How many email marketers hand over email addresses whenever asked? Are those of us in the email field more or less likely than the average consumer to sign up for something? I sign up for a lot of mail, but there are different categories of that mail. Mail I actually want from a company. Usually these are local companies where I visit their brick and mortar or an online only company that I...
Harvard Business Review posted a blog earlier this week suggesting that all businesses should treat email marketing as an opt-out process. Unfortunately, the post seemed to me to conflate and confuse a number of things. She mixes in potential customers providing business cards to an exhibitor at a trade show with current customers that are using a product. She promotes businesses using opt-out as...
Permission is always a hot topic in email marketing. Permission is key! the experts tell us. Get permission to send email! the ISPs tell us. Marketers have responded by setting up processes to “get” permission from recipients before adding them to mailing lists. They point to their privacy polices and signup forms and say “Look! the recipient gave us permission.” In many...
Ben at Mailchimp has a post up explaining what role accounts are and why mailing to them can be a problem. role addresses are built for functions, not people… If you read down in the comments you will see that they talk about how some people do use role accounts for their subscriptions. Small businesses might have a limited number of email accounts with their hosting, so they use info@ or sales@...
Some back of the envelope calculations. 20M “opt-in” leads a month is roughly 650,000 leads a day. 650,000 leads a day is roughly 27,000 leads an hour. 27,000 leads an hour is 450 leads a minute. 450 leads per minute is one lead every 133 milliseconds. The total population of the US is roughly 300,000,000 people. Roughly 240,000,000 Americans have used email at least once. 20M leads a...
Earlier this week ARS Technica reported on a ruling from the Missouri Court of Appeals stating that terms and conditions are enforceable even if the users are not forced to visit the T&C pages. Judge Rahmeyer, one of the panel members, did point out that the term in question, under what state laws the agreement would be enforced, was not an unreasonable request. She “do[es] not want...
There’s a great post over on the AOL Postmaster blog talking about sending wanted mail versus sending mail to people who have <a href=”>grudgingly given permission to receive it. Engagement comes when users REQUEST mail, not just concede to receive it. […] Bottom line… Permission isn’t enough. Our best practices document says “Ensure that you are only...
I cannot tell you how many times over the last 10 years I’ve been talking to someone with a problem and had them tell me “but I’m a legitimate email marketer.” Most of them have at least one serious problem, from upstreams that are ready to terminate them for spamming through widespread blocking. In fact, the practices of most companies who proclaim “we’re...
I’ve talked frequently about permission on this blog, and mentioned over and over again that senders should correctly set expectations at the time they collect permission. Permission isn’t permission if the recipient doesn’t know what they’re agreeing to receive. This is graphically demonstrated in a recent lawsuit filed against Toyota for a marketing program. Toyota sent...
Yesterday I wrote about the ReturnPath study showing 21% of permission based email does not make it to the inbox. There are a number of reasons I can think of for this result, but I think one of the major ones is that not all the mail they are monitoring is permission based. I have no doubt that all of the RP customers say that the mail they’re sending is permission based, I also have no...
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