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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Delivery versus marketing

I’ve been thinking lately that sometimes that what works for marketing doesn’t always work for delivery.
For instance in many areas of marketing repetition is key. Repeat a slogan and forge an association between the slogan and the product in the mind of the consumer. More repetition is better. Marketers can even go so far as using the same ad to drive consumer action. Television advertising is a prime example of this. Companies don’t create new content for every advertising slot, they create one or a few ads and then replay them over and over. The advertiser doesn’t even really care if the consumer consciously ignores the ads. The unconscious connection is still being made.
In the world of email delivery, though, having many or most recipients ignore advertising is the kiss of death. Too many unengaged users and filters decide that mail shouldn’t go into the inbox. These don’t even have to be ISP level filters, but Bayesian filters built into desktop mail clients.
Sending repetitive ads over email may be an effective marketing strategy, but may not be an effective delivery strategy.
Am I off base here and missing something? Tell me I’m wrong in the comments.

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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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How not to build a mailing list

I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

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