Targeted marketing done badly

There was quite a bit of content I cut out on my rant about parasites in the email ecosystem earlier this week. I had whole section on people who ask to connect on LinkedIn and then immediately send a pitch or scrape your address and add it to their marketing automation software and start spamming. Generally, the only reason I will drop someone off LinkedIn is because they do this.
envelopes
Today, one of the deliverability mailing lists has been hopping over spam many folks in the industry received. The discussion started off simple enough, someone said “Is <companyname> spamming the industry?” People immediately chimed in that yeah, it did appear so.
A few people said they’d gotten the message and thought it was personal and were disappointed it wasn’t. Others weren’t sure why they were chosen to receive this message, or why some of their co-workers were chosen. A few of us didn’t get them. I didn’t.
This is a great example of marketing that was reasonably well planned, but a total fail for not knowing their audience. The product in question is an anti-abuse product. The company wants to reach people in the anti-abuse industry. They go off and find people in the anti-abuse industry and send them an email. Mail that seems personalized. It was a perfectly reasonable email. It asked questions and did get some people to engage with it by replying. They even appear to have done A/B testing on subject lines.
All solid marketing decisions. All great things to do.
But, the anti-abuse community is small, particularly the ESP anti-abuse community. We talk on mailing lists, IRC, LinkedIn, Facebook and Slack – and those are just the places I’m connected to. I’m sure there are other meeting places. The fact is, we’re a community and we do interact. If you’re going to try and do something like this, you have to expect that we’re going to realize you’re spamming. And many of us have very low tolerance for this kind of stuff.
A few years ago I worked with some senders who acquired most of their email addresses from technical conferences. They had a lot of delivery problems because a lot of their audience were the people who wrote and maintained filters. Spam the person who writes a spam filter and you may find yourself locked out from all of those filter users. I finally realized I couldn’t help those clients. No amount of technical perfection, personalization, looking like one-to-one mail or magic address cleaning is going to make this audience want your mail.
Marketing starts at understanding your audience. Permission is one of the better ways to understand your audience. Marketing to the anti-abuse crowd is a challenge. I can’t see any place where unsolicited email successfully fits into that plan.

Related Posts

Your purchased list … is spam.

This morning I got spam from someone selling email addresses. The mail starts:

Read More

Things people hate about your email marketing

I found this article over on Hubspot, and I think it covers a lot of why people hate email marketing quite well.

Read More

Best Practices: your mileage may vary

YMMV. One of those abbreviations us old folks used ages ago before email had pictures and the closest we had to social networking was USENET and social gaming was in the form of MUDs. I rarely see it used any more. In a lot of ways that’s a sad thing. It was a very useful abbreviation. Using it at the end of a post full of advice was a sign that the author was providing information but knew that different situations may require different solutions. It acknowledged that what might be the best practice in one form may not be the best for another.
It’s not just the usage that seems to have declined, there seem to be a lot more people who just want to share The Answer! and not acknowledge their experience may not be universal. This seems particularly rampant in email marketing, at least to me (YMMV).
I’ve talked before about how I don’t believe there are any universal best practices for email.
Let’s be honest, the experience of a well known national retailer buying, or appending email addresses is not going to be the same as a local business doing the same thing. The national retailer acquiring email addresses and sending well targeted mail to their purchasers probably won’t cause too many delivery problems, and will generate revenue. The local pizza place probably won’t be so lucky.
A number of marketers have complained that they all too often hear “it depends” when they ask a question about email. But how well a particular email campaign perform does depend. Success depends on the audience and the offer. But more than just the specific offer, success also depends on how well known the brand is and what their real world reputation with customers is.
Customers are a lot more likely to give brands the benefit of the doubt if they like the product. That means poor practices don’t always result in poor results. It also means other companies may not have the same success with poor practices.
Your Mileage May Vary.

Read More