We gave you a chance…

Our formerly feral cat was diagnosed with hyperthyroid disease earlier this year. This week she went in for treatment with radioactive iodine. Now that she’s home, we have some minor safety precautions (mostly around keeping radiation out of landfills and minimizing our exposure) for the next 2 weeks.
MC_forBlog
In previous careers, both Steve and I have been licensed to work with radioactivity so we’ve been swapping stories. Today I remembered an incident recounted during training. One lab had ordered some radioisotope and then mistakenly thrown out the isotope with the packaging material. An honest, but very expensive, mistake. Part of the fix was to have all radiation orders go through a central office on campus. This office would handle the opening and recording of the material and then distributing it to the appropriate research lab. As Steve put it, “We trusted you but you messed up, so now we have to institute some controls.”
This actually is how a lot of email compliance is done, too. Companies are allowed to do what they’re going to do. If they do something bad, even by mistake, there is often a lot of expensive cleanup. After the cleanup, the network (either the ESP or ISP) puts in place processes to limit the chance of this kind of mistake in the future.
In the email space the processes usually involves a couple things. First, the sender needs to change their acquisition process. This change limits the bad addresses getting onto a list in the future. Second, the sender needs to address the bad part of their current list. This often involves purging and/or re-engaging non-responsive addresses.
The fixes are painful for everyone involved. But when cleanup is expensive, prevention is important.

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Technology does not trump policy when it comes to delivery

Recently Ken Magill wrote an article looking at how an ESP was attempting to sell him services based on the ESPs ‘high deliverability rates.’ I commented that Ken was right, and I still think he is.
Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article, pointing out that the vast majority of things affecting delivery are under the control of the list owner, not under the control of the ESP. As they are both right, I clearly agree with them. I’ve also posted about reputation and delivery regularly.

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Clarification on monetizing complaints

There has been quite an interesting discussion in the comment stream of my earlier post about monetizing the complaint stream. I’ve found all the perspectives and comments quite interesting.
There is one thing multiple people have brought up that I don’t necessarily see as a problem. They assert that this idea will only work if all ESPs do it because customers can just say, “Well, Other ESP will let us do this and not charge us.”  I don’t quite understand why this is an issue. Customers already do this.  In fact, sometimes the assertion is actually true.
There are ESPs that let customers spam. There will always be ESPs that let customers spam. This is not new. Changing a pricing model isn’t going to change this.
As I was envisioning the monetization process, ESPs who wanted to do this could actually offer multiple tier pricing. The customer can choose a lower price point for their overall mail program, while assuming the cost of their recipients complaining. Or the customer can choose a higher price point and let the ESP absorb the cost of handling complaints. In either case, the customer would still have to meet the ESP’s standards for complaints and comply with their TOS.
Clearly I’m seeing the idea and industry differently than a lot of my readers. I’m interested to hear the thought process behind this so I can better understand the objection.
 
 
 

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Who pays for spam?

A couple weeks ago, I published a blog post about monetizing the complaint stream. The premise was that ESPs could offer lower base rates for sending if the customer agreed to pay per complaint. The idea came to me while talking with a deliverability expert at a major ESP. One of their potential customer wanted the ESP to allow them to mail purchased lists. The customer even offered to indemnify the ESP and assume all legal risk for mailing purchased lists.
While on the surface this may seem like a generous offer, there aren’t many legal liabilities associated with sending email. Follow a few basic rules that most of us learn in Kindergarten (say your name, stop poking when asked, don’t lie) and there’s no chance you’ll be legally liable for your actions.
Legal liability is not really the concern for most ESPs. The bigger issues for ESPs including overall sending reputation and cost associated with resolving a block. The idea behind monetizing the complaint stream was making the customer bear some of the risk for bad sends. ESP customers do a lot of bad things, up to and including spamming, without having any financial consequences for the behavior. By sharing  in the non-legal consequences of spamming, the customer may feel some of the effect of their bad decisions.
Right now, ESPs really protect customers from consequences. The ESP pays for the compliance team. The ESP handles negotiations with ISPs and filtering companies. The cost of this is partially built into the sending pricing, but if there is a big problem, the ESP ends up shouldering the bulk of the resolution costs. In some cases, the ESP even loses revenue as they disconnect the sender.
ESPs hide the cost of bad decisions from customers and do not incentivize customers to make good decisions. Maybe if they started making customers shoulder some of the financial liability for spamming there’d be less spamming.

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