Audiences, targeting and signups

A few weeks ago we closed on our new house in Dublin. This weekend we’re going to one of those ‘home shows’ where people try and sell you all sorts of things for your home. We know there are some things we want to do with the house so we’re headed out to the convention centre this weekend. Tickets are “free” but they ask for contact information, including an email address.

Given who we are, this sparked a discussion about the email address we wanted to give them. Right now, we’re in a place where we actually want a lot of email about home stuff. We know we need attic insulation and a new heating system and furniture and so yeah, email from the show vendors is good right now. But we also know that this email address will be traded and sold for the next 20 years. We could set up a tagged address and just route it to /dev/null when we’re tired of mail. Instead, we decided to set up a whole new address to use for house things, one that we could set to bounce when we were bored of getting house related mail.

It will be interesting to see what kind of mail we get over time to this address. Are the marketers smart enough to change what they send based on how long they’ve had our address? Or will the mail change with the seasons? Both are legitimate marketing techniques. It will also be interesting to see how they handle this data in the context of GDPR.

In this case, we’re a clear target for this marketing and, in many ways, receptive to all the stuff they’re selling. We’re receptive, they’re going to send us email, it’s all good. We know what we’re getting into, they are getting good subscribers. Everybody is happy. We’ll continue to be happy with the mail until we’re moved in and feel like all the bits are finished and then we’ll either unsubscribe from everything or, more likely, just turn the address off.

Sometimes I don’t know how savvy marketers always are about their audience, though. Two recent examples come to mind.

A friend of mine got engaged last week. She’s looking at planning a wedding. This is another major opportunity for marketing to collect information and bridal shows are huge. Many brides of the digital generation know what they’re getting into when the give an email address to a bridal magazine or to a bridal show. I’ve seen some discussions that the right thing to do is open a gmail account just to handle wedding planning and subscriptions. But, like buying and furnishing a new house, a wedding is a limited amount of time. Anywhere from a few days to 2 or so years. From what I’ve heard, though, not all wedding vendors are that great about sunsetting addresses.

In another case, I was talking with a startup. They’re a fairly new news / political insight organization that was working with some marketing experts to grow their lists. They decided to use co-reg and it was successful increasing their list size by an order of magnitude. It also tanked their delivery. Part of my end of the conversation was about how to fix their delivery. But that was only part of the conversation. A much bigger piece of the conversation was walking them through some discussion of what audience they were looking for and whether or not co-reg was a good way to find that audience.

Fundamentally, though, “people we can get to give us an email address” do not always equate to “people who want our mail.” Recently one of my ESP clients was dealing with a customer who had a lot of delivery challenges and we eventually worked out the problem set of addresses was from wifi logins. Yes, lots of places expect an email address for a wifi login. Lots of users don’t want any mail based on that login. If those addresses become too big a portion of the mailing list, then it can tank delivery for all subscribers.

Part of the challenge of running a successful email marketing program is understanding your subscribers and your collection processes. Email is an amazing communication channel that is constantly evolving. The audience is evolving in what they want and what their needs are. Technology is evolving. Filters are evolving to handle the morphing threats. What worked yesterday might work today but not tomorrow. Marketers have to evolve, too, or risk not reaching the inbox or their audience.

SenderID is dead
Email verification vendor leaking marketer data

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Back to the office!

I’m back in the office after a busy June. The 2 continent, 3 city tour was unexpectedly extended to a 4th city thus I was out most of last week as well.
What was I doing? We spent a week in Dublin, which is an awesome and amazing city and I love it a little bit more every time we visit. After Dublin I jetted off to Chicago, where I spoke at ActiveCampaign’s first user conference.
The talk I did for ActiveCampaign was about how we’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in how email is filtered, particularly at the consumer ISPs. In order reach the inbox. we need to think beyond IP or domain reputation. We need to stop thinking of filters as a way of sorting good mail from bad mail. I touched a little on these concepts in my What kind of mail do filters target? blog post.
The shift in filtering is changing how email reaches the inbox and what we can and should be monitoring. At the same time, the amount of data we can get back from the ISPs is decreasing. This means we’re looking at a situation when our primary delivery fixes can’t be based on feedback from the filters. This is, I think, going to be an ongoing theme of blog posts over the next few months.

The next trip was to spend 2 days onsite at a client’s office. These types of onsite training are intense but I do enjoy them. As this was mostly client specific, there isn’t much I can share. They did describe it as a masterclass in deliverability, so I think it was also intense for them.
That was the planned 2 continent, 3 city tour. The last city was a late addition of a more personal nature. We headed downstate to join my cousin and her family in saying goodbye to my uncle. He was an amazing man. A larger than life, literal hero (underwater EOD, awarded the silver star) whom I wish I had known better. Most of what I remember is how much he loved and adored my aunt.
I’ll be getting back into the swing of blogging over the next few days. It’s good to be back and not looking at traveling in the short term.

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Confirmed Opt-In: An Old Topic Resurrected

Looking back through my archives it’s been about 4 years or so since I wrote about confirmed opt in. The last post was how COI wasn’t important, but making sure you were reaching the right person was important. Of course, I’ve also written about confirmed opt-in in general and how it was a tool somewhat akin to a sledgehammer. I’m inspired to write about it today because it’s been a topic of discussion on multiple mailing lists today and I’ve already written a bunch about it (cut-n-paste-n-edit blog post! win!).
Confirmed opt-in is the process where you send an email to a recipient and ask them to click on a link to confirm they want the mail. It’s also called double opt-in, although there are some folks who think that’s “spammer” terminology. It’s not, but that’s a story for another day. The question we were discussing was what to do with the addresses that don’t click. Can you email them? Should you email them? Is there still value in them?

We have to treat the addresses as a non-homogenous pool. There are a lot of reasons confirmation links don’t get clicked.

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Not a customer you want

Earlier this week one of my ESP clients contacted me. They have a new (potential?) customer dealing with some delivery challenges. Client was looking for advice on how to move the customer over and improve their delivery at the same time.
My advice was actually pretty simple: this isn’t a customer you want. Walk away.
I reached that conclusion about 10 seconds after I loaded the customer’s website. Because I know sometimes initial impressions are wrong, I did spend about 10 more minutes poking around. What I found did nothing to change my mind or convince me my initial impression was wrong. In fact, everything I found reinforced the belief that this was not a good customer for my client.
I sent my client an email explaining what I’d found and they agreed. Future deliverability problem averted!
Some of what I found inspired the conversations with spammers blog post from earlier this week. For instance, the website had two different signup forms, each pointing to a different ESP. Both links were dead.

Then I looked at the company’s whois record and found a bunch of cookie cutter websites, all with different domain names, all with the same broken subscription links.
I do this manually and I can’t fathom how you would automate this kind of checking. For me, it seems there absolutely needs to be a human in the loop. But I suspect that there are ways to automate these types of checks.
In any case, there’s a spammer looking for an email service provider. He’s having problems with IP reputation at his current ESP. He sends content and will even share with you the domain he’s using to collect email addresses. Pro tip: try and sign up for his mail before he signs your contract.

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