Marketing pet peeves

Loren McDonald has a great post over at Mediapost listing his email marketing pet peeves. I particularly love this because he includes those things annoy him as a subscriber.
Most of what annoys me as a subscriber is sloppy marketing. Really is it so hard to actually check what you’re sending and who you’re sending it to?
elloIFNAME
This was a notice from Ello telling me that they’d get to my request for an account “at some point.” There were two fails here. The first is very obvious from the To: line. The second is even worse. I have an Ello account, I’m not waiting. Apparently they pulled their “current user” file and added it to the “waiting user” file and then mailed all of them a notice the accounts were getting turned on, albeit slowly.
The footer of the mail made it clear they knew they were spraying and praying:

PS: If you’re already using Ello and getting this note, you can unsubscribe using the links below.

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Just stop spamming!

Al posted a clip from the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar on SpamResource (slightly NSFW) that resonated with me this week.
If you meet me on the street and ask me what my job is I’ll tell you that I work with companies who send bulk email to make sure that they’re not sending spam. I do this by educating clients into good practices and teaching them how to send mail people want to receive. What this statement doesn’t tell people is that usually clients find me because they have been suspended by their ISP for spamming or blocked by some receiver.
Clients who find me because they can’t send mail usually hire me to solve their immediate problem. And I do give the the best advice I can to resolve their problem. But fixing today’s problem isn’t enough, you also need to fix the processes that caused the problem. To me, a critical part of my job is to set clients up for long term success by creating procedures that will get them delisted and keep them from being relisted in the future.
Sometimes, though, I have those moments Al is talking about. When clients don’t actually want to fix their problems, they just want to argue. They want to argue about the definition of spam. They want to argue about permission. They want to argue about how awful their ISPs are for suspending their account. They want to argue about CAN SPAM. They want to argue about free speech. They are angry and they want to fight.
My role is to listen to them, then guide them down a constructive path. I do turn out to be the sounding board for a lot of customers, sometimes they just need to know someone is listening to them. Once they get it all out we can move on into solving the problem.
But, boy, are there the occasional conversations where I just want to scream, “JUST STOP SPAMMING!”

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More on spam traps

A couple weeks ago I had a discussion with Ken Magill of the Magill Report about spam traps. He had moderated a webinar about spam traps and I publicly contradicted some of the statements made about spam traps.  He contacted me and interviewed me for an updated article about traps for his newsletter. The next week he had a rebuttal from Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx, taking anti-spammers (and presumably me) to task for pointing out that some folks use typos as spam traps.  This week, Derek Harding of Innovyx continues the discussion about traps and how they are a reality that senders need to deal with.
Spam traps are a reality and they’re not going away at any foreseeable point in the future. No entity that actually cares about blocking spam is going to give up the information that spam traps provide them. Not A Single One. They are some of the original tools in the filtering arsenal and they have proven their use and reliability for people trying to keep inboxes useable.
Dela focused on typos in his rebuttal to Ken, but typos aren’t the real issue. The real issue is that any address acquisition technique (and I do mean any) is subject to errors. Those errors end up directing mail at people who didn’t ask for it. If there are too many errors or mail to too many of the wrong addresses, that will result in delivery problems.
Yelling at the people monitoring the accuracy of your email marketing doesn’t make your marketing any better. It doesn’t stop mail from going to the wrong people. It doesn’t actually help anything.
My focus is on helping marketers market better. My focus is on helping folks sending email get that mail to the inboxes of people who want it. I don’t really care if my clients hit traps, traps are, as Derek said, “the canary in the coal mine.” What I really want is to make sure every person who asked for mail from my clients gets that mail. Every trap on the list? That is a lost sale, a lost touch, a lost opportunity. The traps are just the addresses we know are wrong. If there are traps on a list, then it is guaranteed there are deliverable addresses that belong to someone who is not a customer. This generally means two lost customers, the one who isn’t getting the mail they asked for and the one who is getting mail they never asked for.
Traps are a way to quantify missed opportunities, but they’re not the only missed opportunities. If mail is going to traps, it’s not going to your real customers. That is why marketers should care about traps.
 
 

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