Growing your list carefully

laura
Industry
July 17, 2013

Karl Murray wrote a great set of recommendations for growing an email marketing list. I really can’t think of anything I would have said differently. Touching customers and getting contact information from them is great, but there are situations where this gets bad addresses. Too many bad addresses can impact delivery.
So how do you grow your list without falling into a delivery trap? The specific recommendations, as always, depend on your specific situation. But knowing how bad addresses get onto your list will allow you to implement mitigation strategies that actually work.

Types of bad addresses

Typos
These are usually addresses typed in by the user during a transaction. In my case, my fingers can type wordtothewise.com very quickly, but at least 1 time in 10 I type wordtotehwise.com or something similar. My fingers just get away from me. Other people can typo their username or their domain name. Many typo domains are used by various spam filtering companies as spamtrap domains and any mail to them can result in blocked mail. Username typos won’t always lead to blocking, but if you have a lot of them, then the complaints may hurt your reputation.
Data Entry Errors
These usually happen when the user writes down their email address and it’s later transcribed into a database or when an address is taken over the phone. Many people have horrible handwriting, increasing the chance that the address is wrong. Plus, there are all the risks of typos during the data entry.
Purposely bad data
These cases are where stores give discounts or other incentives for addresses at point of sale. The customer doesn’t necessarily want email from the store, but is happy to claim their 5% discount or free gift. One of our local brew pubs actually gives free beers during special events if the customer “signs up for their mailing list.” I can only imagine how many people will give a fake address just for a free beer. Some of these addresses are obviously bad (none@none.com, asdf@asdf.com, etc) but some of them are just randomly made up or belong to other people.

What can senders do to protect themselves?

When collecting addresses at the point of sale, have the have the user type in the address or read the address on the screen before submission.
Collect addresses electronically rather than on paper for later transcription to minimize data entry errors.
When collecting email addresses over the phone, try to send a message during the call to confirm the recipient can receive it.
The first email sent to any recipient should always have a link for “This is not me” so the mistaken recipient can notify you that the address is incorrect and should not be mailed again.
Always send a welcome message. This should be sent as soon as possible, ideally before the user leaves the website or the register. In stores people with smart phones can be encouraged to check their mail right there to make sure they’ve received it. If the message bounces and that information can be pushed back to the register the company associate can ask for a correct address before the end of the transaction. The same bounce data can be pushed back to the website to give the user the opportunity to correct the address.
If you’re collecting addresses by giving things away, send a welcome message, or a welcome series, but do not add those addresses to your main list unless and until there has been some positive activity.
Overall, consumers expect to be asked for their email address during most every interaction with a business. This is not a bad thing, but does mean that the business needs to have processes in place to make sure their data is clean. Clean data is more responsive data.

Harvesting and forging email addresses

For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam.
Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website less than a month and I’m already getting lots of spam to it. Most of it is business related spam, but there’s a couple things that make me think that someone has been signing that address up to mailing lists.
One is the confirmation email I received from Yelp. I don’t actually believe Yelp harvested my address and tried to create me an email account. I was happy when I got the first mail from Yelp. It said “click here to confirm your account.” Yay! Yelp is actually using confirmations so I just have to ignore the mail and that will all go away.
At least I was happy about it, until I started getting Yelp newsletters to that address.
Yelp gets half a star for attempting to do COI, but loses half for sending newsletters to people who didn’t confirm their account.
I really didn’t believe that people would grab a clearly tagged address off the blog and subscribe it to mailing lists or networking sites. I simply didn’t believe this happened anymore. I know forge subscribing used to be common, but it does appear that someone forge signed me up for a Yelp account. Clearly there are more dumb idiots out there than I thought.
Of course, it’s not just malicious people signing the address up to lists. There are also spammers harvesting directly off the website.
I did expect that there would be some harvesting going on and that I would get spam to the address. I am very surprised at the volume and type of spam, though. I’m getting a lot of chinese language spam, a lot of “join our business organization” spam and mail claiming I subscribed to receive their offers.
Surprisingly, much of the spam to this address violates CAN SPAM in some way shape or form. And I can prove harvesting, which would net treble damages if I had the time or inclination to sue.
It’s been an interesting experience, putting an unfiltered address on the website. Unfortunately, I am at risk of losing your questions because of the amount of spam coming in. I don’t think I’ve missed any, yet, but losing real mail is always a risk when an address gets a lot of spam – whether or not the recipient runs filters.
I’m still pondering solutions, but for now the questions address will remain as it is.

Gathering data at subscription time

I recently received a survey from my Congressional Representative. She wanted to know what I wanted her to focus on in the coming year. I decided to go ahead and answer the survey, as I have some rather strong opinions on some of the stuff happening in Congress these days.
The email itself was pretty unremarkable, although quite well done. I was as much interested in answering the survey because it’s one of the few emails I’ve seen with an embedded survey.

Uploading your address book to social media

I am one of the moderators of a discussion list working on a document about getting off blocklists. If anyone not on the list attempts to post to the list I get a moderation request. One came through while I was gone.
Now, I don’t really think Jim Mills wants to be friends with a mailing list. I think he probably gave LinkedIn his email password and LinkedIn went through and scraped addresses out of his address book and sent invitations to all those addresses.
I don’t have any problem with connecting to people on social media. I do even understand that some people have no problem giving their passwords over to let social media sites plunder their address books and find connections. What I do have a problem with is social media sites that don’t do any pruning or editing of the scraped addresses before sending invitations.
In this case, the email address, like many mailing lists, has in the email address “mailman.” While it’s probably impossible to weed out every mailing list, support address and commercial sender, it doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult to run some minor word matching and filtering. It’s not even like those addresses have to be removed from invites. Instead they could be presented to the user for confirmation that these are real people and addresses.
Yes, it’s friction in the transaction and it costs money to do and do well. But those costs and friction are currently offloaded onto uninvolved third parties.