Data never dies
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5 answers you need before mailing old addresses.
- laura
- Jul 20, 2017
From the archives: Mailing old addresses: 5 questions to ask first
James asked the question on twitter:
Incentivizing incites fraud
- laura
- Sep 8, 2016
There are few address acquisition processes that make me cringe as badly as incentivized point of sale collection. Companies have tried many different ways to incentivize address collection at the point of sale. Some offer the benefit to the shopper, like offering discounts if they supply an email address. Some offer the benefits to the employee. Some offer punishments to the employee if they don’t collect addresses from a certain percentage of customers.
All of these types of incentive programs are problematic for email collection.
On the shopper side, if they want mail from a retailer, they’ll give an address simply because they want that mail. In fact, asking for an address without offering any incentive is way more likely to get their real address. If they don’t want mail but there is a financial incentive, they’re likely to give a made up address. Sometimes it will be deliverable, but belong to another person. Sometimes it will be undeliverable. And sometimes it will be a spamtrap. One of my delivery colleagues occasionally shares addresses she’s found in customer lists over on her FB page. It’s mostly fun stuff like “dont@wantyourmail.com” and “notonyour@life.com” and many addresses consisting of NSFW type words.
On the employee side there can also be abuses. Retailers have tried to tie employee evaluations, raises and promotions to the number of email addresses collected. Other retailers will actively demote or fire employees who don’t collect a certain number of addresses. In either case, the progression is the same. Employees know that most customers don’t want the mail, and they feel bad asking. But they’re expected to ask, so they do. But they don’t push, so they don’t get enough addresses. Eventually, to protect their jobs, they start putting in addresses they make up.
Either way, incentivizing point of sale collection of information leads to fraud. In a case I read about in the NY Times, it can lead to fraud much more serious than a little spam. In fact, Wells Fargo employees committed bank fraud because of the incentives related to selling additional banking products at the teller.
Mike might be spamming, but why?
- laura
- Jul 27, 2017
I’ve been talking a lot about ongoing B2B spam. That is, where senders drop your address into some sort of automation, that sends mail from gmail or amazon and just spams and spams and spams. This is what my mailbox looked like this morning
Yes, every one of those emails is sent to the same address. “you are still using the address laura-info@…” Well, no, actually. That was the original address I used as part of our contact on the first iteration of the WttW website. I stopped using that address somewhere around 2002? 3? It’s been a very long time in any case.
Folks, B2B spam is still spam. It doesn’t matter if you register a new domain and use Gmail as your outbounds as a way to avoid filters.
It doesn’t matter…