Signups

Collecting email addresses

One of the primary ways to collect email addresses is from website visitors, and it’s actually a pretty good way to collect addresses. One of the more popular, and effective, techniques is through a pop-up window, asking for an address. Users need to provide an address or click a “no thanks” link or close the window. I’ve noticed, though, that many companies drop something passive aggressive in their “no thanks” button. “No, thanks, I don’t want to save money.” “I don’t need workout advice.”

Conversations with spammers

It’s amazing how many spammers try and fool deliverability into accepting a questionable list. All too often they fall back on a story. The basic points: a company you’ve never heard of collected millions of email addresses on a website hosted on a low end VPS.

I’ve never heard of your company. We’re just that much better at marketing. This list is guaranteed 100% opt in. Subscribers are desperate to hear from us. The mail is vital and important. We had some problems at our last ESP, but that’s just because they don’t understand our business model. And we had a brief problem with complaints. But they weren’t real complaints. Our competitors are signing up for the list and complaining to hurt out business. It’s not a list problem, it’s that we’re so dominant they have to subvert us. That’s just because we’re that much better at their jobs than anyone else.
You’re looking for deliverability help. Well, yeah, sometimes Gmail delivery is bad, but that’s simply because we won’t pay Google money for advertising. Google is so afraid of us they deliberately filter all this spectacularly wanted email into the bulk folder. They have problems with us as a business. Oh, and we might, sometimes, occasionally have a minor problem with Yahoo. But, again, it’s because we threaten them and they don’t want to have to compete on a level playing field.
If they’re a potential customer, I tell them about our services and offer a proposal. Once some company I’ve never heard of tells me their bad delivery is because global companies are afraid of them, there’s really nothing I can do. They’re unlikely to listen to me explain reality to them.
Sometimes, though, this conversation happens because I’m consulting for an ESP or an Agency. They’ve brought me in to discuss deliverability with a customer or vendor. In those cases, it’s my job to keep going.
Your site doesn’t actually have a signup form. That’s because we’re in the middle of an upgrade cycle and had some problems with the back end. [Alternative: We stopped collecting new email addresses because of their deliverability problems and removed the form.] Your site has a signup form, and I signed up, but never got any mail from you. We disconnected the signup form while we handle our deliverability problems. [Alternative: That shouldn’t happen. We can forward you some messages instead.] I have received spam advertising your company. We had a rogue affiliate that we discovered was spamming and we cut them off.
No, this is direct from your IP space. Oh, well, you must have opted in and forgotten about it. [Alternative: We had a rogue sales guy, but we fired him for spamming.] Your company has only been in business for 3 years, this is an address I haven’t used since the ’90s. Oh, we probably bought a company that you opted into and so have permission that way.
That’s not really permission. Of course it is!
OK…. How can I help you. We want you to call Google / Yahoo / Hotmail and tell them we’re really a legitimate company that’s sending content and we shouldn’t be in the bulk folder.
What have you changed? Nothing! Why would we change anything? We’re great marketers. We have all these plans but need to get back to the inbox before we can implement them.
Um… there’s no filter setting for “laura says they’re a good sender.” They’re going to look for new sending patterns so let’s change a few things. Well, we recently removed 2/3 of our database, but it made no difference so we don’t know what else you think we can do.
Let’s talk about your technical setup.

March 2017: The Month in Email

It’s that time again… here’s a look at our last month of blog posts. We find it useful to recap each month, both to track trends and issues in email delivery and to provide a handy summary for those who aren’t following along breathlessly every single day. Let us know if you find it useful too!

As always, I wrote about email filters. It’s so important to recognize that filters aren’t arbitrary — they’re detailed instructions that help meet specific user needs, and the more you are cognizant of that, the better you’ll be able to work with them. Additionally, filters aren’t perfect and likely never will be. False positives and false negatives are frustrating, but as long as spam is still a viable business for spammers, they’ll continue to figure out how to work around filters. As such, we can’t expect filters to be 100% accurate in determining what constitutes wanted and unwanted mail.
Part of this, of course, is due to the problem of fraudulent signups. Companies aren’t particularly vigilant about address acquisition and hygiene, and as a result, they’ll claim you “signed up” for their email when you did not. Some people believe that a confirmed opt-in (COI) will solve this problem, but our experience is companies are reluctant to leave revenue on the table, and that they will continue to mail to addresses that have not confirmed.
Address sharing and co-reg is also part of the problem. As we saw in the extensive RCM data breach, many major brands continue to work with third-party senders to send mail in ways that are quite clearly spam. And in more criminal activity, I looked at the rise of botnets and how some of those criminals were brought to justice. In other justice news, there’s been an indictment in the Yahoo breach and another CASL enforcement action.
I wrote a post about bounce handling and “relaying denied” error messages, which are quite rare. It’s useful to have an understanding of these and other error messages, since bounces are sometimes indicative of a larger technical issue, such as when AOL accidentally bounced all messages for a short period last week. Speaking of AOL, we noted that there’s no official timeline for the move from Verizon addresses to AOL addresses following the 2015 acquisition, but it may be worth considering asking your customers to update their addresses.
Spam and filters aren’t the only factors of course. It can be challenging to figure out the multiple factors that make up the black box of delivery. And of course, the most important part of delivery continues to be engagement, engagement, engagement.
I wrote a few posts this month on why I do what I do, and why it’s so important to me. First, I wrote about A Day Without A Woman, and my choice not to participate in offering advice and guidance for that day. The truth is that I enjoy sharing what I know and helping people solve problems. I was honored to be named one of 11 Innovators in Email, and I know that my volunteer work in the industry and my unpaid blogging work is a big part of that. It may sound corny, but I really do believe we are on the front lines of the fight of good vs. evil online, and despite the distractions of politics and world events, we must all continue to do our part.

Do you know where your signups are?

Here at Word to the Wise we sign up for a lot of email from our customers. There are multiple reasons we do this.

May 2016: The Month in Email

Summer, already? Happy June! Here’s a look at our busy month of May.

I had a wonderful time in Atlanta at the Salesforce Connections 2016 conference, where I spoke on a panel about deliverability. While in Atlanta, I also visited our friends at Mailchimp, and later spoke at the Email Innovations conference in Las Vegas, where I did my best to avoid “explaining all the things”. Since my speaking schedule for 2017 is filling up already, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunity to explain many more of the things over the next year or so. Let me know if there’s an event that might be a good fit for me, either as a keynote speaker or on a panel.
Steve contributed a few technical posts on the blog this month. He mentioned that Google has stopped supporting the obsolete SSLv3 and RC4, and he explored the ARC protocol, which is in development and review, and which will be useful in extending authentication through the email forwarding process.
Meri contributed to the blog this month as well, with a post on the Sanders campaign mailing list signup process. We’ve written about best practices for political campaigns before, and it’s always interesting to see what candidates are doing correctly and incorrectly with gathering addresses and reaching out to supporters.
In other best practices coverage, I pointed to some advice for marketers about authentication that I’d written up for the Only Influencers list, a really valuable community for email marketers. I wrote about purchased lists again (here’s a handy collection of all of my posts on the topic, just in case you need to convince a colleague that this isn’t a great idea). I also wrote about how getting the technical bits right isn’t always sufficient, which is also something I’ve written about previously. I also discussed the myth of using the word “free” in the subject line. As I said in the post, “Single words in the subject line don’t hurt your delivery, despite many, many, many blog posts out there saying they do. Filters just don’t work that way. They maybe, sorta, kinda used to, but we’ve gotten way past that now.”
On a personal note, I reminisced about the early days of mailing list culture and remembered a dear online friend as I explained some of why I care so much about email.
In my Ask Laura column, I covered CAN SPAM and transactional opt-outs. As always, if you have a general question about deliverability that I can answer in the column, please let me know.

GitHub signup

GitHub is a site where developers can share code with one another. It is widely used by open source developers. Their user base is made up of geeks and people who want a lot of control over their mailbox.
Their email signup process reflects the sensibilities of their market, without being difficult to manage or understand.

Driving customers away

I have a frequent flyer account with Virgin America. They want me to sign up for some new thing, and they’ve sent me two emails about it so far, with lots of good call-to-action language, and a big “Join Now” button.
But this is the start of the form that clicking on that button leads to:

(It goes on further, finally ending up with a captcha and a submit button.)
Virgin America already has all that information, and it’s all tied to the account they sent the email to. If they were to have pre-filled the form with that personal information I might have looked at it further. Quite apart from the annoyance of having to give information that they already know, I’ve no idea what my frequent flyer number is and I’d need to go and look it up before I could go any further. From a typical recipients point of view this makes it much less likely that I’d consider signing up for it. That barrier to entry drives people away.
From an email/privacy professionals point of view I know why they do it this way, though. This web form isn’t Virgin America’s form – it’s a third party that Virgin America is doing co-registration with (though neither party is as clear about that fact as they could be, of course). Virgin America are being paid by that third party for each new sign up they capture – but they don’t want to share their customers private information with the untrusted third party. Doing the information capture this way, by just using their mailing list to drive traffic to the third party’s website is very cheap to do, much cheaper (and so more profitable) than doing it “properly” by having Virgin America induct people into the third party program, and reducing the barrier to entry to just a simple disclosure and “Sign me up!” button.
But treating third-party co-registration signups as “free money for almost no investment” only works if you don’t consider the attention of your existing customers valuable. Of the past five emails I’ve received from Virgin America, only one has been talking about buying flights – the other four were, like this one, co-registration offers (credit card, car hire, vacation, online surveys), with varying degrees of Virgin branding. They don’t really bring much benefit to recipients, and they’re a bit intrusive.
I’m not sure how much Virgin America is paid for dropping this sort of co-reg and third-party advertising into their mail stream, but it can’t be that much (does anyone know?). Treating your existing customers as a resource of cheap, fungible eyeballs to be sold to random third parties, rather than as people you’re maintaining a relationship with, risks driving them away from your email program. Given the value of a loyal airline traveller that can’t be profitable in the longer term, and likely not the short term.

Customers want to get mail from us!

Many online retailers assume that anyone making a purchase from them is a prime target for email marketing. THEY ARE OUR CUSTOMERS! Of course they want to get mail from us!
Well. Maybe. But not always. Think about the person who shops online during the holidays. I visit a lot of places looking for gifts for other people. These aren’t places I’d normally shop for myself, and are not places that have things I’m interested in. This means I don’t really have, or want, an ongoing relationship with them.
So for those of you that think they’ve found a new customer because I made a purchase this Christmas, I’d just like to say: Not so much. I mean, yeah, you have the perfect gift for my mother this year. Or that appropriately tacky bit of Vette swag for my dad. But, really, I just want to buy the gift and have it shipped. I don’t want an ongoing customer relationship with you. In fact, I really never want to hear from you again.
Some online retailers are polite and treat purchasers with respect. They allow guest checkouts and don’t require tons of personal information and account creation for a purchase. They even let you opt-out of being added to their mailing list at the time of purchase. Other retailers require the full registration process (you need to know my marital status? so I can buy a gift for my dad? what?) and don’t offer an opt-out during the checkout process. Instead, you infer I want your mail and make me opt-out after the fact.
Making a purchase doesn’t constitute permission. Sometimes retailers can get away with it because when I’m making a purchase for me I might be interested in more mail from you. When I’m making a purchase for someone else, though, there is no long term relationship to be developed.
Sure, with the right campaign you may be able to convert one of those purchasers into a returning purchaser. But without a carefully planned and executed conversion campaign you may lose more future customers than you convert.

Broken signup processes

DJ Waldow wrote a post on explicit permission over on Mediapost. I think he hit on some interesting bits and wanted to comment on them. In order to comment on a Mediapost blog, you have to register.
I’ve thought about it before, but every time I start the process I get to the page asking for detailed demographic information and decide no. This time, I was inspired enough by DJ to get to the second page of the signup process. This requires me to identify what type of marketing I’m interested in and won’t let me past the page until I click something. I’m not interested in anything, so I close the webpage. I can always write my own blog post responding to DJ.
I return to my inbox to discover a welcome message from Mediapost. It seems I am now a member and will be receiving email and specials and all the stuff I didn’t want from them.
This isn’t unusual. There are tons of websites on the net that don’t require you to complete a signup process in order to be added to their database. One of the worst I experienced was 1-800-Pet-Meds. They added me to their database when I abandoned a cart (what I wanted required a prescription from them, whereas I could just go into my vet’s and pick it up, so I’ll just pay the vet’s prices). They added me to their mailing list and couldn’t unsubscribe me because I was not in their customer database. Everything was done with the magic order number, which I didn’t have because I never ordered with them. That was fun to sort out.
It’s a bad idea to add people who don’t complete the signup or purchase process to your mailing lists. If you’re worried about losing a potential customer, then you can send mail reminding them to complete the process (or purchase). If you’re very into customer service, you can ask them if they are interested in future specials from you: would you like to opt-in to our mailing list anyway? Or you can give them the opportunity to remove their information from your database.

Fake privacy policies

I sign up at a lot of websites and liberally spray email addresses across the net. These signups are on behalf of one customer or another and each webform gets its own tagged and tracked email address. I always have a specific goal with each signup: getting a copy of a customer’s email, checking their signup process, auditing an affiliate on behalf of a customer or identifying where there might be a problem in a process. Because I have specific goals, I am pretty careful with these signups and usually uncheck every “share my email address” box I can find on the forms.
In every case the privacy policies of my clients and the things they tell me are explicit in that addresses will not be shared. It’s all opt-in, and email addresses are not shared without permission. Even in the cases where I am auditing affiliates, my clients assure me that if I follow this exact process my address will not be shared. Or so the affiliates have assured them.
Despite my care and the privacy policies on the websites, these addresses occasionally leak or are sold. This is actually very rare, and most of the websites I test never do anything with my address that I don’t expect. But in a couple cases these email addresses have ended up in the hands of some hard core spammers (hundreds of emails a day) and there was no useful tracking I could do. In other cases the volume has been lower, and I’ve watched the progression of my email addresses being bought and sold with morbid fascination.
Today an address I signed up at a website about a year ago got hit with multiple spams in a short time frame. All came from different IPs in the same /24. All had different domains with no websites. Whois showed all the domains were registered behind a privacy protection service. Interestingly, two of the domains used the same CAN SPAM address. The third had no CAN SPAM address at all. None of these addresses match the data I have on file related to the email signup.
It never ceases to amaze me how dishonest some address collection outfits. Their websites state clearly that addresses will not be bought an sold, and yet the addresses get lots of spam unrelated to the original signup. For those dishonest enough to do this they’ll never get caught unless recipients tags and tracks all their signups. Even worse, unless their partners test their signups or their mailing practices, the partners may end up unwittingly sending spam.