Leaving money on the table

On August 1 two domains in the Netherlands are going away: wanadoo.nl and orange.nl. Current users of these domains are being transitioned to new addresses at online.nl. Mailchimp has more information and links.
This is a good time for all of us to consider how easy it is for a subscriber to change their address of record. Some senders just have the subscriber unsubscribe from one address and resubscribe for another. This sounds like the simplest way to do things, and it certainly doesn’t take much engineering effort.
But what information do you lose by simply asking subscribers to unsubscribe and resubscribe? It depends on what you’re tracking, but you do lose everything that you track. Preferences, interaction history, purchase history, it’s all gone. Providing a simple way to change an email address of record preserves the information related to that subscriber.
For some senders, keeping subscriber information through different ISPs and email addresses will pay for the development of a preference center. For others, there’s no real value there. How much money are companies leaving on the table by not providing a mechanism for recipients to change their email address?

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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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Unsubscribe rates as a measure of engagement.

Over at Spamtacular Mickey talks about the email marketers’ syllogism.

  1. Anyone who doesn’t want our mail will opt-out.
  2. Most people don’t opt-out.
  3. Therefore, most people want our mail.

This clearly fallacious reasoning is something I deal with frequently with my clients, particularly those who come to me for reputation repair. They can’t understand why people are calling them spammers, because their unsubscribe rates and complaint rates are very low. The low complaints and unsubscribes must mean their mail is wanted. Unfortunately, the email marketers’ syllogism leads them to faulty conclusions.
There are many reasons people don’t opt-out of mail they don’t want. Some of it may be practical, the mail never hits their inbox, either due to ISP level filters or their own personal filters. Some people take a stance that they do not opt out of mail they did not opt-in to and if they don’t recognize the company, they won’t opt-out.
In any case, low levels of opt-outs or even this-is-spam hits does not mean that recipients want that mail. The sooner marketers figure this out, the better for them and their delivery.

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Best Practices: your mileage may vary

YMMV. One of those abbreviations us old folks used ages ago before email had pictures and the closest we had to social networking was USENET and social gaming was in the form of MUDs. I rarely see it used any more. In a lot of ways that’s a sad thing. It was a very useful abbreviation. Using it at the end of a post full of advice was a sign that the author was providing information but knew that different situations may require different solutions. It acknowledged that what might be the best practice in one form may not be the best for another.
It’s not just the usage that seems to have declined, there seem to be a lot more people who just want to share The Answer! and not acknowledge their experience may not be universal. This seems particularly rampant in email marketing, at least to me (YMMV).
I’ve talked before about how I don’t believe there are any universal best practices for email.
Let’s be honest, the experience of a well known national retailer buying, or appending email addresses is not going to be the same as a local business doing the same thing. The national retailer acquiring email addresses and sending well targeted mail to their purchasers probably won’t cause too many delivery problems, and will generate revenue. The local pizza place probably won’t be so lucky.
A number of marketers have complained that they all too often hear “it depends” when they ask a question about email. But how well a particular email campaign perform does depend. Success depends on the audience and the offer. But more than just the specific offer, success also depends on how well known the brand is and what their real world reputation with customers is.
Customers are a lot more likely to give brands the benefit of the doubt if they like the product. That means poor practices don’t always result in poor results. It also means other companies may not have the same success with poor practices.
Your Mileage May Vary.

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