Implied permission

Codified into law in CASL, implied permission describes the situation where a company can legally mail someone. The law includes caveats and restrictions about when this is a legitimate assumption on the part of the company. It is, in fact, a kludge. There isn’t such a thing as implied permission. Someone either gives you permission to send them email or they don’t.
We use the term implied permission to describe a situation where the recipient didn’t actually ask for the mail, but isn’t that bothered about receiving it. The mail is there. If it has a particularly good deal the recipient might buy something. The flip side of not being bothered about receiving mail, is not being bothered about not receiving mail. If it’s not there, eh,  no biggie.

Implied permission isn’t real permission, no matter what the law says.
Now, many deliverability folks, including myself, understand that there are recipients who don’t mind getting mail from vendors. We know this is a valid and effective way of marketing. Implied permission is a thing and doesn’t always hurt delivery.
However, that does not mean that implied permission is identical to explicit permission. It’s one of the things I think CASL gets very right. Implied permission has a shelf life and expires. Explicit permission doesn’t have a shelf life.
Implied permission is real, but not a guarantee that the recipient really wants a particular email from a sender, even if they want other emails from that sender.

Permission isn’t binary.

In the marketing space we talk about permission as if it’s a binary status. Either we have permission to send email or we don’t. But that doesn’t reflect the complexity of marketing programs. Maybe a recipient wants a password reset email and the occasional social alert, but doesn’t want the weekly newsletter. One recipient might be OK with 3 emails a day, while another would like one a week.
It’s a rare case where this granular permission is collected upfront. And there’s good reason for that, too much choice overwhelms and it’s better to limit options.

Opens aren’t permission.

We’ve fallen down a hole where opens have turned into this proxy for permission. I think that’s why so many people freak out when they discover that sometimes spamtraps will load image pixels or follow links in emails. But following a link or loading an image isn’t permission. It might be interest. It’s even interest from the person running the spamtrap, but not necessarily the good kind of interest.  Or it could simply be that the user needs their password so they opened the password mail.
An open / image load is not permission. At best it means that the recipient can load images in emails they open. Maybe they actually even enjoy it and will enjoy future emails. But it’s not permission. Now, from enough engagement data we can assume that the recipient wants to receive email. But that’s still implied permission at best.

Now what?

What is we keep doing what we’re doing. Making the best decisions about marketing programs with the information we have. It’s all we really can do in the now. But, as we look to how we want our marketing to grow and improve we must look at the whole picture. Marketers have the data to make good decisions, but only if they ask the right questions.
 
 
 

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February 2017: The Month In Email

Happy March!

As always, I blogged about best practices with subscriptions, and shared a great example of subscription transparency that I received from The Guardian. I also wrote about what happens to the small pool of people who fail to complete a confirmed opt-in (or double opt-in) subscription process. While there are many reasons that someone might not complete that process, ultimately that person has not given permission to receive email, and marketers need to respect that. I revisited an older post on permission which is still entirely relevant.
Speaking of relevance, I wrote about seed lists, which can be useful, but — like all monitoring tools — should not be treated as infallible, just as part of a larger set of information we use to assess deliverability. Spamtraps are also valuable in that larger set of tools, and I looked at some of the myths and truths about how ISPs use them. I also shared some thoughts from an industry veteran on Gmail filtering.
On the topic of industry veterans, myths and truths, I looked at the “little bit right, little bit wrong” set of opinions in the world of email. It’s interesting to see the kinds of proclamations people make and how those line up against what we see in the world.
We attended M3AAWG, which is always a wonderful opportunity for us to catch up with smart people and look at the larger email ecosystem and how important our work on messaging infrastructure and policy really is. I was glad to see the 2017 Mary Litynski Award go to Mick Moran of Interpol for his tireless work fighting abuse and the exploitation of children online. I also wrote about how people keep wanting to quote ISP representatives on policy issues, and the origin of “Barry” as ISP spokesperson (we should really add “Betty” too…)
Steve took a turn as our guest columnist for “Ask Laura” this month with a terrific post on why ESPs need so many IP addresses. As always, we’d love to get more questions on all things email — please get in touch!

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Last week the CRTC published a CASL enforcement action wherein they fined an individual $15,000 for 10 violations of the act.

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Permission trumps good metrics

Most companies and senders will tell you they follow all the best practices. My experience says they follow the easy best practices. They’ll comply with technical best practices, they’ll tick all the boxes for content and formatting, they’ll make a nod to permission. Then they’re surprised that their mail delivery isn’t great.

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