Harvesting Addresses from LinkedIn

There seems to have been an uptick in the number of folks harvesting addresses from their LinkedIn contacts and adding them to mailing lists. I’ve been seeing this in my own mailbox. I’m getting added to different lists and because I used a tagged address I know these folks are harvesting from LinkedIn.
This behavior is really rude. Just because someone accepted your contact request on LinkedIn, doesn’t mean they want to be added to any mailing lists you may have. Let’s be honest, some people have hundreds or thousands of LinkedIn contacts. They’re not going to want to get mail from all of them.
This behavior risks your ESP account. I know of ESPs who have disconnected customers for importing all their LinkedIn contacts.
Of course, there are ways to effectively use your LinkedIn contacts. The short version is think about what you’re doing and how your mail will be received. Don’t grab all your contacts, be selective about who you choose. Have too many contacts to go through manually? That’s not an excuse, in fact, it’s an even bigger argument for not becoming a spammer.
Targeting.
I’ve previously written things you must consider when sending bulk mail to people who have connected with you on social networks.

  1. Not everyone will necessarily be happy to receive this mail from you. Consider how closely you are connected with the person. Ask yourself: Would this person appreciate a commercial email from me or my company? If you don’t know the person well enough, then it’s likely that the answer will be no. Put a little time and energy into making sure that your message is going to be wanted. If that means dropping people you’re not sure about off your contact list, then do it.
  2. Consider sending out personal mails, not importing the email addresses into your CRM system or sending them out through your ESP. Don’t make the message look like a mass mailing. This is a social network, make your contact actually social.
  3. Think about what YOU are bringing to the relationship with the recipient. Are you actually offering them any value? With the Christmas card I received the  message was “Our company is wonderful! We love ourselves. And we think we’re so great we’re going to send out this card telling you how we’re not sending out Christmas cards this year!” In Al’s case the message was adding him to a mailing list. In both cases, neither of us cared. There was nothing in it for us.
  4. If you want to announce a product and or service use the tools provided by the social networking service. LinkedIn has InMail, which allows recipients to set their contact preferences and mail through their system.
  5. If recipients object to your email, arguing with them is never helpful. You’re not going to convince them the mail is wanted, you’re just going to convince them that you’re an unrepentant spammer. Apologize, learn from it, move on.

These aren’t hard and fast rules. But if you’re thinking about grabbing contact addresses off of LinkedIn think about who you’re mailing and why they might want the message.

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If you want to spam, don't be stupid

Some random UK email marketing company that I’ve never heard of harvested my address off of LinkedIn (yes, it’s my LinkedIn specific address) and is now spamming me advertising their cheap email marketing services. There were a lot of things about this particular mail that really annoyed me. The annoyance wasn’t just spam in a folder that shouldn’t have spam, it’s that the spam itself was badly done.
The thing is, they could have done this in a way that didn’t annoy me enough to blog about them being spammers. A teeny, tiny amount of effort and an ounce of empathy for their recipients and I wouldn’t have anything to blog about today.
If you want to spam, don’t be stupid. How can you avoid being stupid?
1) Send only one email and make it clear in the message this is a one time (or limited time) email. Don’t just randomly harvest addresses off a website, like Submission Technology did today, and add all those addresses to your marketing list. Spam is an interruption and an annoyance. And if spammers had any sense they’d limit the amount of time they spent annoying and interrupting recipients.
2) Target your email correctly and don’t be lazy. This morning’s mail from Submission Technology was advertising their UK specific marketing programs. They have my LinkedIn profile, they know I’m on the other side of the US from the UK.
3) Don’t lie about where you got my name. In this case, I know Submission Technology harvested it off LinkedIn because that’s the address they are sending it to. And, in fact, in the email they sent they mention they are sending this to me because we’re connected on LinkedIn. The problem is, I can find no trace of a connection between us on LinkedIn. And, yes, I did look because I generally drop connections that add me to their mailing lists.
One part of my anger at this particular spam is that they’ve appropriated a tagged email address of mine and added it to their marketing lists. That’s breaking my filtering.
After doing a little research into their company and their practices, though, I have to wonder if they’re going to sell my address. It seems that Submission Technology sells addresses to their customers, among other product offerings. Is this address that I’ve dedicated to handling LinkedIn specific emails really now going to end up getting spam from UK companies?
Based on multiple online reports (Andy Merrett and Ben Park) it doesn’t even look like unsubscribing will be sufficient to get this mail to stop.
One of the most amusing bits links that showed up was a comment on a post here from 2008. It seems that they spammed Steve Linford and were SBLed for it. I’m only guessing that since they’re not still listed they’ve figured out how to suppress Steve’s address at least.
Sending unsolicited email can be a problem for bulk senders; you risk alienating your potential customers, getting blocked and developing a poor reputation. Some of those problems can be mitigated by not being stupid.

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Ask Laura: Confused about CAN SPAM

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About that permission thing

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.
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The calls have a consistent pattern.

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