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More on Rove Digital

Brian Krebs has more on Rove Digital and the criminal connection to other scammers and spammers.

Biggest botnet takedown to date

Yesterday law enforcement officials arrested 6 people and charged them with running a massive internet fraud ring. Over 4 million PCs were part of the botnet.
According to the FBI

Does it look like you're spamming?

There are lots of terribly complicated rules in email marketing and retention. “Only send email to people who opted-in”, “Never use a pink background”[1], “Have a working unsubscription link”, “Don’t put FREE in the subject line”[1].
Another one should be “How does what you’re doing look to a typical recipient?”.
I’ve received several pieces of spam recently from senders who were ticking quite a lot of the “email best practices” checkboxes, but who completely blew it by not looking at it from the recipients point of view. The mistakes they’ve made, and the things to learn from them, and much the same, so I’ll just give one example.
“Likes Music” is not the same as “Likes Groupon Clones”
I’ve been a subscriber to our local radio station’s mailing list for years – promos KFOG is running, local gigs, that sort of thing, all in a newsletter sort of format. They recently sent out an ad for a Groupon clone called “SweetJack” – on it’s own, not as part of a newsletter. I’m not interested, and I think it’s a fairly poor pitch and won’t work well for their demographic, but fair enough. A couple of weeks later I start getting spam from SweetJack, thanking me for signing up – to the tagged email address I’d only given to KFOG. And no mention of KFOG at all.
Most recipients are just going to see this as spam out of the blue from SweetJack, and hammer on the “This is Spam” button until it goes away. That’s dreadful for SweetJack’s reputation, and is going to hurt their delivery.
Recipients paying more attention are going to notice that the first they heard of SweetJack was an out of the ordinary promo by KFOG, and then they start getting spam from SweetJack. They’re likely to assume that KFOG sold their email addresses to SweetJack – and that they’re sending their spam to an email address that only KFOG has in my case confirms that. That’s going to be dreadful for SweetJack’s reputation and going to damage the relationship between KFOG and their existing subscribers. A dreadful idea.
Digging down deeper, it seems that while KFOG being bought out by media behemoth Cumulus Media a few years back didn’t damage their on-air content, it did change the amount of respect they have for their subscribers. SweetJack is a new Groupon clone started by Cumulus Media. They did have legitimate access to the KFOG mailing lists, sorta. It’s probably not an AUP or privacy violation. It’s just the sort of thing an eager marketing guy at the corporate owners would think was a great idea, to leverage the value of their existing subscribers.
But it would have been a pretty bad idea had they carried it out perfectly, with clear messaging and transparency to the recipients. And they blew their one opportunity to do it well, and I’m betting that most of the recipients have SweetJack categorized as “spammers”, both mentally and in their mail clients.
1. Not a real email marketing rule.

Audit trails are important.

One of the comments on my Spamtraps post claims that audit trails should be maintained by recipients, not senders.

I believe that spamtraps – for the professional marketer – are scare tactics that are no longer relevant. a professional marketer
Read More

How do I know you're spamming?

There are a number of reasons I know that mail coming into my mailbox is spam.

Six best practices for every mailer

People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices.
I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail or a best image to text ratio.
My top 6 best practices every marketer should be doing (and too few are).

The Social Side of Advertising

Most of the time when you’re sending bulk email you’re sending to a fairly anonymous list of email addresses. If you’re a good email marketer you’ve got a fairly good idea of their demographics, where the email addresses came from and maybe that they’ve purchased things from you in the past. But they’re still strangers – a “pre-existing business relationship” is not a relationship.
What would you do differently if all those recipients were people you knew? Friends, colleagues, family – people with faces and names and stories and real relationships with you, rather than a database query or a spreadsheet full of addresses? Would you send the same emails if you expected to be meeting some of the recipients for a drink after work the next day, or handing out candy with them this evening?
And on the flip-side of that… if a company wanted you to send a typical junk message to everyone you know – coming from “you” directly to the inboxes of all your friends, associates, colleagues and family – would you do it? If you would, how much cold, hard cash would you want to be paid for each message sent?
I really want to know what you think. Leave me a comment.

Where do subscribers come from?

Do you know all the ways subscribers can get on your lists?
Are you sure?
I recently used the contact form belonging to a marketing company to inform them that someone had stolen my email address from their database and I was receiving spam to the address only they had.
They had an opt-out link on the form, allowing me to opt-out of personal contact and a demo of their product. But that opt-out didn’t translate to not adding me to their marketing list.
When I contacted the person who was talking with me about the address leak, he told me it was the contact form that led to my address ending up on their marketing list. I asked, just to make sure, if I did remember to check the opt-out link. He confirmed I had, but there was an oversight when they updated their contact page and there was no opt-out for marketing mail.
I believe that the majority of delivery problems for real companies that “only send mail with permission” come from these types of oversights. The biggest problem with these oversights is how long they can go on until companies notice the effect. With the overall focus on aggregate delivery statistics (complaint rates, bounces, etc) oversights like this aren’t noticed until they cause some massive problem, like a SBL listing or a block at a major ISP.
The company involved in this most recent incident was very responsive to my contact and immediately corrected the oversight. But there are other companies that don’t notice or respond to the notifications individuals send. This leads to resentment and frustration on the part of the recipient.
Every company should have at least one person who can account for every address on their marketing list. Who is that person at your company?

Email in 2030

As predicted by Mark Brownlow. My favorite? You can still buy 1 million email addresses for $99. It’s still a bad idea.