by the same spammers sending enlargement spam. The advertiser gets all the benefits of spam without any of the consequences.
Knowing that their signup forms are abused but failing to stop the abuse. A few years back I was talking with a large political mailer. They were insisting they were legitimate email marketers but were finding a lot of mail blocked. I mentioned that they were a large target for people forging addresses in their signup form. I explained that mailing people who never asked for mail was probably the source of their delivery problems. They admitted they were probably mailing people who never signed up, but weren’t going to do anything about it as it was good for their bottom line to have so many subscribers.
Self described legitimate email marketers do the bare minimum possible to meet standards. They talk the talk to convince their customers they’re legitimate:

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Don't forget to check out the forest

I have the #emailmarketing feed on twitter scrolling live across my screen while I’m working. It’s been an interesting experience as many of the people who tweet #emailmarketing aren’t part of my social network.
Over the last week or so there’s been a lot of tweeting going on about Ben and Jerry’s GIVING UP EMAIL MARKETING!!! Only, come to find out, that’s not what they’re doing. Yes, they are moving more into the social networking arena but they will be continuing to connect with subscribers through email. Today many are tweeting that perhaps they “jumped the cow” with their initial reports of email abandonment by B&J.
Watching the ongoing discussions led me to wonder if a lot of email marketers are so focused on the trees that they miss the forest? Are they so disconnected from how people actually use email, and social networks for that matter, that they spend way to much time chasing a response and not enough time thinking about what they’re saying and doing?
Email marketing discussions often focus on a limited number of things, the biggest are how to get mail to the inbox and how to get recipients to engage. Many marketers spend time and money looking for the elusive combination of factors that will get their mail to the inbox and impel the recipient to give the sender money. The focus is on details like color and pre-headers and length and timing and content above and below the fold and the perfect call to action.
The discussions focus almost exclusively on the sender and only mention the subscriber in passing. That is understandable on one level. Senders can only control one end of the equation and figuring out what inputs compel the best response from the other side is what marketing is all about.
But there’s another part of email marketing, and that is that subscribers invite marketers into their inboxes. When someone subscribes to a newsletter or mail from a company they’re offering that company the opportunity to interact with them in their personal space. This is, in fact, the holy grail of marketing having the customer invite contact from a seller.
I suspect this is why the rumors of Ben and Jerry’s abandoning email had people all up in arms. A  company abandoning a channel where they had an engaged and interested audience? PREPOSTEROUS! What’s happening to email as marketing?
I’ll be honest, I didn’t pay much attention because it was such a silly idea. Any marketer worth their salt wouldn’t give up a way to interact with customers. Ben and Jerry’s is a company with an almost cult like following. Anyone who was going to subscribe to a B&J newsletter was going to want that mail (new flavors! coupons! new locations! inside information!).
Someone started a rumor, though, that B&J were abandoning email marketing and everyone focusing on the trees grabbed that story and ran with it. They were so focused on the details they didn’t take a step back and think about what they were repeating. Had they taken a step back and thought about the forest they would have realized how silly the idea of B&Js abandoning email as a customer communication channel was.

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About that Junk Folder

I use a pretty standard mail filtering setup – a fairly vanilla SpamAssassin setup on the front end, combined with naive bayesian content filters in my mail client. So I don’t reject any mail, it just ends up in one of my inboxes or a junk folder. And I have a mix of normal consumer mail – facebook, twitter, lots of commercial newsletters, mail from friends and colleagues and spam. (As well as that I have a lot of high traffic industry mailing lists, but overall it’s a fairly normal mix.)
My bayesian filter gets trained mostly by me hitting “this is spam” when spam makes it to my inbox. If I’m expecting an email “immediately” – something like a mailing list COI confirmation or email as part of buying something online – I’ll check my spam filter and move the mail to my inbox in the rare case it ended up there. Other than that I let it and spamassassin chug along with no tweaking.
I’m starting a data analysis project, based on my own inboxes, and as part of that I’m using some tools to look for false positives in my junk folders, and manually fixing anything that’s misclassified. I’ve been doing this for a couple of hours now, and I’ve found some interesting things.

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