It's still spam

Companies are always trying to find new ways to use and abuse email. My mailbox has been rife with mail from companies trying to sell me stuff for my business. It’s been interesting to watch the new ways they’re trying to get attention, while not honoring the most important rule of email marketing.
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Marketing Automation

The advent of “marketing automation” has added a new dimension to how companies can spam leads. They don’t need to do anything and can bug hundreds or thousands of people over time with one simple step. Maybe their prospect will get so annoyed they respond! Just to get you to leave them alone!
I’ve been watching with some fascination as a UK company is trying to sell me… something. They’ve been vague in all the emails I’ve received so far.

Email 1: Let me show you all this great stuff we can do for you.

Email 2: You didn’t answer me the first time, but, really, we have great stuff for you.

Email 3: I’m having trouble contacting someone, can you tell me who the right person at your company is to talk to about all my great stuff?

If you ignore email 3, they simply add you to random mailing lists at their company. I’ve gotten 2 different ads for webinars from them in the last 3 hours.
All the emails violate CAN SPAM. The first 3 don’t have any unsub links. The last 2 don’t have a postal address.
These emails aren’t relevant. They’re not targeted. They’re not even personalized. At least the folks that harvest our contact address and spam it pretend they’ve visited our website. No, this is just blatant spam from some company. Spam I don’t seem to be able to opt-out of.

The LinkedIn Harvest

As with most of my website subscriptions, LinkedIn has a tagged address of mine. That means I know exactly who is harvesting it and adding it to their lists. It happens a lot less than you would think, but it does happen.
The most recent example was an Indian ESP that added my address to their webinar announcement list. Multiple emails advertising different webinars. Again, these emails had no unsubscribe and no postal address. Considering the address was blatantly harvested, that’s triple damages if I were to take them to court.
Ironically, one of the webinars they were advertising was about deliverability. They were going to  discuss the new changes at Gmail and how to get to the inbox anyway. Even funnier is that their delivery guy was in my mailbox a few weeks ago asking me about Gmail, what I knew and what I would recommend to them and their clients.
First recommendation: Stop harvesting addresses and spamming people.

B2B Spam is Still Spam

There is this view by some marketers that permission doesn’t matter when sending B2B mail. That purchased lists, harvested lists, and mail violating CAN SPAM are all OK if your recipient is at work. In fact, one of the questions I recently fielded was about getting through corporate filters.
In reality, delivery to businesses is harder than delivery to consumers, even for opt-in lists. Businesses operate email systems to further their own business goals. If incoming mail is distracting or annoying to their employees, they can and will block the source. Annoy the wrong person and you really will discover how hard it is to get into businesses.
Now, it’s easier now than it used to be. Most businesses are outsourcing their filtering. Previously outsourcing was to companies who handled the filtering or managed on premise appliances. But now we’re seeing a lot of companies outsource to webmail providers like Office365 and Google Apps. This means some of the engagement rules are now being applied to business delivery.
This may make business delivery easier in some ways. But it is going to make permission a much bigger deal in the B2B space.
Update: Al wrote about B2B spam today, too. His blog post is worth a read, too.
 

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Are you blocking yourself?

One thing that catches me up with clients sometimes is their own spam filters block their own content. It happens. In some cases the client is using an appliance. The client’s reputation is bad enough that the appliance actually blocks mail. Often these clients have no idea they are blocking their own mail, until we try and send them something and the mail is rejected.
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Typically, the issue is their domains are the problem. We mention the domains in email, and the filters do what filters do. We work around this by abbreviating the domains or calling, it’s not a big deal.
It’s a great demonstration of content filters, though. The content (the client’s domain) is blocked even when it comes from an IP with a good reputation. In fact, with Gmail I can often tell “how bad” a domain reputation is. Most mail I send from WttW to my gmail address goes to the inbox, even when the client is reporting bulk foldering at Gmail. But every once in a while a domain has such a bad reputation that any mail mentioning that domain goes to bulk.
Most folks in the deliverability space know the big players in the filtering market: Barracuda, Cloudmark, ProofPoint, etc. Those same people have no idea what filters their company uses and have never even really thought about it.
Do you know what filter your company is using to protect employees from spam?
 
 
 

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Old Lists and RadioShack

RadioShack is putting their assets up for sale including more than 65 million customer records and 13 million email addresses. Many are up in arms about the sale of personal data including the Texas Attorney General and AT&T who both want the data destroyed.
Part of the controversy is that RadioShack’s privacy policy states the collected data will be only used by RadioShack and its affiliates and that they will not “sell or rent your personally identifiable information to anyone at any time”. Company acquisitions happen all the time and data like this is often sold to the new owner and the sale of customer data is common. The problem with RadioShack selling the customer data is that their privacy policy states they will never sell the information.
RadioShack was one of the first companies to ask for personal information at checkout, sometimes refusing a sale without providing it and the collection of data during checkout caught on quickly. Having demographic information for retargeting of customers is extremely valuable to marketers, but only if it’s valid data. With RadioShack, people often lie about their zip code and if they are giving incorrect zip codes I’m pretty sure their email address isn’t going to be valid either. Even Kramer asks why does RadioShack ask for your phone number…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgfaYKoQxzQ
If a client asked if this was a good investment and if the list had value, I would tell them no. Sending to this list will have poor delivery because the data is dirty and the lack of a clear opt-in is going to be problematic especially since a RadioShack customer is not expecting to receive mail from you. Many ESPs have policies prohibiting sending to a purchased list and doing so will hurt your relationship with the ESP.
If a client had already purchased the list and wanted to send to it, I would tell them their reputation is going to take a significant hit and I would discourage them from sending. The list is going to be full of domains that no longer exist and contain abandoned email addresses including ones that have been turned into spam traps.
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