About that permission thing

laura
Industry
June 14, 2016

I wrote a few days ago about permission and how it was the key to getting into the inbox. It’s another one of those “necessary but not sufficient” parts of delivery. There are, however, a lot of companies who are using email without the recipient permission. These companies often contact me to help them solve their delivery problems. Often these are new companies who are trying to jumpstart their business on the cheap by using email.

The calls have a consistent pattern.

Prospect explains to me what they’re doing, including how they are acquiring email addresses by buying lists, looking up relevant websites or taking addresses from appropriate business organization lists.
I listen and then explain back that I can’t really help them. That most of how we fix deliverability problems is to focus on what the recipients wanted and asked for when they subscribed.
Prospect argues with me about how I surely can help them. They know I can because what they’re doing isn’t illegal.
I explain that the type of mail they’re sending, unsolicited prospecting emails, is one thing that filters are keeping out and there isn’t anything I can say to make those filters let the mail through.
Prospect asks if there isn’t something they can do to make their mail go through. What if they authenticated? Or sent more mail? Or how about less mail? Surely companies can’t just block mail because it’s not opt-in.

I had one of these calls today. Ironically, a few days ago Facebook showed me a letter I “wrote” to a potential client more than 5 years ago after a similar phone call.

Dear Potential Client,
I realize it is upsetting that only 50 – 30% of your mail is getting delivered to the inbox. And I totally understand your desire to, somehow, find a magic wand to make the other 50 – 70% of your mail get delivered.
I am more than happy to take your money. I can even give you advice on minor technical changes that may increase your delivery by a few percentage points. However, as long as you insist that joining professional scientific societies and harvesting their membership lists is the only way to gather email addresses there isn’t much I can do to help you.
See, your delivery issues are, actually, email filters working as intended. Yes, the mail that you’re sending is perfectly legal. And, yes, there are people who send mail without permission and have few problems with delivery. But the fact that you’re calling me (repeatedly) means that you are not one of those people.
The underlying issue here is not that you’re sending too much mail, or that you’re sending it at the wrong time of day, or that you are sending unauthenticated mail. The underlying issue is that you’re sending mail that recipients didn’t ask for. I can contact the companies and organizations who are blocking your mail and ask for the blocks to be lifted. But I can tell you now, most of them are going to laugh in my face and did I mention there’s an extra fee for that? There’s always an extra fee for that kind of thing.
In this case, I’m not just an expert on email, I’m also an expert in your target market. See, you’re selling into biotech. You’re selling to scientists. These are my people. I may be 14 years out of academia, but these are still my people. As they are my people, I can say tell you some things about them. I can tell you they really don’t want mail from companies who harvest email addresses and spam them ads for used lab equipment. I can tell you that the best thing that can happen to your mail is that they will just hit delete.
Oh, you still want me to negotiate on your behalf? Well, I can do that. But given your method of collecting email addresses, it’s not out of the question that a particular biotech company is blocking your mail because you annoyed the chief scientist one too many times. And it doesn’t really matter how many employees at that company you get to opt-in to your mail, if the chief scientist says “no, they don’t get access to our employees” then you don’t get access to their employees.
Yes, yes, I know what you’re doing is legal. I know that permission is not the “gold standard” in direct marketing. But what I’m trying to explain to you is not that you need to change your business model, although you do if you expect to get more of your mail delivered. What I’m trying to tell you is that as long as you’re sending mail without permission, then you’re probably not going to get those blocks lifted.
Finally, I am not sure what you think Return Path is selling you. But you are not going to be able to become Return Path certified as long as you continue to harvest email addresses from professional societies. I believe that the sales people have told you the same thing I have, they are more than happy to take your money. That doesn’t mean they’re going to certify you. More power to you, though, if they’re going to certify you, then I wish you luck.
I’m very sorry, I don’t think I am the consultant for you.

While that was mostly written tongue in cheek, there are some truths in there.

Interruption marketing is unwanted.

Maybe not everyone hates interruption based marketing, but many, many people do. In the consumer space ISPs have heard this message loud and clear and

Filters that are blocking unasked for mail are working as intended.

Filters are intended to stop unwanted mail. If a filter blocks mail but the sender can show that the mail is wanted, i.e., the recipients asked for it, then the folks running the filters will often make adjustments to allow the mail through. If there is no permission involved, there is zero incentive for the filter maintainers to make adjustments.

B2B filtering is different.

In the B2B space, the email systems are for the use of the business. Engagement isn’t nearly as important as in the consumer space (although this is changing for hosted mail like Google Apps and Office365). What can happen is one person can make a decision to block all mail from a sender. Once that decision is made, it’s difficult for outsiders to get that decision overruled.

Technical perfection isn’t enough.

Sending technically perfect mail doesn’t matter if you’re sending mail that is unwanted or unasked for. That mail is being blocked because people don’t want to receive it. And because the mail systems are not for general use. IBM used to have a policy that if you wanted to be unblocked, you had to explain to them how your mail supported IBMs business goals. If you couldn’t, the mail would not be unblocked. Other corporations have similar policies, even if they’re not published on a website.

Leads, leads, leads!

There are a number of places that will sell business leads from data they’ve compiled, crawled or crowd-sourced. How great is that? Anyone can buy a list of targeted business information to use to further their business goals! Awesome! Great! Step right up and get your lead here!
But how accurate is that information really?
One of the bigger companies, which allows for public searches, is Zoominfo. I did some lookups recently just to see what their data is like. My conclusion? If the data they have on me is any indication of the overall accuracy of their data, companies are way better off just setting light to a pile of money in their parking lot instead of giving it to Zoominfo.
Let’s look at the data they have on me. When you go to their homepage and enter my name in, you get about 2 dozen profiles. Looking through them, there are a number that describe me.
Laura Atkins; MCRS rep. Fair enough, I do mention MCRS on a few of my webpages and was recently on their board of directors. What I can’t figure out is why they think the Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society is run out the Chesterfield County Business Development office. The MCRS is neither a business nor is it located in the state of Virginia. It’s not even located in the same time zone as Virginia. Strike 1 for Zoominfo.
Laura T. Atkins; Founding Partner. This one is the reference that is most clearly me. Zoominfo claims this information was “community contributed.” OK, so someone uploaded their address book and my name and contact info was in it. But they have my company listed as simply “Word.” Sure, Zoominfo went and scraped a bunch of info off our website, but that isn’t reflected in the actual listing. Strike 2 for Zoominfo.
Laura Atkins; Spamtacular. This one is one of my favorites. I’m listed as associated with Spamtacular. Spamtacular is a blog run by my former co-worker Mickey Chandler. Mickey’s currently working for a major ESP, but he blogs about email, spam and delivery under the Spamtacular.com domain. And, in fact, the “association” is that he lists me as part of the Spamtacular blogroll. But Zoominfo claims they have an email address and phone number for me associated with Spamtacular. According to Mickey, Zoominfo have repeatedly attempted to mail laura at spamtacular. It’s not just my email address they’ve pulled out of nether orifices, though. The Spamtacular corporate information is, if anything, more inaccurate than the MCRS data. Spamtacular is not and has never been registered anywhere near the state of California. Strike 3 for Zoominfo.
But wait! Just because they’ve struck out doesn’t mean they’re going to stop swinging or walk off the field.
Laura Atkins; Context Magazine. I did an interview with Context Magazine back in 2002, and Zoominfo claims they have a phone number for me. I suspect this is not my phone number, but, rather, is the main number for Context Magazine.
There are a couple of other, less interesting profiles for me: Spamcon Foundation, Deliverability.com. All are demonstrably me, but with no real contact information it’s not going to help anyone get in touch with me.
I have to admit, I’m actually surprised at just how totally inaccurate the data about me is. I’m not that hard to find. Zoominfo has 6 listings I can clearly identify as me. In those 6 listings:

May 2016: The Month in Email

Summer, already? Happy June! Here’s a look at our busy month of May.

I had a wonderful time in Atlanta at the Salesforce Connections 2016 conference, where I spoke on a panel about deliverability. While in Atlanta, I also visited our friends at Mailchimp, and later spoke at the Email Innovations conference in Las Vegas, where I did my best to avoid “explaining all the things”. Since my speaking schedule for 2017 is filling up already, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunity to explain many more of the things over the next year or so. Let me know if there’s an event that might be a good fit for me, either as a keynote speaker or on a panel.
Steve contributed a few technical posts on the blog this month. He mentioned that Google has stopped supporting the obsolete SSLv3 and RC4, and he explored the ARC protocol, which is in development and review, and which will be useful in extending authentication through the email forwarding process.
Meri contributed to the blog this month as well, with a post on the Sanders campaign mailing list signup process. We’ve written about best practices for political campaigns before, and it’s always interesting to see what candidates are doing correctly and incorrectly with gathering addresses and reaching out to supporters.
In other best practices coverage, I pointed to some advice for marketers about authentication that I’d written up for the Only Influencers list, a really valuable community for email marketers. I wrote about purchased lists again (here’s a handy collection of all of my posts on the topic, just in case you need to convince a colleague that this isn’t a great idea). I also wrote about how getting the technical bits right isn’t always sufficient, which is also something I’ve written about previously. I also discussed the myth of using the word “free” in the subject line. As I said in the post, “Single words in the subject line don’t hurt your delivery, despite many, many, many blog posts out there saying they do. Filters just don’t work that way. They maybe, sorta, kinda used to, but we’ve gotten way past that now.”
On a personal note, I reminisced about the early days of mailing list culture and remembered a dear online friend as I explained some of why I care so much about email.
In my Ask Laura column, I covered CAN SPAM and transactional opt-outs. As always, if you have a general question about deliverability that I can answer in the column, please let me know.

April 2016: The Month in Email

We are finishing up another busy month at WttW. April was a little nutty with network glitches, server crashes, cat woes, and other disruptions, but hopefully that’s all behind us as we head into May. I’ll be very busy in May as well, speaking at Salesforce Connections in Atlanta and the Email Innovation Summit in Las Vegas. Please come say hello if you’re attending either of these great events.

Speaking of great events, I participated in two panels at EEC16 last month. We had a lot of great audience participation, and I met many wonderful colleagues. I wrote up some more thoughts about the conference here. I also had a nice conversation with the folks over at Podbox, and they’ve posted my interview on their site.
In the Podbox interview, as always, I talked about sending mail people want to receive. It always makes me roll my eyes a bit when I see articles with titles like “5 Simple Ways to Reach the Inbox”, so I wrote a bit about that here. In addition to sending mail people want to receive, senders need to make sure they are collecting addresses and building lists in thoughtful and sustainable ways. For more on this topic, check out my post on list brokers and purchased lists.
These same not-so-simple tricks came up again in my discussion of Gmail filters. Everyone wants a magic formula to reach the inbox, and — sorry to burst your bubble — there isn’t ever going to be one. And this is for a good reason: a healthy filter ecosystem helps protect all of us from malicious senders and criminal activity. The email channel is particularly vulnerable to fraud and theft. The constant evolution of filters is one way mail providers can help protect both senders and recipients — but it can be challenging for senders and systems administrators to keep up with this constant evolution. For example, companies sometimes even inadvertently filter their own mail!
I also wrote a bit about how B2B spam is different from B2C spam, and how marketers can better comply with CAN SPAM guidelines in order to reach the inbox. We also republished our much-missed friend and colleague J.D. Falk’s DKIM Primer, which is extremely useful information that was at a no-longer-active link.
One of my favorite posts this month was about “dueling data”, and how to interpret seemingly different findings around email engagement. We also got some good questions for my “Ask Laura” column, where we cover general topics on email delivery. This month we looked at “no auth/no entry” and the Microsoft Smartscreen filter, both of which are useful things to understand for optimizing delivery.
Finally, we are pleased to announce that we’ve joined the i2Coalition, an organization of internet infrastructure providers. They posted a nice introduction on their blog, and we look forward to working with them to help advocate and protect these important technical infrastructures.