Arguing against the anti-spam policy

Not long ago I was talking with a colleague who works for an ESP.  She was telling me about this new client who is in the process of negotiating a contract. Normally she doesn’t get involved in negotiations, but the sales group brought her. It seems this new client is attempting to remove all mention of the anti-spam policy from the contract. As she is the deliverability and compliance person, the sales people won’t agree unless compliance does.
Her sales team needs props for bringing her in to negotiate a contract where the anti-spam clause is removed.
This isn’t that unusual situation. Many well managed ESPs will include deliverability and compliance personnel in negotiations if the customer indicates they want changes to the language of the anti spam clause.
On the face of thing it seems reasonable for customers to want to negotiate compliance terms. They want to protect themselves from unexpected outages. It seems irresponsible to allow a service provider to have the ability to made such a business affecting decision.
Many folks try to negotiate their way out of anti-spam clauses. Just asking for changes isn’t a big deal. However, some companies push the issue with sales and contract folks to an extreme. They threaten to not sign if the anti-spam clauses are removed completely. ContractForBlog
Threatening a contract over compliance issues can poison an entire working relationship. The fact is that most people who argue about anti-spam clauses and compliance issues are people who have had problems with other ESPs in the past. For better or worse, prospects that try and remove anti-spam clauses from contracts are often problem customers.
On the compliance side, if someone is pushing hard to get the spam clause removed, they think a few different things:

  1. This client has had trouble with other ESPs in the past and possibly been disconnected.
  2. This client thinks they’ll violate our policy and don’t want to be subject to those rules.
  3. This client thinks deliverability is all about the ESP.
  4. This client doesn’t follow even the bare minimum of best practices.
  5. This is going to be a high maintenance customer.

I understand the concern about service interruptions. I understand that email is a critical part of many businesses. But asking for the anti-spam portion of the contract to be struck isn’t going to guarantee your mail will always get through.
Instead of asking for exemptions to the anti-spam policy, you can express concerns about service interruptions and ask to work with compliance to limit the chances of surprise disconnections.
You can, of course, always ask. But beware of any ESP that agrees. What other customers got exceptions? How bad is the ESP reputation?

NY Times on unsubscribing by email
August 2016: The Month in Email

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Purchased lists and ESPs: 9 months later

It was about 8 months ago I published a list of ESPs that prohibit the use of purchased lists. There have been a number of interesting responses to that post.
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ESPs wanted to be added to the list
The first iteration of the list was crowdsourced from different ESP representatives. They shared the info they had with each other. With their permission, I put it together into a post and published it here. Since then, I’ve had a trickle of ESPs asking to be added to the list. I’m happy to add any ESP. The only requirement is a privacy policy (or AUP) that states no purchased lists.
People reference the list regularly
I’ve had a lot of ESP deliverability folks send thanks for writing this post. They tell me they reference it regularly when dealing with clients. It’s also been listed as “one of the best blog posts of 2015” by Pardot.
Some 2016 predictions build on the post
I’ve read multiple future predictions that talk about how the era of purchased lists is over. I don’t think they’re wrong. I think that purchased lists are going to be deliverability nightmares on an internet where users wanting a mail is a prime factor in inbox deliverability. They’re already difficult to deliver, but it’s going to get worse.
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Not everyone thinks this is a good post. In fact, I just recently got an comment about how wrong I was, and… well, I’ll just share it because I don’t think my summary of it will do it any justice.

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March 2016: The Month In Email

Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned!
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Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March:
On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and Steve offered some advice for ESPs and software developers on methods for handling this gracefully. I also answered an Ask Laura question about making the decision to publish DMARC. Look for more on that in this month’s Ask Laura questions…
Our other Ask Laura question this month was about changing ESPs, which senders do for many reasons. It’s useful to know that there will generally be some shifts in deliverability with any move. Different ESPs measure engagement in different ways, and other issues may arise in the transition, so it’s good to be aware of these if you’re contemplating a change.
In industry news, I wrote a sort of meta-post about how the Internet is hard (related: where do you stand on the great Internet vs. internet debate? Comment below!) and we saw several examples of that this month, including a privacy debacle at Florida State University. Marketing is hard, too. I revisited an old post about a fraud case where a woman sued Toyota over an email marketing “prank”. As always, my best practices recommendation for these sorts of things (and everything else!) really boils down to one thing: send wanted email.
Steve wrote extensively about SPF this month in two must-read posts, where he explained the SPF rule of ten and how to optimize your SPF records. He also wrote about Mutt, the much-loved command line email client, and marked the passing of industry pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who, in addition to his many accomplishments, was by all accounts a very thoughtful and generous man.
Finally, I occasionally like to take a moment and follow the twisty paths that lead to my spam folder. Here’s a look at how Ugg spams my email doppelganger, MRS LAURA CORBISHLEY. In other spam news, there’s a lot of very interesting data in the recent 10 Worst list from Spamhaus. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

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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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