Nothing is forever, even email

Yesterday I talked about how important it was to send welcome messages when you discover old email addresses. Today on the Return Path Blog, Tami Monahan Foreman shares an example email that does just that, but not as well as one might hope.

You are receiving this email because sometime during the past 20+ years you have registered with PACE, or one of our affiliated companies, to receive free information and offers concerning child custody matters […]

Tami is appropriately amused by the statement that she opted in in the past 20 years, despite never having custody issues nor ever hearing of this company before. I just can’t fathom the email planning session. Did no one consider that the maximum time for a custody dispute is 18 years? Were these senders even thinking about what they were saying?
And, yes, I realize that this may have been a B2B targeted (or not so targeted) mailing for court officers, social workers and others who mediate custody disputes. In that case it’s even worse, how many people have had the same job over the last 20 years? How many municipalities and courts even had email in 1991?
Clearly there was not a lot of thought put into the target of the email. And this is what, more often than not, defines email marketing in the minds of many people outside thsi industry.

Marketers — THIS is what you are up against. For all the good you are trying to do, many, many consumers and even more people at ISPs think THIS represents the thinking of too many folks who claim the title “email marketer.” — Tami Monahan Foreman

The attitude of ‘once and opt-in always an opt-in’ is all too familiar to me. Recently I had a client explain to me, in all seriousness, that he truly believed that he was still entitled to mail email addresses that opted in 10 or more years ago. Even though the recipient opted in to a company that was eventually purchased by his company. Even though there had been zero contact in the last 10 years. If he wanted to send those people mail, then it was opt-in and no one could stop him. Unfortunately for him, neither Spamhaus nor the ISPs agreed with that point of view and much of his mail was having some fairly serious delivery problems.
I know that the last thing any email marketer wants to do is remove an email address from a list. But sometimes you need to think about what you’re doing and not mail someone just because at some point in the past you think they might have maybe opted in

Conversational foreplay
Fines for not honoring unsubscribes

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Conversational foreplay

How do you approach the first contact with a potential customer or prospect? Do you just jump right in and start making your pitch or do you actually take the time to introduce yourself and your company?
Most good sales reps spend a little time socializing with prospects before they launch into the sales process, particularly when they are cold calling the target. This courtesy doesn’t seem to apply when cold emailing a prospect, though.
I can only imagine how Al might have reacted differently if Douglas Karr had sent a personal contact and introduced himself instead of sending out bulk mail. I know for a fact I would have reacted very differently to the email sent to my LinkedIn account address had it been even vaguely personalized and interested in me.
We even have ESPs getting into the sending cold email game. A reasonably well know ESP added me to their mailing list and sent me an advertisement for a free service they’re providing at Marketing Sherpa this year. I was grumbling about spam to a group of friends, one of whom happens to be their delivery guy. He asked for a copy and spent time chasing down how they got the address.
Evidently I sent mail to the privacy manager who left the company over 2 years ago. That puts me in the “prospect” database. Well, OK, maybe. But there are some many better ways to reactivate a prospect than just adding me to their newsletter. Would it really have taken so much work to send me a personal note from the sales person? It doesn’t have to be very long, just introducing the sales person and telling me they’d seen my inquiry about product and asking if they could talk to me about their offerings.
Had this ESP spent a little time to cultivate me, my response would have been totally different. I could have referred customers to them and given them the name of the sales person that was so helpful and respectful of me and my time. That’s not what they did. In a fit of insouciance they just grabbed a 2+ year old email address and added it to their mailing list. They didn’t bother to tell me why or introduce it to me gently.
Seriously, folks, email is about relationships. Adding someone to a mailing list without their knowledge or permission is a really, really bad way to start a relationship. Show a little respect to your prospects. Send welcome messages, even an automated one, before adding just discovered prospect addresses to mailing lists.

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Relevance or Permission

One of the discussions that surrounds email marketing is whether relevance trumps permission or permission trumps relevance. I believe this entire discussion is built on a false dichotomy.
Sending relevant email is important. Not only do recipients expect mail to be relevant, but the ISPs often make delivery decisions on how relevant their users find your mail. Marketers that send too much irrelevant mail find themselves struggling to get inbox placement.
Permission makes sending relevant mail all that much easier. Sure, really good marketers can probably collect, purchase, beg, borrow and steal enough information to know that their unsolicited email is relevant. But how many marketers are actually that good?
My experience suggest that most marketers aren’t that good. They don’t segment their permission based lists to send relevant mail. They’re certainly not going to segment their non-permission based lists to send relevant mail.
Macy’s, for instance, decided that I would find their Bloomingdales mail relevant. I didn’t, and unsubscribed from both publications, after registering a complaint with their ESP. Had Macy’s asked about sending me Bloomies mail I wouldn’t have opted-in, but I probably wouldn’t have unsubbed from Macy’s mail, too.
So what’s your stand? Does relevance trump permission? Or does permission trump relevance? How much relevant, unsolicited mail do you get? How much irrelevant permission based mail do you get? And what drives you to unsubscribe from a permission based list?

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Email as social media

Rachel Luxemburg, a good friend of mine who runs the Community team over at Adobe, tweeted a link to Successful Social Media is More Than A Campaign. I was reading that article and realized quite how much of it applies to email. In fact, a couple of Amber’s specific recommendations are directly relevant to email.

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