The discussion of “permission” and “opt-in” is one that keeps popping up again and again. I am working on posting some more thoughts about permission and consent. While I’m still thinking about what new I can say, here is a list of articles Word to the Wise I’ve posted in the past on permission: Permission-ish based email marketing Customers want to get mail...
In today’s Magill Report Ken says: The only surprise in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group’s statement last week condemning email appending was that it didn’t publish one sooner. However, MAAWG’s implication that email appending can’t be accomplished without spamming is nonsense. Ken does have a point. I can come up with a number of scenarios where recipients give permission to have...
MAAWG has published their position statement on email appending. It’s pretty explicit in it’s condemnation of the practice. It is the position of MAAWG that email appending is an abusive practice. Sending email to someone who did not explicitly give informed consent for his or her email address to be used in this way is never acceptable. It will result in complaints, which only...
A friend of mine sent me a copy of an email she received, asking if I’d ever heard of this particular sender. It seems a B2B lead generation company was sending her an email telling her AOL was blocking their mail and they had stopped delivery. All she needed to do was click a link to reactivate her subscription. The mail copy and the website spends an awful lot of time talking about how...
Last week the Only Influencers email discussion group tackled this question posed by Ken Magill. How do you gently educate one’s customers or employer to use permission-based marketing? Ken published the responses in his Tuesday newsletter. For a number of reasons I didn’t participate in the conversation, but I’ve been thinking about the question a lot. How do I evangelize...
My Mum flew in to visit last week, and over dinner one evening the talk turned to email. We don’t get much spam on Yahoo, mostly because we don’t give our email address out much. The only spam we really get is from <stockbroker website>, and that all goes to the spam folder. We use the site for checking stock quotes – it’s free, and we never see any of the spam they...
A lot of email marketing best practices center around getting permission to send email to recipients. A lot of anti-spammers argue that the issue is consent not content. Both groups seem to agree that permission is important, but more often than not they disagree about what constitutes permission. For some the only acceptable permission is round trip confirmation, also known as confirmed opt-in...
One of the discussions that surrounds email marketing is whether relevance trumps permission or permission trumps relevance. I believe this entire discussion is built on a false dichotomy. Sending relevant email is important. Not only do recipients expect mail to be relevant, but the ISPs often make delivery decisions on how relevant their users find your mail. Marketers that send too much...
Chad White wrote an article for MediaPost about best practices which parallels a lot of thinking I’ve been doing about how the email marketing industry treats best practices. After several conversations recently about “best practices,” I’m convinced that the term is now meaningless. It’s been bastardized in the same way that the definition of “spam” has...
I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices. Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have...
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