According to the UK DMA, marketers report improvements in deliverability after GDPR went into effect. I mean, thank you UK DMA for doing the research. Of course deliverability is going to improve when you send mail to those people who have expressly opted into your mail. 76% report an increase in open rates in the past 12 months; 75% say click- throughs are higher; 51% say ROI has risen. Opt-out...
Explicit consent
I’m working on a blog post about correlation and causation and how cleaning a list doesn’t make it opt-in and permission isn’t actually as outdated as many think and is still important when it comes to delivery. Today is a hard-to-word day, so I headed over to twitter. Only to find someone in my personal network re-tweeted this: Don't add professional contacts to newsletter...
Delivery is not dependent on authentication
All too often folks come to me with delivery problems and lead off with all of the things they’ve done to send mail right. They assure me they’re using SPF and DKIM and DMARC and they can’t understand why things are bad. There is this pervasive belief that if you do all the technical things right then you will reach the inbox. Getting the technical bits right is an important...
The many meanings of opt-in
An email address was entered into our website An email address was associated with a purchase on our website. We have a relationship with a 3rd party that shares email addresses with us. We have a cookie on a web browser that visited out website and we sent an email to the address associated with that cookie. We both went to the same conference and the attendee list was given to every exhibitor...
One subscription should equal one unsubscription
One of the side effects of using tagged addresses to sign up for things is seeing exactly what companies do with your data once they get it. For instance, 3 years ago I downloaded a white paper or something from an ESP. That white paper was apparently co-branded and the other company got my email address from the ESP. They’re now sending mail to that address. I unsubscribed from the ESP...
Yeah… don’t do that
Never add someone to a mailing list without giving them a heads up that you’re doing it. It’s just uncool and rude. For example, I have been contacting some vendors about some work we need done. One of them has yet to answer my inquiry, but has already added me to their newsletter. Even worse, I had no idea submitting a form asking about their services would get me on their mailing...
Consent must be informed
In the deliverability space we talk about permission and consent a lot. All too often, though, consent is taken not given. Marketers and senders assume they have permission to send email, while the recipient is left expecting no email. There are different ways that companies assume permission. A favorite is to hide the permission deep in the terms and conditions or in the privacy policy. This is...
July 2017: The month in email
August is here, and as usual, we’re discussing spam, permissions, bots, filters, delivery challenges, and best practices. One of the things we see over and over again, both with marketers and with companies that send us email, is that permission is rarely binary — companies want a fair amount of wiggle room, or “implied permission” to send. There are plenty of examples of how companies try...
Implied permission
Codified into law in CASL, implied permission describes the situation where a company can legally mail someone. The law includes caveats and restrictions about when this is a legitimate assumption on the part of the company. It is, in fact, a kludge. There isn’t such a thing as implied permission. Someone either gives you permission to send them email or they don’t. We use the term...
Delete or read?
This week I attended a Data Visualization workshop presented by the Advanced Media Center at UC Berkeley. Every year I set at least one professional development goal; this year it’s learning how to better communicate visually. Part of the class included other resources, which led me to Nathan Yau’s website. One of the articles on the front page of his site is titled “Email...