Affiliate marketing overview

laura
Industry
May 1, 2018

Most retailers have realized that sending unsolicited email is bad for their overall deliverability. Still, the idea they can send mail to people who never heard of them is seductive.
Enter affiliate email. That magical place where companies hire an agency, or a contractor, or some other third party to send email advertising their new product. Their mail and company reputation is protected because they aren’t sending the messages. Even better, affiliates assure their customers that the mail is opt-in. I’m sure some of them even believe it.
The reality is a little different from what affiliates and their customers want to believe.

Affiliate marketing is sold as opt-in

It’s been a while since I’ve taken on affiliate mailers as clients, and I routinely turn down clients who tell me ahead of time they use affiliates. Sometimes, though I’ll take on a client who is having problems with their mail and discover that they use affiliates. “Oh, we probably should have mentioned we also have this affiliate program way over there, but that shouldn’t be why our opt-in and transactional mail is failing at Gmail.”
That’s when I pull out the Google Bulk Mail Senders Guidelines and point at the very bottom of the page.

In reality, using affiliates can affect all mail from a company. I’m not sure how Google does it, but their ability to draw connections between a company’s affiliate mail and their opt-in mail is pretty good. Senders using affiliates in the hopes of prospecting without affecting their “regular” mail discover this, eventually.

Affiliate marketing is kinda opt-in

In my experience most affiliate websites are not very user friendly. Going through signups seems designed to distract and confuse visitors into clicking on agreements. This isn’t just evident in the flashy website design, but the wording on many pages seems designed to confuse.
About a decade ago, one of the MTA vendors hired me to be their in house deliverability expert for some of their major clients. One of the clients they asked me to work with was an affiliate marketing company. They were attempting to “do things right.” And, in fact, they were confirming email addresses before mailing.
However, this company was also sharing data with third parties. One of those parties started sending email to me before the actual client sent me the opt-in request. When I mentioned this to the client, they explained that the company spamming was supposed to only send direct mail, not email. They couldn’t explain why they were passing on email addresses if their partner wasn’t supposed to mail them. ?

Affiliate marketing is overwhelming

In June 2016, one of my clients revealed they were collecting addresses through affiliates. They sent me to a few different websites to sign up for mail. I did. In the 22 months since I signed up, I’ve received a lot of mail.
A lot of mail.
Yes, those are actual email counts. I’m most intrigued by the addresses with only a couple emails, they appear to be truncated versions of some of the addresses I actually used to sign up. I’m not sure what kind of horrible data processing does that, but clearly there’s something truly broken out there mangling email addresses.
Not only did the sites mangle the addresses I gave them, most of the current messages aren’t even job related. Phishing, male enhancement drugs, dating scams they’re all in there. Even the one message offering job vacancies is a work from home scam.

Want to see what one of the emails looks like? I picked CVS/Drug Mall ! Expect Something Extra, Jane Doe

Not all affiliates…

I’m sure it’s not all affiliates. But 95% of affiliate marketers give the other 5% a bad name.

What kind of mail do filters target?

All to often we think of filters as a linear scale. There’s blocking on one end, and there’s an inbox on the other. Every email falls somewhere on that line.
Makes sense, right? Bad mail is blocked, good mail goes to the inbox. The bulk folder exists for mail that’s not bad enough to block, but isn’t good enough to go to the inbox.
Once we get to that model, we can think of filters as just different tolerances for what is bad and good. Using the same model, we can see aggressive filters block more mail and send more mail to bulk, while letting less into the inbox. There are also permissive filters that block very little mail and send most mail to the inbox.
That’s a somewhat useful model, but it doesn’t really capture the full complexity of filters. There isn’t just good mail and bad mail. Mail isn’t simply solicited or unsolicited. Filters take into account any number of factors before deciding what to do with mail.

Outreach or spam?

This showed up in my mailbox earlier today:

The tweet in question

From Crunchbase: “Pluck is an email prospecting tool that gives you the email addresses of the people tweeting about subjects related to your business.”
Prospecting: another name for spamming. Look, I know that you want to sell you’re newest, greatest product to the world. But just because I tweet something with a # that you think is relevant to your product doesn’t mean that I want to get your spam. I also know it’s hard to get attention and find prospects; I’m a small business owner, too and I need to market my own services. But spamming isn’t a good idea. Ever.
There’s been a significant increase in this kind of spam “to help your business” lately. It’s a rare day I don’t get something from some company I’ve never heard of trying to sell me their newest product. It might be something if they tried a contact or two and then went away. But they’ll send mail for weeks or months without getting an answer. Look, silence IS an answer and it means you need to go away and leave your prospects alone.
Unfortunately, there are services out there that sell a product that let you “automatically follow up” with your prospects. Pluck up there uses one of them, as that’s who’s handling all the links in the message. In fact, if you go to the bare domain (qcml.io) they talk a good anti-spam game. “Die, spammers, die.” I reported the message to them. I’m not expecting them to actually do anything, and I’m not expecting a response.
It’s just spam under another name. There’s no pretense that it’s anything else. Even if it’s sent in a way that makes it look like a real person typed the message, like QuickMail offers. “All emails will come straight out of your personal inbox as though you typed them yourself.” As if you typed them yourself.
The worst part is there’s no real way to stop the mail. I can’t unsubscribe. The companies selling the software don’t provide any guidance to their customers about what the law requires. Take the message from Pluck that started the post. It violates CAN SPAM in multiple ways. Moreover, the address they used is not publicly associated with my twitter handle, which means they’re doing some harvesting somewhere. That means treble penalties under CAN SPAM.
I could reply and ask them to stop mailing me. I’ve done that a couple times with a message that says, “Please don’t email me any more.” I’ve got to tell you, some people get really mad when you ask them not to email you. Some just say yes, but others are really offended that you asked them to stop and get abusive. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t ask any more because of that one person who decides to harass, threaten and scream at me. Sure, it’s maybe 1 in 5, but I don’t have the time or energy to figure out who is going to be receptive and who isn’t. I don’t have time for that. No one has time for that.
I’m expecting that filters are going to catch up eventually and these types of mail will be easier to filter out. Until then, though, small business owners like myself are stuck in a place where we have to deal with spam distracting us from our business. At least I get blog content out of it.

Yahoo awarded $610 million

The Federal district court in New York awarded Yahoo $610 million dollars in a suit they filed in 2008.