Is there really one way to email successfully?

I’ve been watching a bunch of folks discuss someone’s mailing practices. The discussion has been fascinating to me.  I’m hearing from the conversation is that there are very specific rules regarding how every company should mail. And that anyone who deviates from those practices is heading down the path to failure. Doing it wrong.
This theme has come up before, when I’ve heard expert marketers comment that Groupon proved how wrong the “daily email is too much” advice was. My response to that is confusion. Who decided daily email was too frequent and wouldn’t work?
I come from a non-marketing background, so maybe I’m missing some essential bit of wisdom or context. But it strikes me that a lot of the rules (no daily email, never establish aggressive engagement metrics) are really stifling innovation. There seems to me to be an unwillingness to think about why it might work if a particular sender does something against the grain.
Of course, once something has proven a success, everyone jumps on the bandwagon. Half my potential clients over the summer told me they “want[ed] to be the next Groupon.” Most of them didn’t make it, though.
I look at email as having a massively diverse user base. There are lots of people who use email in ways I would never consider. There are lots of people who think the way I use email is wrong. Unlimited opportunities for smart marketers exist.
The more cynical part of my brain says that finding and developing an enthusiastic recipient base takes too much time. Companies want to be the “next groupon” or the “next facebook”. But they want to do it by copying the business model, not by being innovative and meeting some need that currently isn’t being serviced.
There are, of course, some models that are never going to work, like randomly harvesting addresses and sending spam. But I don’t think that means email marketing is dying, just that innovation and imagination might be.

Expectations
Social media to improve email delivery

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Attention is a limited resource

Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time.
In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes available for marketing in a TV or radio hour and they cost real dollars. There’s only so much page space available for press. Billboards cost real money and you can’t just put a billboard up anywhere. With email marketing, there are no such costs and thus a recipient can be trivially and easily overwhelmed by marketers trying to grab their attention.
Whether its unsolicited email or just sending overly frequent solicited email, an overly full mailbox overwhelms the recipient. When this happens, they’ll start blocking mail, or hitting “this is spam” or just abandoning that email address. Faced with an overflowing inbox recipients may take drastic action in order to focus on the stuff that is really important to them.
This is a reality that many marketers don’t get. They think that they can assume that if a person purchases from their company that person wants communication from that company.

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Broken Policies

As an email policy wonk, I think a lot about how specific policy implementations can go wrong. Sure, every policy can go wrong, or not fit a common case. A lot of people only write polices that address common cases and don’t worry about the rarer cases. The problem is there are some rare cases that may cause significant harm and those cases should be addressed.
Consumerist has a case up about email policy gone wrong with a clear path to harm but no policy for handling the issue. There are a couple places I see where this policy hole can be fixed.
Chase Bank does no verification when they collect email addresses, which results in them sending email to a person who does not have an account with Chase. This is not an ideal situation for anyone. Chase is revealing private financial information to an outside party, the actual bank customer is not getting their information and someone is getting email about money that’s not theirs.
In terms of policy for institutions handling sensitive personal information, I would always recommend implementing a verification step. This is mail that people want so they should confirm it. It’s also mail that really should be not going to 3rd parties.
Chase does not implement any verification step for email. This isn’t a fatal problem, as long as there is some process in place to get feedback and then correct the issue.
Unfortunately, Chase’s policies failed here, too. Chase requires an account number to speak to a representative about any issues. In this case, the email recipient does not have an account number. All of Chase’s contact channels rely on an account number: no account number, no talking to a human.
In terms of overall policy  Chase is hoping here is that, at some point, their actual customer will notice they’re not getting email and call in and attempt to troubleshoot the problem with Chase reps. I’m willing to bet, though, that their tier 1 people don’t have the training or information needed to troubleshoot this problem. I expect they’re going to read the script that says, “We sent you the mail, it must be a problem on your end. Have a nice day.”
Chase, and other bank analogues that require an account number, that do not verify email addresses should not require account numbers to talk to someone about the mail they are receiving. Why? Because although it’s reasonably rare that the mail is going to the wrong party, the potential harm to the bank’s customer is very high. This danger to customers means the bank should invest in a support pathway that allows non-customers to call, or write, to report misdirected email.
If Chase were my customer, I’d recommend adding a button to the email that says “receiving this mail in error, report here.” Make this a simple form that the recipient can fill out, two boxes one for email address and one optional one for “reason”. Once the bank has the report, they can stop the misdirected email and attempt to contact the customer through another channel. I’d also recommend that customers confirm any new address they add to the account in the future.
I know the bank thinks that by requiring an account number they are protecting their customers. Unfortunately, they’re failing to address a rare but potentially harmful case. Sadly, I expect even after this, they will still fail to implement any changes that will stop this from happening in the future.

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Email filters

What makes the best email filter? There isn’t really a single answer to that question. Different people and different organizations have different tolerances for how false positives versus false negatives. For instance, we’re quite sensitive to false positives here, so we run extremely conservative filtering and don’t block very much at the MTA level. Other people I know are very sensitive to false negatives and run more aggressive filtering and block quite a bit of mail at the MTA level.
For the major ISPs, the people who plan, approve, design and monitor the filters usually want to maximize customer happiness. They want to deliver as much real mail as possible while blocking as much bad mail. Blocking real mail and letting through bad mail both result in unhappy customers and increase the ISP’s costs, either through customer churn or through support calls. And this is a process, filters are not static. ISPs roll out new filters all the time, sometimes they are an improvement and sometimes they’re not. When they’re not, they’re pulled out of production. This works both for positive filters like Return Path and negative filters like blocklists.
Then there is mail filtering that doesn’t have to do with spam. Business filters, for instance, often block non-business mail. Permission of the recipient often isn’t even a factor. Companies don’t often go out of their way to block personal mail, but if personal mail gets blocked (say the vacation plane ticket or the amazon receipt) they don’t often unblock it. But when you think about why a business provides email, it makes perfect sense. The business provides email to further its own business goals. Some personal usage is usually OK, but if someone notices and blocks personal email then it’s unlikely the business will unblock it, even if the employee opted in.
In the case of email filters, the free market does work. Different ISPs filter mail differently. Some people love Gmail’s filters. Other people think Hotmail has the best filtering. There are different standards for filtering, and that makes email stronger and more robust. Consumers have choices in their mail provider and spamfiltering.

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