Things to read: March 9, 2016

It’s sometimes hard for me to keep up with what other people are saying and discussing about email marketing. I’ve been trying to be more active on LinkedIn, but there are just so many good marketing and delivery blogs out there I can’t keep up with all of them.
talkingforblog
Here are a couple interesting things I’ve read in the last week.
Five Steps to Stay Out of the Spam Folder. Conceptually easy, sometimes hard to pull off in practice, these recommendations mirror many things I say here and tell my clients about delivery. The audience is in charge and your recipients are the best ally you can have when it comes to getting into the inbox.
Which states are the biggest sources of spam?. California and New York top the list, but the next two states are a little surprising. Over on Spamresource, Al points out the two next states have some unique laws that may affect the data. I just remember back in the day there were a lot of spammers in Michigan, I’m surprised there’s still a significant volume from there.
CASL didn’t destroy Canadian email. Despite concerns that CASL would destroy the Canadian email marketing industry, the industry is going strong and expanding. In fact, spending on email marketing in Canada was up more than 14% in 2015 and is on track to be up another 10% this year. Additionally, according to eMarketer lists are performing better because they’re cleaner.
A brief history of email. Part of the Guardian’s tribute to Ray Tomlinson, the person who sent the first email. Ray’s work literally changed lives. I know my life would be significantly different if there wasn’t email. Can you imagine trying to be a deliverability consultant without email? 🙂

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Email marketing is hard

I’ve watched a couple discussions around the email and anti-spam community recently with a bit of awe. It seems many email marketers are admitting they are powerless to actually implement all the good advice they give to others.
They are admitting they can’t persuade, cajole, influence or pressure their companies to actually follow best practices. Some of the comments public and private comments I’ve heard from various industry leaders:

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Spam is not a moral judgement

Mention an email is spam to some senders and watch them dance around trying to explain all the ways they aren’t spammers. At some point, calling an email spam seems to have gone from a statement of fact into some sort of moral judgement on the sender. But calling an email spam is not a moral judgement. It’s just a statement of what a particular recipient thinks of an email.
There are lots of reasons mail can be blocked and not all those reasons are spam related. Sometimes it’s a policy based rejection. Mailbox providers publishing a DMARC record with a reject policy caused a lot of mail to bounce, but none of that was because that user (or that mailing list) was sending spam. Most cable companies prohibit customers from running mail servers on their cable connection and mail from those companies is widely rejected, but that doesn’t mean the mail is spam.
Sometimes a block is because some of the mail is being sent to people who didn’t ask for it or are complaining about it. This doesn’t make the sender a bad person. It doesn’t make the sending company bad. It just means that there is some issue with a part of the marketing program that need to be addressed.
The biggest problem I see is some senders get so invested in convincing receivers, delivery experts and filtering companies that they’re not spammers, that they miss actually fixing the problem. They are so worried that someone might think they’re spammers, they don’t actually listen to what’s being said by the blocking organization, or by their ISP or by their ESP.
Calling email spam isn’t a moral judgement. But, if too many people call a particular email spam, it’s going to be challenging to get that mail to the inbox. Instead of arguing with those people, and the filters that listen to them, a better use of time and energy is fixing the reasons people aren’t liking your email.

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CRTC fines Compu-Finder $1.1 million for CASL violations

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is the principle agency tasked with enforcing Canada’s anti-spam law. Today they issued a Notice of Violation to Compu-Finder  including a $1.1 million dollar fine for 4 violations of CASL. The violations include sending unsolicited email and having a non-working unsubscribe link. According to the CRTC, complaints about Compu-Finder accounted for 26% of all complaints submitted about this industry sector.
This is the first major fine announced under CASL.
One of the first things that jumped out at me about this is the action was taken against B2B mail. There are a lot of senders out there who think nothing of sending unsolicited emails to business addresses. In my experience, many B2B senders think permission is much less important for them than B2C senders. I think that this enforcement action demonstrates that, at least to the CRTC, permission is required for B2B mail.
The other thing that jumped out is that given the extent of the complaints (26%) the financial penalties were only slightly more than 10% of the $10M maximum penalty. It seems the CRTC is not blindly applying the maximum penalty, but is instead actually applying some discretion to the fines.
I’ve looked for the actual notice of violation, but haven’t been able to find a copy. If I find it, I will share.
 
 
 
 

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