Why complain now?

There’s a concert promoter in London that’s been spamming me for years and years. Most of the time my spam filters take care of it and I never see their mail. Every once in a while, though, one of emails gets through and ends up in my inbox. Usually I move it to junk, curse at my filters for not getting it right and just go on with whatever I’m doing.
I suspect this is more common than not with most people. Those lucky enough to have a “this is spam” button can make the mail stop by clicking it. Others, like me, just have to delete it and move on.
Sometimes, though, I get to the point where I’ve had enough. I’ll send in a complaint to the sender or their provider.
I have to wonder, though, how many people react to email negatively and hit “this is spam” when they’ve been ignoring mail for a while. This can complicate the lives of senders (what doesn’t?) because the “this is spam” isn’t in reaction to a specific email, but happens due to circumstances outside of the sender’s control.
Delivery is an ever changing field, and it’s just getting more complex and harder as receiver tools get more sophisticated.

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Mail that looks like spam

One thing I repeat over and over again is to not send mail that looks like spam. Over at the Mailchimp Blog they report some hard data on what looks like spam. The design is simple, they took examples of mail sent by their customers and forwarded them over to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project to be reviewed by humans.
In a number of cases they discovered that certain kinds of templates kept getting flagged as spam, even when Mailchimp was sure that the sender had permission and the recipients wanted the mail. They analyzed some of these false positives and identified some of the reasons that naive users may identify those particular emails as spam.
Ben concludes:

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Less can be more and more can be more

The Wall Street Journal reports that some large retailers are scaling back their email marketing. Benefits of sending less mail include higher open rates, lower unsubscribe rates and an increase in sales.

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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.
In fact, for many people I talk to when they say “best practice” what they really mean is “send as much mail as recipients will tolerate.” This isn’t that surprising, the advertising and marketing industries survive by pushing things as far as the target will tolerate (emphasis added).

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