Blasting the message!

Sending frequency is an important part of any email campaign. Too little mail and recipients forget about the mail and don’t open it when it does arrive. Too much mail and folks start complaining, like John Cole over at Balloon Juice.

Take the dogs to the park for a half hour, come back, and there are 30 new messages from advocacy groups and campaigns in my email box.
[…] Seriously- is spamming people good politics? I’m usually far more inclined to read emails from people who only email me once or twice a week than idiots who send me 10 breathless emails every day.

Political groups are some of the worst when it comes to well behaved email campaigns. Saturating the airwaves may help win elections but saturating an email inbox may annoy voters. When I was spammed by Bill Jones back in 2002, I went out of my way to vote against him in the primary election. Sure, my one vote didn’t cost him the nomination, but voters are a fickle group.
Over-blasting rarely a good email marketing campaign strategy, and just because the mail is “political” not “marketing” doesn’t change how people react to the annoyance.

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Legitimate email marketers need to take a stand

I was reading an article on Virus Rants and the opening paragraph really stood out.

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How not to build a mailing list

I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

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It's not illegal to block mail

My post “We’re going to party like it’s 1996” is still getting a lot of comments from people. Based on the comments, either people aren’t reading or my premise wasn’t clear.
Back in 1996 the first lawsuits were brought against ISPs to stop ISPs from blocking email. These suits were failures. Since that time, other senders have attempted to sue ISPs and lost. Laws have been written protecting the rights of the ISPs to block content they deem to be harmful.
Dela says that he was just attempting to open up a conversation, but I don’t see what he thinks the  conversation is. That ISPs shouldn’t block mail their customers want? Sure, OK. We’re agreed on that. Now, define what mail recipients want. I want what mail I want, not what someone else decides I might want.
Marketers need to get over the belief that they own end users mailboxes and that they have some right to send mail to people. You don’t.
When marketers actually start sending wanted mail, to people who actually subscribe – not just make a purchase, or register online or happen to have an easily discoverable email address – then perhaps marketers will have some standing to claim they are being treated illegally. Until and unless that happens, the ISPs are well within their rights to block mail that their users don’t want.

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