Marketing and storms

Never let it be said that marketers can’t take advantage of anything. In this case, there was a lot of commercial email mentioning Hurricane Sandy sent over the last few days. The emails themselves mapped into a number of broad categories.
Informational: Emails from hotels, airlines and east coast businesses keeping customers updated about their current status.  Emails from many banks also fell into this category. Generally these emails offered information about reservations, flight statuses and cancellations. In the case of banks, customers were also told about loosening of overdraft and other policies.
Sales: Some retailers used the storm as an excuse for a storm. American Apparel sent out an email advertising a 36 hour sale for residents in states on the hurricane path. This prompted some recipients to complain about the tastelessness of the advertising.
Relief efforts: A number of companies sent out emails encouraging subscribers to donate to relief efforts. In many cases these companies are located in or have employees directly affected by the storm. Some of these companies offered discounts or bonuses to people who donated to relief efforts.
Spam: Finally, I would be remiss in not pointing out that spammers and scammers come out in force after most natural disasters. Spammers took full advantage of the storm, too and were sending out lots of mail mentioning the storm. Mailchimp dedicated a full blog post to looking at the amount of spam mentioning the storm and its impact on email delivery.
Return Path has an analysis of some of the Sandy related mailings and how they performed both between categories (although Return Path didn’t categorize them like I did) and within categories. It’s well worth a read to see how different approaches worked.
Email is a great way to communicate with people. The breadth of emails going out about or referencing the storm are a testament to that.

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Transactional emails

Tamara has an excellent collection of musts related to transactional email. I would add a few more, specific to traveling (hotel and plane reservations) that occurred to me recently as I was bombing through airports trying to read hotel and airline confirmations on my iPhone.

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Storms, outages and email

There’s been quite a bit of discussion about how Hurricane (Superstorm?) Sandy has affected email delivery over the last week. There are a couple things that may affect delivery at a number of domains.
Receiving mailservers hosted in facilities that lost power or connectivity for one reason or another. Most of these issues seem to be resolved now, although a number of places are still on generator power. There are also a number of facilities where employees and customers went above and beyond the call of duty to keep those facilities running. Peer1 got a lot of press for their bucket brigade, but they’re not the only company that kept running despite power outages, flooding and horrible conditions.
Routing hardware went down in a number of places. Again, mostly because of the power outages. Router failures can mean that some mail can’t get from A to B, even if both A and B are up and functioning. As with the servers, these problems seem mostly under control.
Recipients don’t have power or internet at home. In fact, I think this is one of the bigger marketing challenges. Recipients can’t get their mail because they don’t have power or internet. This is probably going to have a bit of a longer term affect on email. Even when folks get their email back, the latest sale email from their favorite vendor isn’t necessarily going to be what they are looking for in their inbox. Even if they are looking for that sale email, they’re going to have a mailbox with days worth of email to sort through.
None of this is a long term problem. It’s mostly temporary. But marketers can expect lower open and click rates during the storm cleanup and restoration phase.

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Letting people stop transactional mail

The question of putting unsub links on transactional messages came up on multiple lists recently. As with any question that has to do with email and controlling it, there were a lot of different opinions.
A number of people believed that transactional mail should never, ever have an unsubscribe. Their argument was that transactional mail is too valuable to allow recipients to unsubscribe from it.
Other people argued that the recipient should always be able to stop mail and that an unsub link was important, even in transactional mail.
A third group pointed out that under CASL transactional mail to Canadian residents may have to have an unsub link, even if the sender doesn’t want to add one in.
As with most questions, I don’t think there is necessarily a single answer for every mailer or sender.
There are absolutely cases where transactional messages should have an unsubscribe. Twitter notifications and Facebook notifications are just some of the examples of mail a lot of people just want to stop.
But should companies allow recipients to unsubscribe from receipts? Some people feel very, very strongly that recipients should never be allowed to unsubscribe from receipts.
The problem with that stance is it ignores the fact that people don’t always correctly type their email addresses and end up giving the address of another person as part of a purchase. Al found a report at the Consumerist where someone is getting flooded with receipts for Nook books she’s never purchased.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, not by a long shot. In fact, in the past year I negotiated a Spamhaus delisting for a very large company that wasn’t confirming email addresses of their customers. This company sells a service that sends email alerts triggered when certain actions happen. Because they were not confirming their customer’s email addresses, they ended up sending alerts to spamtraps. The alerts triggered a SBL listing.
I don’t think that the Nook owner or the alert purchaser are actually malicious or that they purposely gave the wrong email address to their vendors. But it happens, and it happens not infrequently.
What do I recommend?
Transactional mail that is only ever a single event and where that address is not associated with an account don’t need to have an unsubscribe link. If it’s a one-time email, then it’s OK to not have an opt-out link. It’s OK to have an opt-out link, but not necessary.
Transactional mail that’s associated with some sort of account should have a process in place to make sure that mail is going to the right person and if it’s not, that the wrong person can make the mis-directed mail stop. There are multiple ways to do this. One is to confirm the email address associated with the account during the account creation process. Or you can allow anyone receiving the mail to click on a link and opt-out of receiving mail.
Whatever it is, it needs to be effective and protect everyone involved. Requiring the victim recipient to hand over a bunch of personal information, like Virgin Mobile does, helps no one. Continuing to send purchase receipts to an unrelated third party is poor business practice, particularly when you’ve been informed that this is the wrong person.

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