The truth matters.

bullhornCall within the next 10 minutes…
Consumers with last names starting with O – Z can call tomorrow…
Only 5 seats left at this price!
 
All of these are common marketing techniques designed to prompt consumers to buy. It’s not a new idea, create a sense of urgency and people are more likely to buy.
I think some marketers are so used to making outrageous claims to support their marketing goals, that it doesn’t occur to them that the truth matters to some people.
There’s almost no better way to get me to send in a spam complaint than to send me an email with a claim about how I opted in.
Example:

You are receiving this e-mail because your e-mail address was registered at Money Net LLC to receive relevant 3rd party communications. If you would like to unsubscribe from receiving 3rd party email communications from this marketer please click the unsubscribe link below.
— Sent from a company that doesn’t do business in the US.

Another example:

I am not spamming. I have studied your website, prepared an audit report and believe I can help with your business promotion. If you still want us to not contact you, you can ignore this email or ask to remove and I will not contact again.
— Sent with a series of followups over a month period.

And another example:

You are receiving this email from Spamming Marketing Company because you have previously shared your email address with us…
— Sent to an email address harvested off LinkedIn.

I’m not even sure the above are good marketing. But they’re certainly untrue. No, I didn’t subscribe to Money Net LLC and as I am not a UK resident, I’m not eligible for your sale. No, you didn’t leave me alone and stop contact. No, I didn’t share my email address with you.
In the email space, typical marketing prose doesn’t always work. People view their email inboxes as a much more personal space than television or even their postal mailbox. Sending emails that contain blatant falsehoods is equivalent to going into their house and lying to their face. It’s bad practice, and it’s bad customer relationships.
In email, everything is about the relationship. Lies don’t make for good relationships.

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Mary Litynski Award winner Jayne Hitchcock

This morning the Messaging, Mobile and Malware Anti-Abuse Working Group announced the winner of the Mary Litynski Award.
Congratulations to Jayne Hitchcock of WHO@ for her work over the last 2 decades fighting online abuse and cyberstalking.
I’ve never actually met Jayne, but I do remember following her story in the late 90s. She started off trying to protect people from being scammed by Woodside Literary Agency. In return for her work to inform and protect people the principals of Woodside set out on a multi-year harassment campaign against her.
This was in the late 90s and the Internet was very new. There weren’t any laws. There weren’t really abuse desks. We had to protect each other. Law enforcement didn’t know what to do with problems. There weren’t any laws against harassment online. The word “cyberstalking” was created by a reporter when describing what was happening to Jayne.
Jayne has been a force for good online and she and her volunteers help people who are victims of abuse online and cyberstalking. She’s been instrumental in getting anti-cyberstalking laws passed and helping law enforcement understand why online abuse is an issue and that it should be addressed.

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Spam is not a marketing strategy

Unfortunately, this fact doesn’t stop anyone from spamming as part of their marketing outreach. And it’s not just email spam. I get quite a bit of blog spam, most of which is caught by Akismet. Occasionally, though, there’s spam which isn’t caught by the filter and ends up coming to me for approval.
Many of these are explanations of why email marketing is so awesome. Some of them are out and out laugh inducing. One of my favorites, and the inspiration for this post.

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Email saves trees!

The arrival of my first spam email was a bit of a shock. I’d been on the internet for years by that point and had never seen junk mail in my inbox. Of course, the Internet was a very different place. The web was still a toddler. There was no email marketing industry. In fact, there wasn’t much commerce on the web at all. Much of the “surfing” I did was using gopher and ftp rather than the fancy new web browser called NCSA Mosaic. To share pictures we actually had to send printouts by postal mail.
It wasn’t just getting spam that was memorable (oh, great! now my inbox is going to look like my postal box, stuffed full of things I don’t want), it was the domain name: savetrees.com. Built into the domain name was an entire argument defending spam on the grounds of environmental friendliness. By sending spam instead of postal mail we could save the earth. Anyone who didn’t like it was morally corrupt and must hate the planet.
Why do I mention this history? During a discussion on a list for marketers earlier this week, multiple people mentioned that email marketing was clearly and obviously the much more environmentally sound way to do things. I mentioned this over on Facebook and one of my librarian friends (who was one of the people I was email friends with back in those early days) started doing her thing.
She posted her findings over on the Environmental News Bits blog: The comparative environmental impact of email and paper mail. It’s well worth a read, if only because a lot of companies have really looked into the issue in great detail. Much greater detail than I thought was being put into the issue.
I shared one of the links she found, the 2009 McAfee study, with the email marketing group discussing the issue. (You may want to put down the drinks before reading the next line.) It was universally panned as marketing and therefore the conclusions couldn’t be trusted.
Anyone who pays any attention knows that nothing we do and none of the choices we make are environmentally neutral. Plastic bags were supposed to save trees from becoming paper bags, but turned into an environmental mess of their own.
Simple slogans like “email saves trees” might make marketers feel better, and may have gained Cyberpromo a strong customer base in the early days. But the reality is different.

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