… and bad acquisition practices

I talked last week about how incentivizing people to sign up for your mailing list could be effective when it’s done well.
This week I’m staying at a Large International Hotel Chain and I’ve got a great example of what happens when it’s done poorly.
The “free” wifi requires you to join the hotel’s loyalty programme. I’ve done that in the past, so I login with my email address and password. Nope, the email address isn’t what you log in with, it’s an obscure nine digit number (but I only discover this after assuming I’d forgotten my password and attempting the password recovery dance, which doesn’t work).
OK, new loyalty programme account time. I create a new throwaway^W tagged email address and cough up some contact information. I get a welcome email. It has a Reply-To: address of, literally, “REPLYTOADDR”.
The newly created account also doesn’t actually get me in to the hotel wifi. I’m probably not going to be a terribly receptive recipient when they start emailing me at that address about what a great hotel they are. I’ll just unsubscribe. Any reasonable recipient not in the email industry will probably hammer the “this is spam” button until the mail goes to their spam folder and doesn’t come back.
On a somewhat related note, I have line-of-sight to a nearby discount mall. They have free public wifi and “me@privacy.net” already has an account on it in the name of “Eric”. I wonder how much email they send Eric?

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December 2016: The Month in Email

Happy New Year! We’re looking forward to some interesting new projects this year, both for our clients and for Word to the Wise. Stay tuned!
December was a slow month for blogging, with everything going on. But we’re back on the horse now and ready to blog for 2017.
WalesCaernarfonCastle
List and subscription management continue to be hot topics, especially in the wake of the listbombing attacks earlier this year. Earlier this month, I presented a webinar on listbombing for the EEC and DMA to review the attacks and discuss best practices for companies to manage subscriptions. For Ask Laura, I wrote about the unsubscribe process and how senders can best manage those requests to keep their lists current and compliant.
With all the holiday mail flying around, Steve wrote up a good post about the challenges of DNS hosting and issues customers may have reaching your site. He also wrote about canonicalization, a process for comparing things to see if they are the same, which is useful for understanding how messages change during the delivery process. It’s important to understand how this works with DKIM, as that process specifically looks at changes to messages in delivery to validate them.
I wrote a post about how delivery at Gmail is a bit different from other mail providers, which can lead to intermittent delivery problems, and got some useful information in the comments about some upcoming process changes. And as always, unwanted email is SPAM. It doesn’t matter if you call it outreach or prospecting, or “here’s something you might find interesting!” Still SPAM.

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Does CAN SPAM apply to individual prospecting emails

Two different people on two different mailing lists asked very similar questions recently. Are people who send individual prospecting emails required to comply with CAN SPAM.
My opinion (not a lawyer, don’t play one on TV, didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn last night) is that CAN SPAM does not mention anything about volume, and any individual unsolicited email that has a “primary purpose” of advertising is required to include a physical postal address and a way to unsubscribe.
My other take on it is for individual prospecting emails failing to comply with CAN SPAM is like speeding. It’s illegal, and you can get in legal trouble by doing it, but everyone does it and few people get caught.

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ESPs and consolidation

Earlier this week Bloomberg news reported that an anonymous source  told them Verizon was looking to acquire or investigate a partnership with AOL. It didn’t take long for the Verizon CEO to quash the acquisition rumors. Acquisitions and partnerships have always been around in technology, this is nothing new. But it made me think a little bit about the acquisitions and mergers in the ESP space.
The last 2 years have seen unexpected purchases of ESPs. Oracle bought Eloqua. Deluxe acquired Vertical Response. IBM has acquired a number of players in the email space, including parts of mail.com, SilverPop and Pivotal Veracity. eBay acquired e-Dialog. Salesforce acquired ExactTarget. Big companies seem to use the acquisition process to acquire the technology needed to send mail to and on behalf of their customers.
I’ve heard some people claim this is the beginning of the end of the stand alone ESP. I disagree. I think there is enough market demand to support stand alone ESPs. But the market is crowded and there are a lot of ESPs out there. There will be some consolidation. Some ESPs will be bought, either for their technology or their staff. Some ESPs will change and add more features. Some big companies will decide to install big appliances to run their own marketing in house.
Things will change but that’s what happen as a market matures. And the ESP market is maturing.
Who do you think will be bought next?

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