From the archives: Taking Permission

From February 2010, Taking Permission.

Permission is always a hot topic in email marketing. Permission is key! the experts tell us. Get permission to send email! the ISPs tell us.
Marketers have responded by setting up processes to “get” permission from recipients before adding them to mailing lists. They point to their privacy polices and signup forms and say “Look! the recipient gave us permission.”
In many cases, though, the permission isn’t given to the sender, permission is taken from the recipient.
Yes, permission is being TAKEN by the sender. At the point of address collection many senders set the default to be the recipient gets mail. These processes take any notion of giving permission out of the equation. The recipient doesn’t have to give permission, permission is assumed.
This isn’t real permission. No process that requires the user to take action to stop themselves from being opted in is real permission. A default state of yes takes the actual opt-in step away from the recipient.
Permission just isn’t about saying “well, we told the user if they gave us an email address we’d send them mail and they gave us an email address anyway.” Permission is about giving the recipients a choice in what they want to receive. All too often senders take permission from recipients instead of asking for permission to be given.
Since that post was originally written, some things have changed.
CASL has come into effect. CASL prevents marketers from taking permission as egregiously as what prompted this post. Under CASL, pre-checked opt-in boxes do not count as explicit permission. The law does have a category of implicit permission, which consists of an active consumer / vendor relationship. This implicit permission is limited in scope and senders have to stop mailing 2 years after the last activity.
The other change is in Gmail filters. Whatever they’re doing these days seems to really pick out mail that doesn’t have great permission. Business models that would work a few years ago are now struggling to get to the inbox at Gmail. Many of these are non-relationship emails – one off confirmations, tickets, receipts. There isn’t much of a relationship between the sender and the recipient, so the filters are biased against the mail.
Permission is still key, but these days I’m not sure even informed permission is enough.

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Thoughts on Gmail and the inbox

Over the last few months more and more marketers are finding their primary delivery challenge is the Gmail inbox. I’ve been thinking about why Gmail might be such a challenge for marketers. Certainly I have gotten a lot of calls from people struggling to figure out how to get into the Gmail inbox. I’ve also seen aggressive domain based filtering from Gmail, where any mention of a particular domain results in mail going to the bulk folder.
It’s one of those things that’s a challenge, because in most of these cases there isn’t one cause for bulk foldering. Instead there’s a whole host of things that are individually very small but taken together convince Gmail that the mail doesn’t need to be in the inbox.
A pattern that I’m starting to see is that Gmail is taking a more holistic look at all the mail from a sender. If the mail is connected to an organization, all that mail is measured as part of their delivery decision making. This is hurting some ESPs and bulk senders. I’ve had multiple ESPs contact me in the last 6 months looking for help because all their customer emails are going to bulk folder.
Gmail’s filtering is extremely aggressive. From my perspective it always has been. I did get an invite for a Gmail account way back in the day. I moved a couple mailing lists over to that account to test it with some volume and discussion lists. I gave up not long after because no matter what I did I couldn’t get gmail to put all the mail from that list into the tag I had set up for it. Inevitably some mail from some certain people would end up in my spam folder.
Gmail has gotten better, now they will let you override their filters but give you a big warning that the message would have been delivered to spam otherwise.
Gmail_NotSpam
What are mailers to do? Right now I don’t have a good answer. Sending mail people want is still good advice for individual senders. But I am not sure what can be done about this ESP wide filtering that I’m starting to see. It’s possible Gmail is monitoring all the mail from a particular sender or ESP and applying a “source network” score. Networks letting customers send mail Gmail doesn’t like (such as affiliate mail or payday mail, things they mentioned specifically at M3AAWG) are having all their customers affected.
I suspect this means that ESPs seeing problems across their customer base are going to have to work harder to police their customers and remove problematic mail streams completely. Hopefully, ESPs that can get on the Gmail FBL can identify the problem customers faster before those customers tank mail for all their senders.

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CASL is more privacy law than anti-spam law

Michael Geist, a law professor in Canada, writes about the new CASL law, why it’s necessary and why it’s more about privacy and consumer protection than just about spam.

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Permission: Let’s Talk Facts

I’ve commented in the past about how I can usually tell when an ISP makes filtering changes because all my calls relate to that ISP. The more recent contender is Gmail. They made changes a few months ago and a lot of folks are struggling to reach the inbox now. What I’m seeing, working with clients, is that there are two critical pieces to getting to the gmail inbox: permission and engagement.

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