It's still spam

laura
Best practices
April 26, 2016

Companies are always trying to find new ways to use and abuse email. My mailbox has been rife with mail from companies trying to sell me stuff for my business. It’s been interesting to watch the new ways they’re trying to get attention, while not honoring the most important rule of email marketing.

Marketing Automation

The advent of “marketing automation” has added a new dimension to how companies can spam leads. They don’t need to do anything and can bug hundreds or thousands of people over time with one simple step. Maybe their prospect will get so annoyed they respond! Just to get you to leave them alone!
I’ve been watching with some fascination as a UK company is trying to sell me… something. They’ve been vague in all the emails I’ve received so far.

Email 1: Let me show you all this great stuff we can do for you.

Email 2: You didn’t answer me the first time, but, really, we have great stuff for you.

Email 3: I’m having trouble contacting someone, can you tell me who the right person at your company is to talk to about all my great stuff?

If you ignore email 3, they simply add you to random mailing lists at their company. I’ve gotten 2 different ads for webinars from them in the last 3 hours.
All the emails violate CAN SPAM. The first 3 don’t have any unsub links. The last 2 don’t have a postal address.
These emails aren’t relevant. They’re not targeted. They’re not even personalized. At least the folks that harvest our contact address and spam it pretend they’ve visited our website. No, this is just blatant spam from some company. Spam I don’t seem to be able to opt-out of.

The LinkedIn Harvest

As with most of my website subscriptions, LinkedIn has a tagged address of mine. That means I know exactly who is harvesting it and adding it to their lists. It happens a lot less than you would think, but it does happen.
The most recent example was an Indian ESP that added my address to their webinar announcement list. Multiple emails advertising different webinars. Again, these emails had no unsubscribe and no postal address. Considering the address was blatantly harvested, that’s triple damages if I were to take them to court.
Ironically, one of the webinars they were advertising was about deliverability. They were going to discuss the new changes at Gmail and how to get to the inbox anyway. Even funnier is that their delivery guy was in my mailbox a few weeks ago asking me about Gmail, what I knew and what I would recommend to them and their clients.
First recommendation: Stop harvesting addresses and spamming people.

B2B Spam is Still Spam

There is this view by some marketers that permission doesn’t matter when sending B2B mail. That purchased lists, harvested lists, and mail violating CAN SPAM are all OK if your recipient is at work. In fact, one of the questions I recently fielded was about getting through corporate filters.
In reality, delivery to businesses is harder than delivery to consumers, even for opt-in lists. Businesses operate email systems to further their own business goals. If incoming mail is distracting or annoying to their employees, they can and will block the source. Annoy the wrong person and you really will discover how hard it is to get into businesses.
Now, it’s easier now than it used to be. Most businesses are outsourcing their filtering. Previously outsourcing was to companies who handled the filtering or managed on premise appliances. But now we’re seeing a lot of companies outsource to webmail providers like Office365 and Google Apps. This means some of the engagement rules are now being applied to business delivery.
This may make business delivery easier in some ways. But it is going to make permission a much bigger deal in the B2B space.
Update: Al wrote about B2B spam today, too. His blog post is worth a read, too.

Spam is about invading other people's space

At the recent Sendgrid Emailmatter’s conference Sally Lehman advised attendees to “Treat someone’s inbox like it was their home.” This is advice I’ve been giving clients for a long time. I think it’s even more relevant now as so many people have data enabled phones and are checking email so frequently. It’s not just their home, it’s their personal space they can take with them.
Seanan McGuire, a friend and NY Times bestselling author, wrote a blog post today about how she views promotion and marketing as an artist and someone who is expected to promote her work. She also talks about what it feels like to be a target of promotion and offers some advice about how to promote your products online. She talks about how she, as an author and creative type, is expected to do some level of self promotion and how that promotion is done in her space – whether that space be on twitter or her blog.

Fraud, terms of service and email marketing

Here at the Atkins house we’re still both recovering from the M³AAWG plague. I don’t know what it was that we shared during the conference, but it’s knocked many folks over. I don’t have a lot to blog about this afternoon so I was looking through some of my old blog posts to get at least some content up before I give up for the weekend.
I found an old post about permission (Permission: It May Not Be What You Think It Is). The post discusses where a woman sued Toyota over emails from an online marketing campaign. I’d totally forgotten about that blog post, so I started looking at what happened with the case.
In the original case Toyota created a social media campaign where people could opt their friends in to be the target of a prank.

Email in 2020

Late last year Litmus invited me to contribute to a whitepaper they were putting together about email in 2020. Today, they released Email Marketing in 2020. I am honored to be included in the list of experts that they chose.
One of the things I find so so much fun in participating in this type of joint project is seeing what other people’s visions are. When Chad first contacted us, his request was very simple. He wanted 400-ish words on what we thought would change. We all approached it from our own perspectives. The final document really touches on a wide range of changes and gives an bright and rosy view of the future of email.
It’s hard to imagine I’ve had email for more than 25 years. It’s become such a fundamental and critical part of my life. I mean, sure I’m an email professional but it’s more than that. Some of my best friends I met over email. I’ve gotten multiple jobs based on my presence on email discussion lists. Steve and I met around email. One of the fun bits of M³AAWG is that I get to see friends I first met almost 20 years ago over email.
Email has really changed in the last decade. It is now a critical part of daily life for many people. Even social networking would be nowhere without an email address. Email really is the key to the digital kingdom. That’s not going to change.
Email being the key to the digital kingdom is a challenge. It lets nefarious people into our homes and into our lives and into our computers. A lot of very smart people are working on how to make email safer for us. I think it will be much safer in 2020, through the hard work and dedication of a lot of people.
I strongly encourage you to download the Email Marketing in 2020 white paper from Litmus. There is a lot of insight. It will be fun to see how much of what was said becomes reality.