Debating Appending

There was a session at the recent Email Insiders Summit that discussed appending. I wasn’t there, but I’ve been hearing about the session, including one description that involved the term ‘fist fight.’
I have found a couple articles about the session.
E-Append Comes Under Fire
Email Insider Summit Email Append Panel — The Day’s Hottest Debate
I encourage folks to read both articles and watch the video posted by Return Path. I agree with different points by folks on both sides of the debate. Appending can be a useful acquisition strategy for some companies. But we can’t pretend there’s any permission involved in common appending strategies.
Ignoring the lack of permission, I believe that the companies saying it is a successful strategy share some common factors.

  1. They are companies with high brand awareness
  2. They are companies with sufficient resources to commit to long term marketing strategy.
  3. They have a mature direct marketing strategy.
  4. They have a well maintained customer database.
  5. They have funds to use a decent appending provider.

Of course most of those factors also mean that those same companies could send unsolicited email to non-customers and have success with that strategy.
My experience, and the experience of many delivery people, is that appending causes a lot of problems. But I’ll be the first to admit that we only see the incidents where it doesn’t work. If an ESPs customer does an append and it doesn’t cause delivery problems, then the ESP will probably never know.
Does this mean I support appending? Not really. I land firmly on the side of permission and that recipients should have control over the email they receive. Unless the recipient is actively involved in the appending process, and giving their permission for their address to be sold to a company, there is no permission involved. So I won’t advocate it, or support its use. I think that opt-out appending doesn’t scale in the same way that spamming doesn’t scale.
 

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Costs and accounting for email

The decision by Cheetahmail to stop allowing customers to use email append caused a very long discussion on some of the marketing lists.  One of the criticisms had to do with what a dumb “business decision” Cheetah was making.
I disagree. Appending, and other non-permission based sending cause a lot of costs to trickle down on the ESP. Many of the large ESPs have teams of 8 or 10 people working to manage delivery, deal with blocks and keep the mail flowing. In fact, I once had a client say “We want to be as clean as ExactTarget” only to choke when I told them how many people are on the compliance and delivery team at ET.
That’s not even looking at the cost of a SBL listing. One company estimated the cost of a slightly less than 24 hour block at over $1,000,000 in lost opportunity costs and in actual staff costs to deal with the listing. I know of one Fortune 20 company who had to re-engineer their entire customer and prospect databases due to a blocklist. And, yeah, that one was actually due to an append. They did an append and the append not only added a “new” address to a record where the person had previously opted out, but that person worked at a major spam filtering company. They experienced a whole world of very expensive pain.
Many ESPs are actually making a sound business decision by refusing to deal with non-permission mail, whether it be a purchased list or an appended list. The sender does not have permission to send to the addresses. That causes all sorts of delivery problems, which costs the ESPs lots of money and staff time to deal with. Most marketers won’t actually pay for the resources they use when appending or buying lists. Then they blame the ESP when their mail ends up in the bulk folder or is blocked outright.
I don’t think many marketers fully integrate the cost of dealing with a poor list into their decisions. My tweet from earlier today “If you have to “ignore all the costs associated with complaints” to find a positive ROI on opt-out mail, is there really a positive ROI? is a paraphrase of one of the things I heard.
ESPs can’t avoid those costs, they’re stuck with them. Lowering those costs by requiring senders to only send to recipients who have given permission is a smart business decision. Marketers don’t pay those costs, but if they even acknowledged them I suspect that there would be a whole lot less sloppy email marketing.

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I do not think that means what you think it means

Yesterday, I looked at the analysis of ESP delivery done by Mr. Geake. Today we’ll look at some of his conclusions.
“Being blacklisted most likely suggests that sender IP either sends out to a great deal of unknown or angry recipients.” That’s not how most blocklists work. Most blocklists are driven by spam traps or by the personal mailboxes of the list maintainers. The only blocklist that took requests from the public was the old MAPS RBL, and I don’t believe that is the case any longer.
Blocking at ISPs is often a sign of sending out a lot of mail to unknown or angry / unengaged recipients. But most ISPs don’t make their lists public. Some allow anyone to look up IP addresses, and if we had the IPs we could check. But we don’t, so we can’t.
“[…] if you share this IP with Phones4U then only 62% of your emails will be accepted by a recipient’s email server. That’s before they hit the junk filter. I wouldn’t want to pay for that.” This conclusion relies on the Sender Score “accepted rate” number. Accepted Rate is a figure I don’t rely on for much. I’ve never been able to reconcile this number with what client logs tell me about accepted rate. For instance, I have one IP address that has a 4.4% acceptance rate. But I know that 19 out of 20 emails from this IP do not bounce. In fact, it’s rare to see any mail from this IP bounce.
The one thing that Mr. Geake gets right, in all of this, is that if you’re on a shared IP address with a poor sender, then you share that sender’s reputation. Their reputation can hurt your delivery.
But a dedicated IP isn’t always your best bet, either.  Smaller senders may not have the volume or frequency required to develop and keep a good reputation on an static IP. In these cases, sharing an IP address with similar senders may actually increase delivery.
For some senders outsourcing the email expertise is a better use of resources than dedicating a person to managing email delivery. For other senders, bringing mail in house and investing in staff to manage email marketing is better.
Tomorrow: how do you really evaluate an ESP?

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Return Path acquires OtherInbox

This morning Return Path announced they have acquired OtherInbox.
OtherInbox is a service that allows subscribers to create tagged email addresses and organize incoming mail. Acquiring OIB gives Return Path access to recipient behaviour that only the ISPs had previously.
According to the press release, Return Path will be using engagement data from OIB as another factor for Return Path Certification. I think this can only improve the scoring and reflect a more modern measure of wanted mail.
Congratulations to Return Path and OtherInbox.

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