Check your assumptions

One of the things that prompted yesterday’s post was watching a group of marketers discuss how to get subscribers to give them their “real” or “high value” email addresses. Addresses at free email providers are seen as less valuable than addresses at a place of employment or at a cable company or dialup ISP. The discussion centered around how to incentivize recipients to give up their “actual” email addresses.
The underlying belief is that users don’t use free mail accounts for their important mail, and if a recipient gives a marketer a free mail account as a signup that they will not be reading the mail regularly. Better to get an email address that the recipient checks frequently so there is a better chance at a conversion and sale.
Perfectly acceptable marketing goals, but makes a number of assumptions that I am not sure are valid.
Assumption 1: An email address at a freemail provider is less important to the recipient than a different email address.
Wrong! A sender has no idea if a recipient uses a freemail account exclusively or has another real email address. Many people these days use gmail as their primary account and they don’t check the email account associated with their dialup or broadband provider. For instance I have an email account at AT&T associated with our UVerse TV and internet service, but have never logged in to do anything with email.
Assumption 2: A non freemail address gives better response rates.
Really? I haven’t seen data one way or another saying that different classes of email addresses give better responses. It may be true, but it may not.  Some users do have separate accounts for friends and family and marketing mail. In that case, are senders better off in the marketing account? Or in the F&F account where the user may hit the “this is spam” button just because that mail is in the wrong place?
Assumption 3: I’ve been invited in, I get free run of the place
Wrong! Just because you’ve been invited onto the front porch for a glass of lemonade, doesn’t mean you’re welcome in the bedroom. Marketing is all about pushing limits and getting more and more from recipients, but in email marketing the recipients get to hit the “this is spam” filter and stop delivery of that email. Limit pushing in email may result in all out blocks and zero inbox delivery, rather than causing a massive increase in sales.
Assumption 4: Incentivized permission is the same as real permission
Wrong! Just because a subscriber hits the “give me a coupon” or “enter me in the drawing” link does not mean they want mail from that sender. What it really means is the recipient wants a chance to win something or get $5 off their next purchase. Just because they closed the loop to get an incentive does not mean the sender gets a free pass through spam filters or is exempt from having their mail marked as spam.
The marketing relationship between sender and recipient is a lot more balanced than any other direct marketing relationship. The sender can’t ignore the recipients’ preferences over the long term without suffering delivery problems. Many email marketers, particularly those that didn’t start in email, forget that the relationship is different and marketers have to respect the recipient.

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Don't forget to check out the forest

I have the #emailmarketing feed on twitter scrolling live across my screen while I’m working. It’s been an interesting experience as many of the people who tweet #emailmarketing aren’t part of my social network.
Over the last week or so there’s been a lot of tweeting going on about Ben and Jerry’s GIVING UP EMAIL MARKETING!!! Only, come to find out, that’s not what they’re doing. Yes, they are moving more into the social networking arena but they will be continuing to connect with subscribers through email. Today many are tweeting that perhaps they “jumped the cow” with their initial reports of email abandonment by B&J.
Watching the ongoing discussions led me to wonder if a lot of email marketers are so focused on the trees that they miss the forest? Are they so disconnected from how people actually use email, and social networks for that matter, that they spend way to much time chasing a response and not enough time thinking about what they’re saying and doing?
Email marketing discussions often focus on a limited number of things, the biggest are how to get mail to the inbox and how to get recipients to engage. Many marketers spend time and money looking for the elusive combination of factors that will get their mail to the inbox and impel the recipient to give the sender money. The focus is on details like color and pre-headers and length and timing and content above and below the fold and the perfect call to action.
The discussions focus almost exclusively on the sender and only mention the subscriber in passing. That is understandable on one level. Senders can only control one end of the equation and figuring out what inputs compel the best response from the other side is what marketing is all about.
But there’s another part of email marketing, and that is that subscribers invite marketers into their inboxes. When someone subscribes to a newsletter or mail from a company they’re offering that company the opportunity to interact with them in their personal space. This is, in fact, the holy grail of marketing having the customer invite contact from a seller.
I suspect this is why the rumors of Ben and Jerry’s abandoning email had people all up in arms. A  company abandoning a channel where they had an engaged and interested audience? PREPOSTEROUS! What’s happening to email as marketing?
I’ll be honest, I didn’t pay much attention because it was such a silly idea. Any marketer worth their salt wouldn’t give up a way to interact with customers. Ben and Jerry’s is a company with an almost cult like following. Anyone who was going to subscribe to a B&J newsletter was going to want that mail (new flavors! coupons! new locations! inside information!).
Someone started a rumor, though, that B&J were abandoning email marketing and everyone focusing on the trees grabbed that story and ran with it. They were so focused on the details they didn’t take a step back and think about what they were repeating. Had they taken a step back and thought about the forest they would have realized how silly the idea of B&Js abandoning email as a customer communication channel was.

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Engaging recipients critical for delivery

One of the issues I have touched on repeatedly is the changing face of blocking and filtering at ISPs. Over the last 12 – 18 months, large, end-user ISPs have started rolling out more and more sophisticated filters. These filters look at a lot of things about an email, not just the content or the sending IP reputation or URLs in the message but also the recipient profile. Yes, ISPs really are measuring how engaged recipients are with a sender and, they are using that information to help them make blocking decisions.
There were two separate posts on Friday related to this.
Mark Brownlow has a great blog post speculating about a number of things ISPs might be looking at when making decisions about what to do with an incoming email. He lists a number of potential measurements, some of which I can definitively confirm are being measured by ISPs.

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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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