Reaching targets, the wrong way

I’ve been increasingly annoyed by these drip automation campaigns. You know the ones I mean. Senders use some software to find some flimsy pretext to send a mail. Then there emails drop every few days. Sometimes this cycle goes on for months. Most of these messages violate CAN SPAM. It’s annoying. It’s illegal. It is spam.
I can even opt out of most of these messages, they don’t offer that ability.

Spammers Gonna Spam

I have so many examples of these emails. They’re all the same, really. They start out with a statement someone is reading my website. Then they mention they have an article that they or their customers wrote. This article is, of course, perfect for my site and the article.
Well that’s the theory anyway.  They tend to miss the mark pretty significantly.
There was this one example where the company found a post linking to a newspaper article.

Hi there,
I was just browsing Word To The Wise and saw you were interested in travel from this post (https://wordtothewise.com/2011/01/fines-for-not-honoring-unsubscribes/). So I thought you might also be interested in linking to a resource we put together on how travelling can improve your health.
Here is a link for your review:
This example is the first in the second series of emails from Eric. He’s changed his email address and got my name wrong on this round, but otherwise this is identical to the messages he sent me in late May. I can even predict the cadence. Three days after the first messages, I’ll get a “hey, did you get my email?” On the fourth and fifth days the message will change a bit. By day 7 he’ll start asking for the “right person” at my company.
Hey Lauren –
I hope everything is going well on your end 🙂
I just finished going through your article here: https://wordtothewise.com/2015/04/a-series-of-tubes/. Thanks for the resource!
My colleague Lavanya put together a pretty comprehensive piece on the net neutrality just last week.There is a lot of info out there about net neutrality, and it’s sort of a hot topic at the moment. Our guide was designed to cut through the noise a bit.
The article is here: [link removed]
Would you consider linking to it in the post of yours I mentioned above? I saw you linked to en.wikipedia.org in there, so I figured I’d see if you’d link to mine as well. Perhaps your visitors find it helpful, but hey, it’s up to you.
Thanks,- Eric
P.S. I respect the relationship you have with your readers, I wouldn’t ask you to link to anything I didn’t think was an excellent resource for your site.

B2B spam is still spam

I was recently contacted by one of the software companies that provides infrastructure for these types of emails. Surprisingly, they are having a difficult time getting their mail delivered. It seems no one wants their mail. The thing is, I can’t help them. No one can help them. They’re sending mostly unwanted mail. I’m sure even the bloggers who make their money from blogging hate these kinds of messages.
This was someone building software that is causing significant amount of annoyance. I get the messages this software company, and their competitors, are facilitating. I am not going to help their spam get through to people who don’t want it.
During the call, they did name some of their competitors and I fell down the rabbit hole of B2B spamware. The vendors go through all sorts of contortions to convince their users this isn’t spam. Many of the phrases used on the websites were the same I heard on the phone. It’s one-to-one mail. It’s targeted. It’s focused on the recipient. It’s important.
Guess what? I’m a frequent recipient of that kind of mail. I know the mail isn’t targeted and it’s not focused on the recipient. The two examples above show that clearly. One of them couldn’t even get my name right! Both of them missed the context of the links and posts. None of this has to do with me or my readers, other than an example of what not to do.

CAN SPAM applies

The above examples aren’t anything special, I picked out the first two I saw in my mailbox. I have dozens of examples of these campaigns.  In almost every case the messages violate CAN SPAM. Very rarely they’ll include an opt-out link, but they almost never include a physical postal address.  Sometimes they include an opt-out, but they almost never have a physical address.
CAN SPAM says nothing about bulk, it only mentions commercial email. Specifically the act says:
The term “commercial electronic mail message” means any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose).
It’s clear to me that the messages I’m getting are commercial. CAN SPAM applies. They need to have a physical address and an opt-out link for every message. They don’t.

Unwanted mail doesn’t reach the inbox.

Last week’s phone call demonstrated I am not alone in hating this mail. The software company contacted me for help because they can’t get to the inbox. It seems no one wants their mail. Due to blocking problems many of the senders resort to tactics used by spammers. They use different domains for their unsolicited mail. Sometimes they’re analog or cousin domains, like a .co for the unsolicited messages and a .com domain for their response emails. In other cases, they use Office365 or Google apps or Gmail for their outbound mail stream. Most places won’t block @gmail.com, so it’s a fairly safe to use gmail addresses.

Some of the messages are upfront about their marketing strategy using the Gmail. Let’s be clear, this strategy is a way to avoid spam filters.

Permission is key to delivery

Marketing programs that rely on spammer tactics are doomed to failure long term. Mail sent without permission does not work, even in the B2B space. Companies relying on unsolicited email discover it’s not that simple. Spam filters block unsolicited email. That’s their job, it’s what they’re designed to do. The way they detect unsolicited varies, but filters target unsolicited email.
There are large companies, many of them clients of mine, who do get caught in filters, usually because some of their mail is unsolicited. This isn’t intentional. Their overall program is sending mail to people who have asked for it and want it. Permission is a central piece of the email strategy. But, particularly as programs age, we find grotty corners where permission is a little iffy. These are small parts of their database, but they can cause significant problems.
Good email marketers know that permission is key. They invest time, energy and resources into getting permission and maintaining data. They think long term. They know recipients don’t want spam and that any gains from spamming are fleeting.

Final migration of Verizon email addresses to AOL
The cycle goes on

Related Posts

Disappearing domains

On May 31, British broadband provider EE discontinued service for a number of email domains: Orange.net, Orangehome.co.uk, Wanadoo.co.uk, Freeserve.co.uk, Fsbusiness.co.uk, Fslife.co.uk, Fsmail.net, Fsworld.co.uk, and Fsnet.co.uk.
These domains were acquired by EE as part of multiple mergers and acquisitions. On their help page, EE explains that the proliferation of free email services with advanced functionality has led to a decrease in email usage at these domains.
Yesterday, Terra.co.br announced they were discontinuing email to a number of their free domains as of June 30, 2017: terra.com, terra.com.ar, mi.terra.cl, terra.com.co, terra.com.mx, terra.com.pe, terra.com.ve, and terra.com.ec.

I’m not surprised to see these domains going away and I think we’ll see more of it going forward. The reasons are pretty simple. Mail is not an easy service to run. Mail doesn’t bring in a lot of money. Dedicated mailbox providers do a great job and the addresses from them are portable.

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Targeted marketing done badly

There was quite a bit of content I cut out on my rant about parasites in the email ecosystem earlier this week. I had whole section on people who ask to connect on LinkedIn and then immediately send a pitch or scrape your address and add it to their marketing automation software and start spamming. Generally, the only reason I will drop someone off LinkedIn is because they do this.
envelopes
Today, one of the deliverability mailing lists has been hopping over spam many folks in the industry received. The discussion started off simple enough, someone said “Is <companyname> spamming the industry?” People immediately chimed in that yeah, it did appear so.
A few people said they’d gotten the message and thought it was personal and were disappointed it wasn’t. Others weren’t sure why they were chosen to receive this message, or why some of their co-workers were chosen. A few of us didn’t get them. I didn’t.
This is a great example of marketing that was reasonably well planned, but a total fail for not knowing their audience. The product in question is an anti-abuse product. The company wants to reach people in the anti-abuse industry. They go off and find people in the anti-abuse industry and send them an email. Mail that seems personalized. It was a perfectly reasonable email. It asked questions and did get some people to engage with it by replying. They even appear to have done A/B testing on subject lines.
All solid marketing decisions. All great things to do.
But, the anti-abuse community is small, particularly the ESP anti-abuse community. We talk on mailing lists, IRC, LinkedIn, Facebook and Slack – and those are just the places I’m connected to. I’m sure there are other meeting places. The fact is, we’re a community and we do interact. If you’re going to try and do something like this, you have to expect that we’re going to realize you’re spamming. And many of us have very low tolerance for this kind of stuff.
A few years ago I worked with some senders who acquired most of their email addresses from technical conferences. They had a lot of delivery problems because a lot of their audience were the people who wrote and maintained filters. Spam the person who writes a spam filter and you may find yourself locked out from all of those filter users. I finally realized I couldn’t help those clients. No amount of technical perfection, personalization, looking like one-to-one mail or magic address cleaning is going to make this audience want your mail.
Marketing starts at understanding your audience. Permission is one of the better ways to understand your audience. Marketing to the anti-abuse crowd is a challenge. I can’t see any place where unsolicited email successfully fits into that plan.

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Parasites hurt email marketing

As a small business owner I am a ripe target for many companies. They buy my address from some lead generation firm, or they scrape it off LinkedIn, and they send me a message that pretends to be personalized but isn’t really.
“I looked at your website… we have a list of email addresses to sell you.”
“We offer cold calling services… can I set up a call with you?”
“I have scheduled a meeting tomorrow so I can tell you about our product that will solve all your technical issues and is also a floor wax.”
None of these emails are anything more than spam. They’re fake personalized. There’s no permission. On a good day they’ll have an opt out link. On a normal day they might include an actual name.
These are messages coming to an email address I’ve spent years trying to protect from getting onto mailing lists. I don’t do fishbowls, I’m careful about who I give my card to, I never use it to sign up for anything. And, still, that has all been for naught.
I don’t really blame the senders, I mean I do, they’re the ones that bought my address and then invested in business automation software that sends me regular emails trying to get me to give them a phone number. Or a contact for “the right person at your business to talk to about this great offer that will change your business.”
The real blame lies with the people who pretend that B2B spam is somehow not spam. Who have pivoted their businesses from selling consumer lists to business lists because permission doesn’t matter when it comes to businesses. The real blame lies with companies who sell “marketing automation software” that plugs into their Google Apps account and hijacks their reputation to get to the inbox. The real blame lies with list cleansing companies who sell list buyers a cleansing service that only hides the evidence of spamming.
There are so many parasites in the email space. They take time, energy and resources from large and small businesses, offering them services that seem good, but really are worthless.
The biologically interesting thing about parasites, though, is that they do better if they don’t overwhelm the host system. They have to stay small. They have to stay hidden. They have to not cause too much harm, otherwise the host system will fight back.
Email fights back too. Parasites will find it harder and harder to get mail delivered in any volume as the host system adapts to them. Already if I look in my junk folder, my filters are correctly flagging these messages as spam. And my filters see a very small portion of mail. Filtering companies and the business email hosting systems have a much broader view and much better defenses.
These emails annoy me, but I know that they are a short term problem.  As more and more businesses move to hosted services, like Google Apps and Office365 the permission rules are going to apply to business addresses as well as consumer addresses. The parasites selling products and services to small business owners can’t overwhelm email. The defenses will step in first.
 

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