From NPR.
I’ve had clients over the years who were email marketing agencies selling leads to lenders. Their delivery is horrible, even when they’re doing all the “right things” for email. I’ve come to the conclusion that PayDay lenders are a lot like lawyers: “95% of them give the rest a bad name.”
PayDay loans are the one area where content trumps everything else, and so much of the content out there is bad, it can ruin delivery for everything. The NPR article speaks to why that is.
What happens when you apply for a PayDay loan
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It’s the tragedy of the commons. Enough payday loaners do bad stuff that it has made the ISPs hate all of the industry’s mail.
Well said Al… we have seen this first hand at our lead gen company.
Well. I agree about quality of data, but that can happen with pay day or without pay day loans. I think, the bottom line is good data, higher user engagement makes a big difference. ISP’s has automated filters and they generally look at reputation of IP and domain name, if it passes then allow more mail to that domain. Key here is user engagement. If a user don’t want that mail, just don’t send it, right?
Mohamed, I think that you are ignoring the effect of a truly toxic industry on email deliverability. Payday lenders are a mostly-scummy lot that aggressively buy leads and pursue people til they hate the day they were introduced to telephones and/or email. Worse, payday loans as a product are also in a dark grey area ethically and borderline legally in many jurisdictions.
Add those two things together with a tool like Procmail or Perl, both of which are free and available to any system administrator that runs a Unix-based mailserver. The result — a great many ad-hoc pattern matching filters of varying quality. Some of them dump any email that mentions payday loans, Viagra, MILLION US DOLLARS, etc. into the system junk mail folder.
IP reputation and engagement often don’t get a chance to kick in, because on a small or medium-sized mailserver a local filter often runs first. Such a filter is often less resource intensive than checking a remotely-hosted DNS-based list. IP reputation and engagement are therefore checked only for email that passes initial filtering.
Is this a good idea? Not really, not unless the system administrator is both an excellent coder and watches the junk mail folder carefully for false positives. But it’s easy, and easy solutions often persist until they break something badly enough to force people to re-evaluate.
Al Iverson knows what he’s talking about. The same industry-wide reputation problem caused by more than a few bad actors has made it nearly impossible (and pointless) for legitimate pharmaceutical companies to use bulk email as well.
Ever worked with a payday loan marketer? They almost all seem to be involved in other iffy or quasi-legal stuff at the same time. Win a free iPad, just take our survey! Click here for a free gift card, that’s not really free! And as Mickey is finding out, some of them are happy to scrape your payday loan application web form to sign you up for other kinds of unwanted mail at the same time. The actual practice of payday loans seems awfully ethically challenged, so I guess it shouldn’t surprise us to find that most people marketing them are engaged in other ethically challenged endeavors too.
Their mailing practices are horrible. It wouldn’t surprise me if some places have put “payday loan” in the same word category as “viagra.” It’s not that they’re blocking mail with the word payday loan in it but that mail mentioning payday loans is unwanted and unasked for vastly more than it’s actually opted in.
I’ve had numerous payday loaners ask me for advice over the years. Even the ones who are doing all the “right things” in terms of mailing can’t get into the inbox lately. It seems to be an entire industry I can’t help get inbox delivery. It’s always possible these clients are doing things they’re not telling me about that’s driving delivery problems, but I do try to independently investigate their issues (although some of their signup forms require info I’m not prepared to give).
Anyway, their delivery is bad and I do think it’s because so much of the industry is so bad with their mailing practices that “payday” is a sign that the mail is spam, even when technically it might not be.
You hit both issues head on: a) List acquisition practices (“It’s an op-in list – I promise!”) and equally bad b) abusive mailing practices. They’ll email to their contacts daily until they’re terminated.
At Pinpointe – we no longer accept new customers in certain industries, including quick / payday loans, internet marketing — and the industry we’ve found to be just as offensive as the quick loans – recruiting services.
Ooh, I haven’t run into abusive recruiting services senders…..yet?
Al obviously hasn’t uploaded a resume to a job site for quite a while. 😉 I’ve had to retire an old email address from the early 2000s when I was last out of work and looking because it got overrun by spamming job recruiters.