Bad data drives delivery problems

It’s a wild election season here in the US. In the past few presidential elections, email has played a bigger and bigger role in messaging and fundraising. President Obama’s campaign used email effectively, but sent  huge volumes. In fact, the volume was so heavy, it led to a joke on the Daily Show.

(Video: email question at the 5:56 mark)
Jon Stewart: “We have been talking here for 12 – 14 minutes. I am curious. How many emails, in that time, do you think your campaign has sent me?”
President Obama: “It depends on whether you’ve maxed out!” Data Driven Email

This year there is a stark difference in how the candidates are using email. Return Path has different blog posts about the success of the Clinton, Sanders and Trump email campaigns which let’s you play around with the data they’ve collected from the different campaigns.
ElectionSpam2
Recently Donald Trump’s campaign has been in the news for different email related issues. He sent his first fundraising email on June 21, 2016. But 60% of those emails went to spam. Some have speculated that the spam was due to a new domain.
That spam rate, however, may not be simply due to using a brand new domain. Recent reports are that email went out to foreign nationals in Iceland, Scotland, Britain, including some government officials. Yes, Donald Trump’s campaign is spamming foreign government officials on their government addresses asking for donations.
I’ve been around the email industry long enough to know that campaigns, special interest groups and elected officials share constituent and supporter data freely. There isn’t really ever anything like informed opt-in when it comes to politics, PACs or political groups. Anything citizens do that lands an email address in the hands of a political group results in that address being shared.

Sign a petition? Address gets shared.

Make a donation? Address gets shared.

Sign up to volunteer? Address gets shared.

Contact an elected official? Address gets shared.

I don’t really expect the campaigns to do only opt-in mail. I do expect campaigns to do mostly opt-in with a side of strict hygiene and well crafted messages that get good delivery. But opt-in isn’t in their nature. Still, this is noteworthy in that the mail went to people that should never appear on a US political list.
With this new information, I’m much less inclined to blame his brand new domain for a 60% email rate. I think it’s much more likely that the problem is the data. Who knows where the campaign got the address list, but it certainly doesn’t seem like it was even political style opt-in.
This is yet another example of how data quality and source directly affects deliverability results. Sure, part of the problem may be the domain wasn’t properly warmed up. But it’s much more likely that the problem was the fact that the delivery problems were the result of using bad data.
 
 
 

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More on Newsmax and spam to political lists

Things are getting stranger and stranger with Newsmax and the politicians they’re managing lists for.  Earlier this week, recipients on Scott Brown’s list received emails with the subject line “5 Signs You’ll Get Alzheimer’s Disease.” The advertisement was for products and information from Dr. Blaylock, a contributor to Newsmax Health. Scott Brown told the political reporter at WMUR in New Hampshire that he did not authorize this email was cutting ties with Newsmax
Newsmax contacted me after I posted about unexpected email to the Herman Cain mailing list. They wanted to make it clear to me that their mailings were all double opt-in and that they adhered to all best practices. They also said that select advertisers were allowed to put ads in the body of messages from the politician to their supporters.
It seems, though, that may not be the whole truth. After I received the message from Newsmax, I signed up on caintv.com to see if they really were using double opt-in. While it is very possible that Mr. Cain was using double opt-in during the campaign, he isn’t any longer. I started receiving emails immediately, with neither a welcome message or a confirmation message.
In the case of Scott Brown’s list, the advertisement wasn’t from an outside advertiser, the advertisement was for a Newsmax columnist. And the ad wasn’t in the body of a message to supporters, it was the message to supporters. Mr. Brown has this to say about his likeness and mailing list being used by Newsmax.

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I cannot feel the Bern.

On a lark (and to do my best to stay as informed as possible via primary sources) I decided to sign up for the official mailing lists of the Trump, Clinton, and Sanders campaigns.
Both Trump and Clinton were happy to take my email address and add it to their distribution lists, no confirmation required. Not terribly surprising, since they need to make it as easy as possible to get their messages out to anyone who will listen.
On to the Sanders campaign.
I… couldn’t figure out how to subscribe to Sanders’ mailing list.
I feel I must have missed something obvious. I’m certainly not saying that I’m a super-genius or anything… but, at the same time, if I can’t figure out how to get your mail, then it might just be that others are having similar problems.
The first obvious place to sign up for updates was the big blue “This is your movement” box. That route requires a donation to proceed. Back to the main page.
The next option would sign me up for mobile alerts. No thanks.
All the way at the bottom of the page, a final big blue box asks, “Are you ready?” Somewhat beyond ready, I entered my information, clicked “Join us” and held my breath.
I Cannot Feel the Bern
The “Form submission limit reached” error is likely indicative of the use of outsourced product or service being used to collect and manage contact information on behalf of the campaign. My actually seeing this error is indicative of insufficient testing of the site by the campaign.
I’m sure the developer promised a bulletproof site, and it seems the campaign took this on faith. But at least one thing fell through cracks, resulting in the campaign not just losing an avenue of communication with someone who has self-selected as interested, but also potentially diminishing that person’s opinion of how the campaign manages the finer points, and wondering how that ultimately reflects on the candidate. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether or not the campaign developed the site themselves or hired someone else to do it on their behalf. All that matters is that they put their name on it, and let it speak for their brand.
Campaigning is sales. Whether you’re selling a candidate or a stock portfolio or a hand-made product, when you invite your audience to interact with you online, they must find the experience to have been worth their time, otherwise they’re unlikely to take you up on any future invitations. In business, as in politics, there’s a lot on the line, communication is vital, and mastering digital interaction with the public is no longer optional.
And while I was writing this post, I started receiving mail from the Sanders’ campaign. So I guess I could subscribe after all.

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Email as a PR problem

Email is a great way to connect to and engage with people. It is also a medium where the sender doesn’t get to control the message as well as they might in other media. This means that sometimes email campaigns go wrong in a way that drives a national news story about how you are a spammer.
In the stress and flurry of dealing with public accusations of spamming many companies overlook the fact that the underlying issue is they are sending mail that the recipients don’t want or don’t expect. If there is a public uproar about your mail as spam, then there is a good chance something in  your email strategy isn’t working.
Even in the recent White House as spammers strategy, there is a strong chance that they are actually using reasonable and industry standard methods to collect email addresses. However, in their case, they are a large target for people to forge email addresses in forms. “Bob doesn’t like the president, but I’ll sign him up for this list so he can learn how things really are.” or “Joe doesn’t like the democrats so I’ll sign him up for their mailings just to piss him off.”

When you are confronted with an email campaign that upsets a large number of people there are a number of steps you should take.
Step 1: Gather information
This includes information internally about what actually happened with the campaign and information from the people who are complaining.
Externally: Get copies of the emails with full headers. If you’re working with people who do not want to reveal any details of the mail they received then you may not be able to fully investigate it, but if they do you will have everything you need right there. Figure out where their address came from (you do have good audit trails for all your email addresses, right?).
Internally: Talk to everyone who worked on that particular campaign. This includes the geek down in the IT department who manages the database. Figure out if anything internally went wrong and mail was sent to people it wasn’t intended for. I know of at least 2 cases where a SQL query was incorrectly set up and the unsubscribe list was mailed by accident.
Step 2: Identify the underlying problem
Look at all the available information and identify what happened. Was there a bad source of email addresses? Did someone submit addresses of spamtraps to a webform? Was there a technical problem? Again, talk to your people internally. In many companies I have noticed a tendency to try and troubleshoot problems like this at very high levels (VP or C-level executives) without involving the employees who probably know exactly what happened. This sometimes leads to mis-identifying the problem. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it.
Step 3: Identify the solution
Once you know what the problem was, you can work out a solution. Sometimes these are fairly simple, sometimes not so much. On the simple end you may have to implement some data hygiene. On the more complex end, you may need to change how data is handled completely.
Step 4: Inform the relevant parties of the solution
Make a statement about the problem, that you’ve identified it and that you’ve taken steps to fix it. How you do this is a little outside my area of expertise, although I have participated in crafting the message, rely on your PR folks on how to communicate this. In the Internet space, honesty is prized over spin, so do remember that.
Every company is going to have the occasional problem. In the email space, that tends to result in the company being labeled a spammer. Instead of being defensive about the label, use the accusation to drive internal change to stop your mail from being labeled spam by the recipients.

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