Collecting email addresses

One of the primary ways to collect email addresses is from website visitors, and it’s actually a pretty good way to collect addresses. One of the more popular, and effective, techniques is through a pop-up window, asking for an address. Users need to provide an address or click a “no thanks” link or close the window. I’ve noticed, though, that many companies drop something passive aggressive in their “no thanks” button. “No, thanks, I don’t want to save money.” “I don’t need workout advice.”

Of course, I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Many people have commented on this phenomenon. I’ve heard it called confirmshaming and the Nielsen Norman Group called them manipulinks. Someone even started a tumblr for screenshots of the ways companies try to manipulate visitors into handing over their email address.

In deliverability terms, I don’t think this is a great strategy. Manipulating users into giving you an email address is never a good thing for finding enthusiastic engaged users. I’ve written before about how some opt-in schemes are closer to taking permission asking for it. Confirm shaming is not exactly taking permission, but it is senders attempting to get an email address from a user who might not otherwise be inclined to share personal information.

Interestingly enough, there is some small amount of research showing that these techniques, despite showing an increase in address acquisition, may drive down brand reputation.

Although manipulinks may in fact cause people to pause, consider, and even convert in higher numbers, there’s a hidden tradeoff involved.  This approach will negatively impact your user’s experience in ways that aren’t as easily quantified with A/B testing. The short-term gains seen by increased micro conversions will come at the expense of disrespecting users, which will likely result in long term losses. Are a few more newsletter signups worth lower NPS scores? Or a negative brand perception? Or a loss of credibility and users’ trust?
[…] When companies use dirty tactics like this and then see conversion increases, it probably has less to do with “clever” manipulink text than with the fact that they’re straight up lying to their users. And that’s not just a needy pattern, it’s a dark pattern. Stop Shaming Your Users for Micro Conversions

The article didn’t discuss deliverability related to collecting addresses through manipulinks. I’m not sure anyone has. But if these links contribute to a negative user experience on the website, it’s likely the negative feelings transfer to the emails. Even if the emails themselves are great and don’t continue the negative user experience, how engaged are these users? Do companies using manipulinks to collect email addresses see any difference in deliverability from companies that don’t?

Major webmail providers focus on user experience. We know address collection processes are and important factor in reaching the inbox. Starting off an email relationship by shaming could hurt inboxing. Anyone have data?
Edit: Brian points out that Google is already watching who is doing full overlays and downgrading sites based on the overlays.

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Harvesting and forging email addresses

For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam.
Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website less than a month and I’m already getting lots of spam to it. Most of it is business related spam, but there’s a couple things that make me think that someone has been signing that address up to mailing lists.
One is the confirmation email I received from Yelp. I don’t actually believe Yelp harvested my address and tried to create me an email account. I was happy when I got the first mail from Yelp. It said “click here to confirm your account.” Yay! Yelp is actually using confirmations so I just have to ignore the mail and that will all go away.
At least I was happy about it, until I started getting Yelp newsletters to that address.
Yelp gets half a star for attempting to do COI, but loses half for sending newsletters to people who didn’t confirm their account.
I really didn’t believe that people would grab a clearly tagged address off the blog and subscribe it to mailing lists or networking sites. I simply didn’t believe this happened anymore. I know forge subscribing used to be common, but it does appear that someone forge signed me up for a Yelp account. Clearly there are more dumb idiots out there than I thought.
Of course, it’s not just malicious people signing the address up to lists. There are also spammers harvesting directly off the website.
I did expect that there would be some harvesting going on and that I would get spam to the address. I am very surprised at the volume and type of spam, though. I’m getting a lot of chinese language spam, a lot of “join our business organization” spam and mail claiming I subscribed to receive their offers.
Surprisingly, much of the spam to this address violates CAN SPAM in some way shape or form. And I can prove harvesting, which would net treble damages if I had the time or inclination to sue.
It’s been an interesting experience, putting an unfiltered address on the website. Unfortunately, I am at risk of losing your questions because of the amount of spam coming in. I don’t think I’ve missed any, yet, but losing real mail is always a risk when an address gets a lot of spam – whether or not the recipient runs filters.
I’m still pondering solutions, but for now the questions address will remain as it is.

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Ongoing subscription form abuse

Last week Spamhaus posted information on the ongoing subscription attacks. They provided a more information about them that was not make public previously, including some information about the volume of mail some targets received.
Today SendGrid also blogged about this, going into a little more detail about why senders should care about this. They also provided a number of suggestions for how to mitigate the risk of being part of an attack.
Many abstract images on the theme of computers, Internet and high technology.
There are a couple of things I think it’s important for folks to realize.

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Incentivizing incites fraud

There are few address acquisition processes that make me cringe as badly as incentivized point of sale collection. Companies have tried many different ways to incentivize address collection at the point of sale. Some offer the benefit to the shopper, like offering discounts if they supply an email address. Some offer the benefits to the employee. Some offer punishments to the employee if they don’t collect addresses from a certain percentage of customers.
All of these types of incentive programs are problematic for email collection.
listshoppingcart
On the shopper side, if they want mail from a retailer, they’ll give an address simply because they want that mail.  In fact, asking for an address without offering any incentive is way more likely to get their real address. If they don’t want mail but there is a financial incentive, they’re likely to give a made up address. Sometimes it will be deliverable, but belong to another person. Sometimes it will be undeliverable. And sometimes it will be a spamtrap. One of my delivery colleagues occasionally shares addresses she’s found in customer lists over on her FB page. It’s mostly fun stuff like “dont@wantyourmail.com” and “notonyour@life.com” and many addresses consisting of NSFW type words.
On the employee side there can also be abuses. Retailers have tried to tie employee evaluations, raises and promotions to the number of email addresses collected. Other retailers will actively demote or fire employees who don’t collect a certain number of addresses. In either case, the progression is the same. Employees know that most customers don’t want the mail, and they feel bad asking. But they’re expected to ask, so they do. But they don’t push, so they don’t get enough addresses. Eventually, to protect their jobs, they start putting in addresses they make up.
Either way, incentivizing point of sale collection of information leads to fraud. In a case I read about in the NY Times, it can lead to fraud much more serious than a little spam. In fact, Wells Fargo employees committed bank fraud because of the incentives related to selling additional banking products at the teller.

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