Enter clickbait here

Yesterday I talked about how the truth matters in email marketing. But that’s not the only place the truth matters.
Today I found myself in a bit of a … discussion on Facebook. It ended up being a lesson in why you should never trust the clickbait headline. I also realized there are parallels with email best practices and how we share them with people.

The Facebook discussion

wineglass_smallOne of my friends linked to a USA Today article with the headline CDC: Young women should avoid alcohol unless using birth control. There was some complaining about how wrong / annoying / bad / anti-feminist these recommendations were.
The thing is, in my scientific career I actually worked in two labs that left me with strong opinions about these specific CDC recommendations.. My very first lab job was at the FDA and gave me a solid background in public health. After grad school I moved to a lab studying fetal alcohol syndrome. We were looking at extremely early exposure (equivalent to 3 – 4 weeks post conception in humans) to a single dose of alcohol. It was some really interesting work that also had significant public health implications.
So when people start discussing public health recommendations, particularly in the area of in utero alcohol exposure, I have some opinions. The Facebook argument centered around how these recommendations don’t take into account the specific situations for each individual woman. There was also some concern about how this might be another attempt to police women’s behavior. These aren’t unreasonable concerns in the current political climate, but in this case the recommendations have real science behind them.
I jumped in and started pointing out the science. I argued that this isn’t necessarily a bad public health recommendation. I didn’t even get into why public health recommendations are generally not nuanced. I didn’t even bother to really read the USA Today article. I skimmed it to find a link to the actual CDC recommendations and see if the article actually quoted the CDC as saying what was in the headline.
Surprise! (not) The article didn’t support the headline. They didn’t have any quote from anyone at the CDC saying what the headline claimed. They didn’t even bother linking to the CDC website. But that’s OK, I could find it anyway.
It wasn’t until I was 2 or 3 posts into the discussion that I realized I was arguing about a USA Today headline. The problem was the headline, not the CDC recommendations. I’m not defending USA Today, the headline was total clickbait. But I also wasn’t putting any stock in the content of the USA Today article. That was fluffy non-scientific reporting and wasn’t relevant.
Once I posted the actual CDC recommendations everyone backed off on the fight. We were arguing about a non-issue. The actual CDC recommendation is that doctors should “Recommend birth control to women who are having sex (if appropriate), not planning to get pregnant, and drinking alcohol.” Well, yes, they should. No one is forcing birth control on women, in fact the CDC recommendations make it clear that women have the final choice and responsibility.

Email? Huh?

hands-typing-4How does this relate to email? Best practices are a lot like public health recommendations. They address the common situation and give general guidelines. Some recommendations are for the general public, some are for professionals and some are for experts.
In public health there tends to be one set of recommendations for health professionals (doctors, physicians assistants, pharmacists, nurses, etc) and another set of recommendations for individual people. These address different sets of knowledge, but also different areas of responsibility. Health professionals should be concerned about all their patients, the individual only needs to be concerned about a smaller group.
In email, some recommendations are geared for the general audience, others are geared towards the professionals who will be offering guidance to the general audience. The volume and complexity of information is different, but the knowledge bases are different. For example, some people know what a 5321.from is, others need it explained in different language. It does mean, too, you might hear different recommendations from me depending on what audience I’m with. The things I tell my colleagues at M3AAWG are different than the things I tell my colleagues at an ESP user conference and those are both different than what I talk about to a general audience.
I don’t think that’s bad or wrong. If I can’t speak to my audience I’m wasting everyone’s time.
 
 
 

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Would you buy a used car from that guy?

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I got email today to an old work email address of mine from Strongmail. To be fair it was a technically correct email. Everything one would expect from a company handling large volumes of emails.  It’s clear that time and energy was put into the technical setup of the send. If only they had put even half that effort into deciding who to send the email to. Sadly, they didn’t.
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“Thank you for your thoughtful response to our opt-in request. On occasion, we provide members of our database with the opportunity to opt-in to receive email marketing communications from us.”
Wait. What? Members of our database? How did this address get into your database?
“I can’t be sure from our records but it looks like someone from StrongMail reached out to you several years ago.  It’s helpful that you let us know to unsubscribe you.  Thank you again.”
There you have it. According to the person answering email at abuse@ Strongmail they sent me a message because they had sent mail to me in the past. Is that really what you did? Send mail to very old email addresses because someone, at some point in the past, sent mail to that address? And you don’t know when, don’t know where the address came from, don’t know how it was acquired, but decided to reach out to me?
How many bad practices can you mix into a single send, Strongmail? Sending mail to addresses where you don’t know how you got them? Sending mail to addresses that you got at least 6 years ago? Sending mail to addresses that were never opted-in to any of your mail? And when people point out, gently and subtly, that maybe this is a bad idea, you just add them to your global suppression list?
Oh. Wait. I know what you’re going to tell me. All of your bad practices don’t count because this was an ‘opt-in’ request. People who didn’t want the mail didn’t have to do anything, therefore there is no reason not to spam them! They ignore it and they are dropped from your list. Except it doesn’t work that way. Double opt-in requests to someone has asked to be subscribed or is an active customer or prospect is one thing. Requests sent to addresses of unknown provenance are still spam.
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