Thoughts on transactional mail

I mentioned a few weeks ago about a conversation I’d had at MAAWG about transactional email and opened up the conversation to readers here. Mike proposed a definition.

[Transactional mail is] an automated message, sent on a per-user basis, usually as the result of a direct action by the user or strongly associated with the user.

In Mike’s decision were things like sales receipts, opt-in notifications / welcome messages, social networking messages and the like.
Kelly disagreed with Mike and said she looked to the FTC and her current working definition was was mail that the user could not opt-out of.
Margaret pointed out that users should be able to unsubscribe from transactional mail.
Finally Steven posted this definition:

I think transactional email is anything which serves a functional purpose which is useful to the receiver. Shipping information is the classic example, invitations to buy are not.

I think these various comments demonstrate something I’ve been thinking for a while. Transactional email is one of the most interesting use cases of email. The traditional examples of transactional emails are those triggered by an action of the recipient; things like shipping notices and purchase receipts. Then there are transactional emails triggered by the actions of a friend of the recipient but that expect interaction or action by the recipient. Requests to connect through the various social networking sites or forward to a friend links on webpages fit into this category. Email as a command, subscription and unsubscription requests, are also a common category that fits clearly into most people’s definition of transactional email.
Then there is email as a notification. These notifications are often programatically generated and may or may not require action on the part of the recipient. Often, they are generated by monitoring scripts, and only fire when certain thresholds are crossed.
I think one of the important factors of a transactional email is that they are not generated by a person. If a mail is generated by a person then it is a one-to-one email. Of course, like most definitions, there are some exceptions, like some sales receipts are drafted and sent by hand not by an automated system.
What do you think? Are these types of messages transactional messages? Or is there some other term that would encompass this use of email?

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Permission, Part 2

Permission Part 1 I talked about the definition of permission as I use it. Before we can talk about how to get permission we need to clarify the type of email that we’re talking about in this post. Specifically, I’m talking about marketing and newsletter email, not transactional email or other kinds of email a company may send to recipients. Also, when I talk about lists I include segments of a database that fit marketing criteria as well as specific list of email addresses.
There are two ways that recipients give permission to receive newsletters or marketing email, explicit permission and implicit permission. Recipients give explicit permission to receive marketing email when they sign up for such email. Implicit permission covers situations where a user provides an email address, either during the course of a purchase, a download or other interaction with a company. There may be some language in the company’s privacy policy explaining that recipients may receive marketing email, but the recipient may not be aware they will receive email.
The easier situation is explicit permission. There are two basic ways a company can gather explicit permission to send marketing email: single opt-in and double (confirmed) opt-in.
Single opt-in: Recipient provides an email address to the sender for the express purpose of receiving marketing email.
Double (or confirmed) opt-in: Recipient provides an email address to the sender for the express purpose of receiving marketing email. The sender then sends an initial email to the recipient that requires a positive action on the part of the recipient (click a link, log into a web page or reply to the email) before the address is added to the sender’s list.
There can be problems with both types of opt-in, but barring fake or typoed email addresses being given to the sender, there is an social contract that the sender will send email to the recipient. I’ll talk about single and double opt-in in later posts.
Implicit permission covers a lot of situations where email is commonly sent in response to a recipient giving the sender and email address. In these cases, though, the recipient may not be aware they are consenting to receive email. This behavior may annoy recipients as well as causing delivery problems for the sender. Common cases of implicit permission include website registration, product purchase and free downloads.
More responsible companies often change implicit opt-in to explicit opt-in. They do this by making it clear to users that they are agreeing to receive email at the point where the user gives the company an email address. Not only is the information about how email addresses will be used in the company’s privacy policy, but there is a clear and conspicuous notice at the point where the user must provide their email address. The recipient knows what the sender will do with the email address and is given the opportunity to express their preferences. If users do agree to receive email, the company will send a message to that recipient with relevant information about how their email address will be used, how often they will receive email and how they can opt-out.
Explicit opt-in is the best practice for building a list, however, there are still companies that successfully use implicit opt-in to build marketing lists. Companies successfully using implicit opt in usually are collecting emails as part of a sales transaction. There is very little incentive for their customers to give them an email address not belonging to the customer.
Outside of purchasers, however, implicit opt-in leaves a company open to getting email addresses that do not actually belong to the person providing the company with the email address. This most often occurs when the sender is providing some service, be it software downloads, music or access to content, in return for a “payment” of a valid email address. In order to protect against users inputting other, valid addresses into the form, the sender must verify that the address actually belongs to their user before sending any sort of marketing email. The easiest way for senders to do this is to send a link to the recipient email. This link can be the download link, or the password to get to restricted content. Because the recipient must be able to receive and act on email, the only addresses the sender has belong to actual users of the site.
In some rare cases, implicit opt-in can be used to build a list that performs well. However, senders must be aware of the risks of annoying their customer base and the recipient ISPs. Mitigating these risks can be done, but it often takes more effort than just using explicit opt-in in the first place.

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Language

Over on Deliverability.com Krzysztof posts about discussions going on over on the URIBL list about using “confirmed opt-in” to describe a subscription process versus using “double opt-in” to describe the same subscription process. I do not even need to read the list to know what is being said. This is a disagreement that has been going on since the first usage of “double opt-in” over 10 years ago.
To better explain the vitriol, a little history of the two terms might help.
My personal recollection and experience is that the term “confirmed opt-in” was coined by posters in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email around 1997 or 1998. There was some discussion about marketers / spammers (a lot of the posters did not distinguish between the two) trying to use the term “double opt-in” instead of “confirmed opt-in.” Many posters believed (and many still do) that this was a deliberate attempt by marketers to make the process seem overly burdensome and unworkable.
During the 2003 FTC spam hearings, Rebecca Lieb shared formal definitions for 5 different subscription types including “Confirmed opt-in” and “double opt-in”. These definitions are still up on ClickZ.

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Do open rates matter?

Ken Magill over at DirectMag has an article deriding the reliance on ‘open rates’ as a metric for the success (or failure!) of marketing campaigns.

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