In the US, the law governing the sending of commercial email is CAN SPAM. I’ve seen a number of questions about CAN SPAM recently. One came from twitter, where someone was asking if just having an email address meant permission to send to it. Clearly, just being able to dig up an email address doesn’t imply permission to send marketing or commercial email to it. I can promise you...
Want to see a WWF style smackdown? Put a marketer and a delivery expert in a room and ask them to discuss frequency and whether or not more mail is better. The marketer will point to the bottom line and how much more money they make when they increase frequency. The delivery expert will point to inbox rates and user engagement and point out that too much mail drives users to ignore the mail. This...
There was a recent question on a mailing list during a discussion of spam and delivery problems. A number of folks who work in delivery were discussing how a bad address got on a list. Someone who works on the spam blocking end of things asked why do you care how a bad address got onto a mailing list? For recipients, they usually don’t care. They just want the unsolicited mail to stop...
I’ve seen a lot of discussion and arguments over the CAN SPAM rule about whether or not an unsubscribe needs to be a One-Click unsubscribe. It’s gotten so common, I have a stock email I use as a template when wading into such discussions. It’s probably useful for a lot of other people, too, so I thought I’d share. The regs say: § 316.5 Prohibition on charging a fee or...
The decision by Cheetahmail to stop allowing customers to use email append caused a very long discussion on some of the marketing lists. One of the criticisms had to do with what a dumb “business decision” Cheetah was making. I disagree. Appending, and other non-permission based sending cause a lot of costs to trickle down on the ESP. Many of the large ESPs have teams of 8 or 10...
Jeanne has a great post up at ClickZ comparing the performance of mail to an opt-in list to performance of mail to an opt-out list. The article looks at opens, clicks and click through rates over 7 quarters (Q1 – Q4 2010; Q1 – Q3 2011) covering 330 million emails. I strongly suggest anyone interested go read the whole article. The short version, though, is that the opt-in lists had...
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...
One of the themes I harp on with clients is setting recipient expectations. Senders that give recipients the information they need to make an informed subscription decision have much higher inbox and response rates than senders that try to mislead their recipients. Despite the evidence that correctly setting expectations results in better delivery and higher ROI on lists some senders go out of...
Virgin Blue has been fined $110,000 by the Australian government for not honoring unsubscribes.
Unfortunately, this fact doesn’t stop anyone from spamming as part of their marketing outreach. And it’s not just email spam. I get quite a bit of blog spam, most of which is caught by Akismet. Occasionally, though, there’s spam which isn’t caught by the filter and ends up coming to me for approval. Many of these are explanations of why email marketing is so awesome. Some...
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