Timely and appropriate mail

I woke up this morning to an exploding twitter and FB feeds with lots of friends cheering the defeat of DOMA and Prop 8. Apparently some companies are getting into the act as well.
(Behind a cut because some of this may be slightly NSFW in some places)

TimelyMail_GV Less than 4 hours after the rulings came down, Good Vibration had an email campaign going out celebrating the decisions.
Given the likely demographics of their customer base (mostly liberal, left-leaning, LGBT supporters) this is a great campaign. Lots of people are excited and ecstatic about the rulings. What better way to increase sales than by harvesting some of that energy?
But it’s also a good branding opportunity for Good Vibes. It’s a way for the company to communicate their values to their customer base. By celebrating the rulings, Good Vibes is confirming their commitment to “San Francisco Values.”
I have no doubt that Good Vibes had another campaign ready to go if the court had ruled the opposite way. This campaign, too, would have reinforced their values and engaged their recipient base.
I’m sure other companies and organizations, on both sides of the issue, had similar campaigns lined up to engage and electrify their base. Getting revenue out of it would be good, but is really not the point of these campaigns.

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Email and politics

I occasionally consult for activists using email. Their needs and requirements are a little different from email marketers. Sure, the requirements for email delivery are the same: relevant and engaging mail to people who requested it. But there are complicating issues that most marketers don’t necessarily have to deal with.
Activist groups are attractive targets for forged signups. Think about it, when people get deeply involved in arguments on the internet, they often look for ways to harass the person on the other end of the disagreement. They will often signup the people they’re disagreeing with for mailing lists. When the disagreements are political, the logical target is a group on the other side of the political divide.
People also sign up spamtraps and bad addresses as a way to cause problems or harass the political group itself. Often this results in the activist group getting blocked. This never ends well, as instead of fixing the problem, the group goes yelling about how their voice is being silenced and their politics are being censored!!
No, they’re not being silenced, they’re running an open mailing list and a lot of people are on it who never asked to be on it. They’re complaining and the mail is getting blocked.
With that as background, I noticed one of the major political blogs announced their brand new mailing list today. Based on their announcement it seemed they that they may have talked to someone who knew about managing a mailing list.

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Opting customers in to new programs

Recently, I started getting “1 sale a day!” emails from buy.com. I’ve made purchases from Buy in the past and generally have been content to get emails from them. They’re not always relevant, but hey, it’s relatively non-intrustive marketing.
When they started this new program, they just started mailing: no warning, no introduction, nothing. So I decided to opt out of this mail.
Buy.com has a preference center, and while I was there, I opted out of all email marketing. Why? Because a company that is going to randomly add me to new (daily!) marketing lists is a company I don’t trust any more.
A lot of folks have complained about Amazon doing the same thing. Amazon started a daily deals program and opted in a lot of people without warning, without introduction and without permission.
I get why companies do this. It’s a lot easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. It lets them sell things to people who might never opt-in to that program. And in many areas of direct marketing, consumers have no rights to make the marketing stop. They have no tools to make the marketing stop.
Email is different from many direct marketing channels, though. Many consumers have the tools to make mail stop (filters, this is spam buttons, changing their email address completely) and they do take advantage of them.
Given a marketers job is to extract as much revenue from customers as possible, they can’t respect recipients. They have to treat them as money dispensing machines. But at least in email recipients have some ability to opt-out of the transactions.

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The legitimate email marketer

I cannot tell you how many times over the last 10 years I’ve been talking to someone with a problem and had them tell me “but I’m a legitimate email marketer.” Most of them have at least one serious problem, from upstreams that are ready to terminate them for spamming through widespread blocking. In fact, the practices of most companies who proclaim “we’re legitimate email marketers” are so bad that the phrase has entered the lexicon as a sign that the company is attempting to surf the gray area between commercial email and spam as close to the spam side of that territory as possible.
What do I mean by that? I mean that the address collection practices and the mailing processes used by self-proclaimed legitimate email marketers are sloppy. They don’t really care about individual recipients, they just care about the numbers. They buy addresses, they use affiliates, they dip whole limbs in the co-reg pool; all told their subscription practices are very sloppy. Because they didn’t scrape or harvest the email address, they feel justified in claiming the recipient asked for it and that they are legitimate.
They don’t really care that they’re mailing people who don’t want their mail and really never asked to receive it. What kinds of practices am I talking about?
Buying co-reg lists. “But the customer signed up, made a purchase, took an online quiz and the privacy policy says their address can be shared.” The recipient doesn’t care that they agreed to have their email address handed out to all and sundry, they don’t want that mail.
Arguing with subscribers. “But all those people who labeled my mail as spam actually subscribed!!!” Any time a mailer has to argue with a subscriber about the validity of the subscription, there is a problem with the subscription process. If the sender and the receiver disagree on whether there was really an opt-in, the senders are rarely given the benefit of the doubt.
Using affiliates to hide their involvement in spam. A number of companies use advertising agencies that outsource acquisition mailings that end up being sent by spammers. These acquisition mailings are sent by the same spammers sending enlargement spam. The advertiser gets all the benefits of spam without any of the consequences.
Knowing that their signup forms are abused but failing to stop the abuse. A few years back I was talking with a large political mailer. They were insisting they were legitimate email marketers but were finding a lot of mail blocked. I mentioned that they were a large target for people forging addresses in their signup form. I explained that mailing people who never asked for mail was probably the source of their delivery problems. They admitted they were probably mailing people who never signed up, but weren’t going to do anything about it as it was good for their bottom line to have so many subscribers.
Self described legitimate email marketers do the bare minimum possible to meet standards. They talk the talk to convince their customers they’re legitimate:

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