Don't leave that money sitting there

The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts.
I’m probably the first to admit that confirmed opt-in isn’t the solution to all your delivery problems. There are situations where it’s a good idea, there are times when it’s not. There are situations where you absolutely need that extra step involved and there are times when that extra step is just superfluous.
But whether a sender uses confirmed opt in or not they must do something to confirm that the email address actually belongs to their customer. It’s so easy to have data errors in email addresses that there needs to be some sort of error correction process involved.
Senders that don’t do this are leaving money on the table. They’re not taking that extra step to make sure the data they were given is correct. They don’t make any effort to draw a direct line between the email address entered into their web form or given to them at the register or used for a receipt, and their actual customer.
It does happen, it happens enough to make the non-tech press. Consumerist has multiple articles a month on some email address holder that can’t get a giant company to stop mailing them information about someone else’s account.
Just this week, the New Yorker published an article about a long abandoned gmail address that received over 4000 “legitimate” commercial and transactional emails.

It turns out that eighteen@gmail.com (let’s call it—him?—“eighteen” for short) had been admitted to a four-year college that features a mascot named Roary the Lion, helped fund a successful Presidential campaign, traded e-mails with a major television network, treated itself to fabulously over-the-top shopping sprees, and, just for good measure, volunteered to work at the PetSmart on 117th Street in East Harlem.

For every email that account received, an actual customer did not receive the email they wanted. Each of those 4000 messages represents a wanted mail not received and a sale not made and an education not received. Those senders, by not doing anything to link the email address to their customer, left money sitting on the table.
Making a clear and direct connection between a customer and an email address is one of the best ways to improve delivery and email ROI. These are real customers. These are people who give a sender an email address. They want that mail! It only makes sense that the marketer would do something to directly link the person and the address. That link doesn’t need to be done just with confirmed opt-in, but all too many marketers delude themselves that their address collection process is accurate. Many of them aren’t doing any data hygiene, and that costs senders real revenue.

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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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Confirming website registrations

Confirming email addresses during a website registration process is a good practice. It stops people from creating fake accounts, abusing  resources and using that site as a mechanism for harassment. But simply sending out a confirmation mail is not sufficient to prevent problems, particularly when everything about the process assumes that unconfirmed registrations are actually valid and not problem accounts.
I’ve had a couple recent experiences with companies attempting to use email confirmation, but failing pretty miserably. In each case a website set up a process where a user could register an account on the site. Both sites required confirmation of the registration email addresses as part of the process. But in each case there were some major failures that result in non-customers getting email.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about those two specific cases. I’ll also provide specific suggestions on how not to fall into the same trap and actually send opt-in email.

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Confirming addresses for transactional mail

A colleague was asking about confirming transactional mail today. It seems a couple of big retailers got SBLed today for sending receipts to spamtraps. I talked a few weeks ago about why it’s important to let people unsubscribe from transactional email, and many of those same things apply to confirming receipts.

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