Email Change of Address

How many readers have ever submitted an email change of address form? How many readers even know where to go to submit an email change of address form?
And I’m not talking about going to a particular retailer and saying “change my email address” I’m talking about using one of the companies that offer email change of address as a service. Where do they get their names and email addresses? I sure don’t know.
How many readers have actually purchased an email change of address service for one of your mailing lists? Do you know where the addresses came from?
I’m wondering how many people buy email change of address services, but have zero clue how to sign up for them. I mean, I know, you can go to FreshAddress or Experian and get ECOA services. But I don’t know how to tell either of them that I want to be included in their ECOA services.
So how do consumers get to be on a change of address list? And how opt-in is their participation?
One reason I ask is that a number of my clients have stumbled into serious delivery problems recently. Investigation generally points back to the ECOA service they used. So I’m wondering how actively and knowingly consumers are using ECOA services.
 

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Customers want to get mail from us!

Many online retailers assume that anyone making a purchase from them is a prime target for email marketing. THEY ARE OUR CUSTOMERS! Of course they want to get mail from us!
Well. Maybe. But not always. Think about the person who shops online during the holidays. I visit a lot of places looking for gifts for other people. These aren’t places I’d normally shop for myself, and are not places that have things I’m interested in. This means I don’t really have, or want, an ongoing relationship with them.
So for those of you that think they’ve found a new customer because I made a purchase this Christmas, I’d just like to say: Not so much. I mean, yeah, you have the perfect gift for my mother this year. Or that appropriately tacky bit of Vette swag for my dad. But, really, I just want to buy the gift and have it shipped. I don’t want an ongoing customer relationship with you. In fact, I really never want to hear from you again.
Some online retailers are polite and treat purchasers with respect. They allow guest checkouts and don’t require tons of personal information and account creation for a purchase. They even let you opt-out of being added to their mailing list at the time of purchase. Other retailers require the full registration process (you need to know my marital status? so I can buy a gift for my dad? what?) and don’t offer an opt-out during the checkout process. Instead, you infer I want your mail and make me opt-out after the fact.
Making a purchase doesn’t constitute permission. Sometimes retailers can get away with it because when I’m making a purchase for me I might be interested in more mail from you. When I’m making a purchase for someone else, though, there is no long term relationship to be developed.
Sure, with the right campaign you may be able to convert one of those purchasers into a returning purchaser. But without a carefully planned and executed conversion campaign you may lose more future customers than you convert.

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Are you sure you didn't opt in?

Yes, really. I’m sure I didn’t opt-in.
I get a lot of spam. I get a lot of spam to addresses that aren’t used to sign up for mail. But it seems inevitable that when I bring up examples of receiving spam I inevitably get asked, “Are you sure you didn’t opt-in?”
On one level I can understand the question when I send in a complaint to an abuse desk and they’re dealing with a customer who swears all their mail is opt-in. It makes sense when an ESP is working to identify what may have happened so they can correct their customers’ behaviour.
But when it’s a client who has hired me to investigate their email delivery problems and I provide examples of spam sent to me? Why, WHY would I lie to you? Why would I claim I’m getting spam if I wasn’t? What use is that? How does me forgetting I subscribed actually help fix your delivery?
And even if I did forget, shouldn’t that be a sign that maybe there is some issue with your mail program that people sign up and forget?
I am not sure what causes clients to think I would tell them they’re spamming me when they’re really not. I certainly do tell clients when I opt-in and enjoy their mail while offering advice on how to improve their marketing program. I’m not sure what’s going through their heads when I say, “Oh, you (or your affiliate) is sending me a lot of spam,” that prompts them to ask, “Are you sure you didn’t opt-in?”

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Change is required

I get a lot of calls from senders who tell me that they have not changed what they were doing, but all of a sudden their mail isn’t performing the way it used to. Sometimes it’s simply less effective marketing, but more often than not the issue is mail being blocked or filtered to the bulk folder.
What worked today won’t work tomorrow. Spammers are forever evolving new techniques to get past spam filters. ISPs are forever evolving new techniques to stop them.
One of the current driving forces for spam filter development is focused on the individual recipients. Recipient wants and needs are king in the world of ISP mail filtering. Much of that is driven by the underlying business models of the free ISPs. They are selling eyeballs to their advertisers and that relies on keeping as many eyeballs around for as long as possible.
An early version of the recipient driven filtering was “add to your address book” where individual users could over ride ISP delivery decisions by actively adding a From: address to their address book. The ISPs have been refining this over time. For instance, if you reply to an email in some clients, you are prompted to add that address to your address books. If you take an email out of your bulk folder and move it to your inbox then that address is automatically added to your address book.
But the refinements haven’t stopped there. ISPs are now making smart decisions about what emails a particular recipient will want to receive. This raises a number of challenges to senders. How do you send email to ten thousand or a hundred thousand or a million people and make it relevant to all of them?
Smart senders will take the individual delivery challenge in stride. They will change along with the ISPs, to send mail that their recipients want to receive. Change is inevitable and required.

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