Recent comments

On my followup EEC post Tamara comments

The eec made a really bad and ugly mistake but you can take my word for it that they have learned from it and that it will not happen again. I am not going to blog about this because I really do believe in the value of the EEC and what it brings to the industry. It’s okay to call out a mistake, but do you really need to destroy an organization that is so worthwile?

Just to be clear I had not heard of the EEC before this and when the story broke I blew it off as no big deal, some organization did something stupid and spammed. It was only after I did a little research that I realized this was THE organization that was supposed to be leading the pack in email marketing. They are

[…] a global professional organization that strives to enhance the image of email marketing and communications, while celebrating and actively advocating its critical importance in business, and its ROI value.

And, yet, they send mail that was perceived by many of their recipients as spam. While I have not seen copies of the mail, two posters commented that the mail did not comply with CAN SPAM. One of those said there was no opt-out link. Putting aside any of the permission or relevancy questions, if this is true then it takes it from a bad idea to illegal activity. How does this organization maintain any credibility as a leader in the email marketing space?
As for the negative comments, I fully expect that if Word to the Wise pulled something like this, there would be a lot of negativity and people holding us accountable for our actions. I do not see with the EEC should expect anything different from their base.
There was a funny comment from EEC Member pointing out that the EEC had brought us standardization of the spelling of email.
On my Email non-viable for acquisition post, Josh disagreed. He says

I think saying that “email is not viable for customer acquisition” might be too broad of a statement. I wouldn’t have any problem with “Purchasing lists is not viable for customer acquisition.”

I think his point is well taken. There are places where you buy a mailing, or buy an advertisement and that does drive acquisition as well as sales. I am still wary of using email for acquisition as most of the companies who come to me with that business model mean purchasing lists or co-reg when they say acquisition.
There have been a number of comments about Postini. Jay Levitt had a couple of comments that sum up the frustration that many of us have had with Postini.

I too tried to get a human at Postini. I took three different back-channel routes to get there. They all landed at the same person – apparently the one guy who sends out “we’re not responsible no matter what” form letters to anyone who writes to Postini. He told me, and I can’t make this up:
Postini was scoring my e-mails as “spammy” because Postini had previously scored my e-mails as spammy.

Dennis also commented about Postini:

I was told that if you take a document originally typed on an application such as MS Word and then copy and paste this into the marketing e-mail it gives it funky html code that for some reason gives your e-mail a lower score in Postini.

Cutting and pasting from MS Word has a myriad of problems, not just Postini delivery. One thing I emphasize with my clients is that their email structure must be clean and standards compliant. So many spammers out there are using badly formatted HTML mails, that the ISPs are looking at the technical structure of your email and using that as part of their filtering decisions. This confirmation from Postini only reinforces that.
Have a good weekend, everyone!

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Do you know where your addresses go?

Being a deliverability consultant, I end up signing up for a lot of lists and providing email addresses to a lot of different websites I may not normally trust with my email address. The only way to manage the resulting volume of email is using a disposable address system. There are a number of commercial versions, but we built our own system.
Any time I need to sign up with a client, I create a new email address. Part of the address creation process involves making notes about where and when the address was used. When mail is received at any of the email addresses I have used, that email is appended with the data I provided at the time I signed up and forwarded to a mailbox on my main system. If an address ends up compromised or sold and getting too much mail, I can just turn it off. This system allows me to freely hand out addresses, without a large amount of mail ending up in my primary mail box.
Disposable addresses great way to monitor what my clients are doing with my email address. I have found, in at least 2 cases, that my clients are doing nothing wrong, but there are leaks in their process that lets email addresses get out to spammers. My reports of data leaking were the first they knew about any problems with their vendors or customers.
I strongly recommend any marketer who shares any data, include in that data test or seed accounts. Sign up for your own lists, using unique addresses, so that you can see what kind of mail your subscribers are receiving once they sign up at your site. If you are providing data to customers or vendors, include unique test data in each list. If you start getting unexpected mail to those addresses, you can track back to the specific vendor with the data problem.
Your email address list is one of the biggest assets your company has. Protect that asset by monitoring what others are doing with it.

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Signup forms and bad data

One thing I frequently mention, both here on the blog and with my clients, is the importance of setting recipient expectations during the signup process. Mark Brownlow posted yesterday about signup forms, and linked to a number of resources and blog posts discussing how to create user friendly and usable signup forms.
As a consumer, a signup process for an online-only experience that requires a postal address annoys and frustrates me to no end. Just recently I purchased a Nike + iPod sport kit. Part of the benefit to this, is free access to the Nike website, where I can see pretty graphs showing my pace, distance and time. When I went to go register, however, Nike asked me to give them a postal address. I know there are a lot of reasons they might want to do this, but, to my mind, they have no need to know my address and I am reluctant go give that info out. An attempt to register leaving those blanks empty was rejected. A blatantly fake street address (nowhere, nowhere, valid zipcode) did not inhibit my ability to sign up at the site.
Still, I find more and more sites are asking for more and more information about their site users. From a marketing perspective it is a no-brainer to ask for the information, at least in the short term. Over the longer term, asking for more and more information may result in more and more users avoiding websites or providing false data.
In the context of email addresses, many users already fill in random addresses into forms when they are required to give up addresses. This results in higher complaint rates, spamtrap hits and high bounce rates for the sender. Eventually, the sender ends up blocked or blacklisted, and they cannot figure out why because all of their addresses belong to their users. They have done everything right, so they think.
What they have not done is compensate for their users. Information collection is a critical part of the senders process, but some senders seem give little thought to data integrity or user reluctance to share data. This lack of thought can, and often does, result in poor email delivery.

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