Emailpocalypse

Apparently emailpocalypse is coming on Monday. That’s when Facebook is going to release their email platform (the one no one knows anything about) and it’s going to DESTROY EMAIL MARKETING AS WE KNOW IT.
Are you ready?
I think my favorite doom and gloom scenario is: Facebook will throw out the book on email deliverability because it will likely be the first mass-user email platform that is whitelist-based. In other words, you will NOT be able to send to a user unless they have given you explicit permission to do so.
THE HORRORS! Marketers are going to have to get PERMISSION TO SEND EMAIL. OH NOES! The SKY! It is falling! Recipients are going to have to actually invite marketers in! They can’t just take permission, they have to be granted it.
Oddly enough, a lot of the folks who are having conniptions are also people who have been preaching permission for years. Really, if they’re already getting explicit permission, then this is no different. It’s just an email platform.
And even if Titan is somehow a total game changer and is going to require explicit permission, it’s not going to destroy email marketing. Everyone who has a facebook account already has another email account. Marketers who can’t get explicit permission to mail to the facebook account can certainly keep sending “permission” email to their other email accounts.

Related Posts

Spam is not a marketing strategy

Unfortunately, this fact doesn’t stop anyone from spamming as part of their marketing outreach. And it’s not just email spam. I get quite a bit of blog spam, most of which is caught by Akismet. Occasionally, though, there’s spam which isn’t caught by the filter and ends up coming to me for approval.
Many of these are explanations of why email marketing is so awesome. Some of them are out and out laugh inducing. One of my favorites, and the inspiration for this post.

Read More

We only mail people who sign up!

I get a lot of calls from clients who can’t understand why they have spamtraps on their lists. Most of them tell me that they never purchase or rent lists, and they only mail to people who sign up on their website. I believe them, but not all of the data that people input into webforms is correct.
While I don’t have any actual numbers for how many people lie in forms, there was a slashdot poll today that asked readers “How truthful are you when creating web accounts?”. The answer seems to be “not very” at least for the self-selected respondents.

Read More

More on opt-out for B2B marketing

There is still a bit of discussion going on around the HBR article on how B2B mail should be opt-out not opt in on various delivery blogs. Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog new daddy (congratulations!) DJ writes a post about why he thinks opt-out in any context is a poor marketing decision.
One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when they get unsolicited email from a company they have interacted with.

Read More