Confusing opt-in and opt-out

Harvard Business Review posted a blog earlier this week suggesting that all businesses should treat email marketing as an opt-out process. Unfortunately, the post seemed to me to conflate and confuse a number of things.
She mixes in potential customers providing business cards to an exhibitor at a trade show with current customers that are using a product. She promotes businesses using opt-out as a default communication practice, but then talks about giving customers preference centers to manage the contact.
Overall, it was a very confusing article.
For instance the author says:

Many B2B marketers abide by a [opt-in only] policy, but they don’t have to — and shouldn’t. In fact, I’d argue, your business customers generally would prefer the reverse: an opt-out arrangement in which you send them messages unless they say “stop.”

Of course, the author then completely negates her own point by pointing out how businesses collect email addresses from customers and provide preference centers so that the recipients can control the communication center.

[T]he gold standard of business communications permissions today is to offer a choice to customers, like a web-based form that allows them to indicate their preferences. Let them choose the media channels they prefer and how often they want to hear from you. Allow them to change their preferences at any time. And above all, comply with their requests.

I dunno, that sounds pretty opt-in in practice to me. Once you get to the point of collecting email addresses from actual, paying customers, and implement them a preference center then I’m finding it hard to see how that is opt-out.
What a lot of other readers focused on and objected to is her example of collecting business cards at a trade show.

Consider this scenario: Say you attend a trade show and exchange business cards with an exhibitor. Does that exhibitor have permission to contact you by email? Of course. You fully expect to receive email (or phone, or postal mail) follow-up. That’s how you stay informed, build relationships, and do your job.

Many of us have had horrible experiences with over aggressive marketers collecting business cards and then adding us to marketing lists. A followup email or phone call is absolutely expected. An invite to join a mailing list? That’s not opt-out and is a fine practice. Adding every business card you find to your marketing list? That’s a major no-no and the only practice I’d consider opt-out here.
I am pleased to see the number of email marketing folks that commented at hbr.org, and on DJ Waldow’s post at Bronto blog arguing that opt-out was bad and even B2B marketers needed to use opt-in. But when I went back to the article to draft this post I couldn’t find where the author actually talked about opt-out marketing except when she said all businesses should use opt-out marketing. All of her examples involved users giving vendors their email addresses. How is that opt-out?

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With great wisdom…

Guest Post by JD Falk
There was certainly some surprise in the room when I pointed out (yep, it was me) that Laura has been around since before there were ESPs. Part of it, I’m sure, was because Laura’s not particularly ancient — and part was because it’s a shock to realize that people sent and received email and everything was just fine long before the segment of the industry that you work in had even been imagined.
Since this was at MAAWG, there were quite a few people in the room who were involved before there were ESPs (I asked for a show of hands) — and it was interesting to see how many of them work for ESPs now. Commenting on Laura’s article “A very young industry,” Kent McGovern mentioned three — including Anne Mitchell, who made up the word “deliverability” not long after stepping down as the head lawyer for the first shared blacklist of email-sending IP addresses.
Just think about that. She was the head lawyer for the MAPS RBL before there was such a thing as deliverability. (I worked with her there; so did Laura.)
There are a lot of us who’ve been around that long, and most don’t work in the deliverability/marketing side of the industry. Nearly all of us have become cynical over the years; some were cynical to begin with. A few, sadly, have burned out entirely from the frustration of having the same arguments, same discussions, over and over and over.
I think some of the recent refrain calling for ESPs to pressure each other into better practices comes in part from that same frustration. Yes, bad practices are bad, but we’re also tired with teaching the same thing to people with the same title, and feeling like the message never gets through. Part of what we’re saying is “It’s your industry, you’ve learned this stuff, now you teach ’em.”
And when you do, it does work — far more often than when we say it, because you speak the same language. There’s now a generation (for lack of a better term) of ESP & deliverability staff who weren’t around before there were ESPs, maybe not even before CAN-SPAM, but have learned many of the same things and undergone similar transformation. Who’d have thought that Jaren Angerbauer — quite possibly the nicest guy in the industry — would ever start sighing at those young whippersnappers like a cynical old anti-spammer? And Jaren’s not only teaching deliverabilitators; he’s also teaching college students, ensuring that they’ll know far more when they enter the work force than you or he did.
We old-timers once struggled with the idea that we must reach out — even to people we disagree with — and teach what we knew, learning along the way to put it into terms that marketers understand. It’s so much simpler to add to a blacklist and throw away they key, declaring “not my problem anymore.” But we did start teaching, and look how far we’ve come; we’re still doing it, and look how much further there is to go.
Now it’s time for the next generation to do the same. Stop looking to us, or to the ISPs, to solve the problems of your industry for you; we’re busy dealing with spam, as we should’ve been doing all along. Your colleagues’ cluelessness is exactly as impermanent as your own was, and can be overcome in the same ways. Whether you have fifteen or ten or five or merely two years of experience, you’ve found your way to this blog and read down to this line, and attained some measure of wisdom, and you can ease the passage for others.
When someone at a marketing conference says something that you know isn’t true, that you know will result in poor deliverability and industry ire, call them on it. Engage them in a dialogue. Teach, explain, cajole, push — because with great wisdom comes great responsibility.
It’s your turn.
J.D. Falk is Director of Product Strategy for Receiver Products at Return Path, which is not an ESP.

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I’m working on a few projects designed to help provide mentoring for other delivery people and to bridge the communication gap between the various groups active in email. One of those projects is collecting, linking to, and publishing more delivery resources. Some will be linked to directly from the blog, others will be linked to from the wiki. While I’m reasonably familiar with what’s out there, it is impossible for me to know about all the useful resources available. So I ask you readers:

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