Rancid Slime and Email Marketing

Despite what some email marketers may tell you there are times when it’s really not appropriate to try and add someones email address to your list.
I just opened a pot of yogurt and instead of a smooth, creamy dessert there was a sticky brown slurry dotted with firm white chunks – looking like hot-and-sour soup, and not in a good way. No, this isn’t an email marketing metaphor, it’s just background to the story.
Food is a fairly delicate product, and supply-chain problems happen – it doesn’t take leaving yogurt out in the sun all day to turn it into something unpleasant. I’m not too concerned, but I thought I’d drop them a line and tell them that they had a problem (not because I want the traditional coupon for a free yogurt but because I want them to fix their problem and reduce the odds of the yogurt I buy next month trying to kill me).
They have a web site. I dodge past the full-screen pop-up “subscribe to our newsletter!” and go to their contact us link. Comment, complaint or question? Complaint, I guess.
They ask for a lot of information, almost all of it “required”. UPC Code, Plant Number, Production Line, Use By Date, Time Stamp, Store where it was purchased, city, state, comments. And my title, first name, last name, email address. And my email address again (no, people, that is *not* what double opt-in means). Phonenumber, Street Address, Building/Suite/Unit, City/Town, State, Zip Code, Country.
And whether I “Would you like to receive news, information and other offers from Brennan’s” – with the tempting options of “Accept” or “Not Accept”.
Skipping over the question of whether 23 fields ever makes sense for a subscription capture form, someone who’s contacting you to complain that your product looks like last months chinese take-out isn’t someone you have a close relationship with, someone who wants to receive your email. Odds are pretty good that they’re either going to decline your tempting offers and be slightly annoyed, or (accidentally?) sign up for them and hit the this-is-spam button when you mail them.
Neither is a good result, for you or them. Maybe you should wait to offer the opportunity to sign up for your yogurt mailing list until after you’ve resolved the complaint to their satisfaction, rather than when they’re making the complaint?

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Censorship, email and politics

Spamfiltering blocks email. This is something we all know and understand. For most people, that is everyone who doesn’t manage an email server or work in the delivery field or create spamfilters, filtering is a totally unseen process. The only time the average person notices filters is when they break. The breakage could be blocking mail they shouldn’t, or not blocking mail they should.
Yesterday, a bunch of people noticed that Yahoo was blocking mail containing references to a protest against Wall Street. This understandably upset people who were trying to use email as a communication medium. Many people decided it was Yahoo (a tool of the elites!) attempting to censor their speech and stop them from organizing a protest.
Yeah. Not so much.
Yahoo looked into it and reported that the mail had gotten caught in their spam filters. Yahoo adjusted their filters to let the mail through and all was (mostly) good.
I don’t think this is actually a sign of filters being broken. The blocked mail all contained a URL pointing to a occupywallst.com. I know there was a lot of speculation about what was being blocked, but sources tell me it was the actual domain. Not the phrase, not the text, the domain.
The domain was in a lot of mostly identical mail coming out of individual email accounts. This is a current hallmark of hijacked accounts. Spammers compromise thousands of email accounts, and send a few emails out of each of them. Each email is mostly identical and points to the same URL. Just like the protest mail.
There was also a lot of bulk mail being sent with that URL in it. I’ve been talking to friends who have access to traps, and they were seeing a lot of mail mentioning occupywallst.com in their traps. This isn’t surprising, political groups have some horrible hygiene. They are sloppy with acquisition, they trade names and addresses like kids trade cold germs, they never expire anything out. It’s just not how politics is played. And it’s not one party or another, it’s all of them. I’ve consulted with major names across the political spectrum, and none actually implement best practices.
As I have often said the secret to delivery is to not have your mail look like spam. In this case, the mail looked like spam. In fact, it looked like spam that was coming from hijacked accounts as well as spam sent by large bulk mailers. I suspect there was also a high complaint rate as people sent it to friends and family who really didn’t want to hear about the protests.
To Yahoo!’s credit, though, someone on staff was on top of things. They looked into the issue and the filter was lifted within a couple hours of the first blog post. A human intervened, overruled the algorithm and let the mail out.
I bet this is one of the few times anyone has seen that Yahoo does outbound filtering. Given it’s a politically charged situation, I can see why they assume that Yahoo is filtering because of politics and censorship. They weren’t though.
More on politics, filtering and censorship.

They’re not blocking you because they hate you
It really can be your email
More on Truthout
Another perspective on the politico article

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Are you sure? Part 2

There was a bit of discussion about yesterday’s blog post over on my G+ circles. One person was telling me that “did you forget you opted-in?” was a perfectly valid question. He also commented he’s had the same address for 20 years and that he does, sometimes forget he opted in to mail years ago.
As an anti-spammer with the idea that it’s all about consent, I can see his point. Anti-spammers, for years, have chanted the mantra: “it’s about consent, not content.” Which is a short, pithy way to say they don’t care what you send people, as long as the recipients themselves have asked for it.
This is the perfect bumper sticker policy. As with most bumper sticker policies, though, it’s too short to deal with the messy realities.
I’m not knocking consent. Consent is great. Every bulk mailer should only be sending mail to people who have asked or agreed to receive that mail.
But if your focus is on delivery and getting mail to the recipient’s inbox and getting the recipient to react to that mail then you can’t just fall back on consent. You have to send them mail that they expect. You have to send them mail that they like. You have to send them mail they will open, read and interact with.
If your permission based recipients are saying they forgot that they signed up for mail, that is a sign that the sender’s program is futile. These are people who, at one point or another, actually asked to receive mail from a sender, and then the mail they receive is so unremarkable that they totally forget about the sender.
Maybe that’s another reason the question “are you sure you didn’t forget you opted in” from clients bothers me so much. If I signed up and forgot that points to problems in your program, mostly that it’s totally unremarkable and your subscribers can forget.

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Opt-in vs. opt-out

Jeanne has a great post up at ClickZ comparing the performance of mail to an opt-in list to performance of mail to an opt-out list.
The article looks at opens, clicks and click through rates over 7 quarters (Q1 – Q4 2010; Q1 – Q3 2011) covering 330 million emails. I strongly suggest anyone interested go read the whole article.
The short version, though, is that the opt-in lists had more opens and more clicks than the opt-out lists. In some quarters it was double the number of opens and clicks.
This data is a strong indication that opt-in lists perform much better than even the best opt-out lists.

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