Gathering data at subscription time

I recently received a survey from my Congressional Representative. She wanted to know what I wanted her to focus on in the coming year. I decided to go ahead and answer the survey, as I have some rather strong opinions on some of the stuff happening in Congress these days.
The email itself was pretty unremarkable, although quite well done. I was as much interested in answering the survey because it’s one of the few emails I’ve seen with an embedded survey.

Screen shot of the email survey in my mailbox
Screenshot of the email survey
I was a little unnerved by the note at the bottom, under the submit button. “By clicking submit you will automatically be opted into receiving regular updates from my e-newsletter.” It’s not necessarily that I mind being opt-ed in, but I get mail from her often enough that I’m pretty sure that I’m already opted in. But, OK, I clicked submit.
I noticed this was being hosted on a website called address-verify.com. OK, so it’s been outsourced to a 3rd party. But what I saw on the website caused me to recoil in horror, both as a email recipient and as an email expert. The “subscription page” doesn’t look like it was intended to be shown to the general public. (Click on the image to see the full form)
Subscription form, not for the public
This appears to be more information than any recipient would give
My first reaction was “You can not seriously expect me to give you all of that data! And why are you asking for my email address, you have it! You sent me email!” Then I started looking at the form a little harder and it actually looks like an internal form used to track constituent contact and not one that was supposed to be exposed to recipients.
I’m sure this is all valuable information for my rep to have, but I’m not going to spend a lot of time filling out the long form. It’s too much to hand over.
I’m disappointed. I actually wanted to give my Rep. the information she was asking for. And I happily answered the survey in the email. I really appreciated the initial email and the subscription notice on the email. It seemed like a well put together campaign and I am happy to give her my feedback. I’m not sure anyone at the office actually looked at the landing page before the email was deployed.
Unfortunately, this is not as uncommon as it should be. Sometimes senders don’t pay attention to landing pages and actually check mails before deploying them, particularly when they’re sending something new. In this case, they lost the chance to engage more with me. And I lost the chance to engage more with them as I just don’t want to spend 20 minutes filling out pages and pages of a survey.

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Food for thought

Companies that can’t be bothered to implement good subscription practices will rarely be bothered to send relevant or engaging email.
True or False?

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Choosing Twitter over Email to engage customers

Eric Goldman has an interesting blog post over at hit Technology and Marketing Law blog comparing and contrasting twitter and email. One of the reasons he likes Twitter is that it gives him, the ‘subscriber’ (follower in Twitspeak) control. There’s no chance that the company will sell his data. And, if the company does tweet too much that is uninteresting or irrelevant, the follower can ‘unsubscribe’ (or unfollow) without any fear that the company will override or lose the unsub request.
To my mind, the biggest problem with Twitter for B2C communication is the 140 character limit. On the other hand, it means that companies need to be clear in their language and concise in their tweets. Maybe the limited space is actually a feature not a bug.

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Don't take my subscribers away!

Tom Sather has a good summary of the problems with inactive email addresses and why data hygiene is critical to maintain high deliverability. These recommendations are some of the most difficult to convince people to implement.
Some of my clients even show me numbers that show that a recipient that hadn’t opened or read and email in 18 months, suddenly made a multi-hundred dollar purchase. Another client had clear numbers that showed even recipients that didn’t open for an entire year were responsible for 10% of revenue.
They tell me I can’t expect them to let their customers go. These are significant amounts of money and they won’t let any potential revenue go without a fight.
I understand this, I really do. The bottom line numbers do make it tough to argue that inactive subscribers should be removed. Particularly when the best we can offer is vague statements about how delivery may be affected by sending mail to unengaged users.
I don’t think many senders realize that when they talk about unengaged users they are actually talking about two distinct groups of recipients.
The first group is that group of users that actively receive email, but who aren’t opening or reading emails from particular senders. This could be because of their personal filters, or because the mail is going to the bulk folder or even simply because they don’t load images by default. This is the pool that most senders think of when they’re arguing against removing unengaged users.
The second group is that group of users that never logs in ever. They have abandoned the email address and never check it. I wrote a series of posts on Zombie Emails (Part 1, 2, 3) last September, finishing with suggestions on how to fight zombie email addresses.
Unlike senders ISPs can trivially separate the abandoned accounts from the recipients who just don’t load images. Sending to a significant percentage of zombie accounts makes you look like a spammer. Not just because spammers send mail to really old address lists, but a number of spammers pad their lists with zombie accounts in order to hide their complaint rates. The ISPs caught onto this trick pretty quickly and also discovered this was a good metric to use as part of their filtering.
I know it’s difficult to face the end of any relationship. But an email subscription isn’t forever and if you try to make it forever then you may face delivery problems with your new subscribers.

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